If you left the phone untouched with the always-on display enabled, you'd expect to lose an extra nine percent of battery over the course of the day. To put a real world example to these figures, let's say you take the Galaxy S7 Edge off the charger at 6am, and return it to charge at 10pm. Running PCMark, for example, consumes 20 times more energy. If the phone is in your pocket and the always-on display is enabled, expect to lose 0.008 percent more per hour due to the power consumption of the proximity sensor.Ĭompared to general usage, the impact from the always-on display is low. When looking at how much battery is consumed per hour, the always-on display sucked between 0.59 and 0.65 percent of the battery per hour. If the phone was left to die, it would have taken a whopping 130 hours to deplete with the always-on display enabled, or five and a half days. In my tests I found that the always-on display consumed around 11 percent of the phone's battery over the course of 18 hours, relative to when the feature is disabled.
#S7 night screen software#
Why would the display be off when the always-on feature is enabled? Well, Samsung's software engineers are clever, and turn off the display whenever the proximity sensor detects the phone is in your pocket or bag. I tested the phone without the feature enabled, and three times with the feature enabled: one for when the display was at a high brightness due to indoor lighting, one where the display was dim due to no lighting, and one where the display was off. To test the always-on display, I left the Galaxy S7 Edge in airplane mode over the course of 18 hours in a variety of conditions. As the phone doesn't need to power a backlight to display this information, energy is conserved by keeping the vast majority of the display black (or off in this case). This is due to the Galaxy S7 Edge's AMOLED display, which only needs to illuminate a handful of pixels to show the time and notifications.
Over the past few days I've been testing exactly how much battery the always-on display consumes, and the results aren't surprising: battery consumption is very low. Being able to see the time at a glance is very handy, but many people have a misconception that enabling this feature consumes a lot of precious battery. One of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge's great new features is the always-on display, which shows you the time, date, and select notifications even when the screen is 'off'.