We don't often give battery life its own subheading in our mobile reviews, but it seems pertinent to do so with the GS2. Our review until now has been an outright love-fest, in line with our experience with the handset, though it's not a clean sheet for Samsung this time around. The battery life on the GS2 is a problem, especially for heavy users, and though this is true for most smartphones, the GS2 does appear to drain the juice faster than comparative handsets, sometimes up to twice as fast.
Using an hour of web browsing as our benchmark, the GS2 powered through 20 per cent or more of its available charge in this time frame, while other Androids might use 10 or 15 per cent of charge performing the same task. The end result is a phone you'll either charge during the day or rush home to a power point each evening. Adjusting the screen brightness to one of its lower settings will help, as will switching your connectivity off when it's not being used, but this still doesn't make a big enough difference to mitigate the battery drain for when you are using the phone. To rub salt in the wound, we found it took at least three hours to recharge the phone back to 100 per cent
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We also found the handset would get extremely hot during processor-intensive use, like gaming, and especially if we continued to use the phone while it charged. This isn't an uncommon occurrence for smartphones, but it was hot enough and often enough to become irritating during our tests.
Information we've gathered from online forums suggest that the poor battery life could be a symptom of the way Android deals with dual-core processors in version 2.3.3, and that the most recent 2.3.4 firmware fixes the issue. Samsung has committed to releasing a 2.3.4 update for GS2 handsets, so don't be surprised if we bump up the score of this review if it makes a significant difference.