Battery anxiety
Battery life, however, is poor. Using it as my primary device with three hours of app usage and browsing, hundreds of emails and push notifications, a couple of photos, five hours of music over Bluetooth headphones and the odd game of Jetpack Joyride during my one hour and 20 minute train commute to and from work, it lasted an average of just over 14 hours between charges, meaning it didn’t survive past 9.30pm.
Rather than having better battery life in my testing, the iPhone 7 has
worse battery life than the iPhone 6S when new. No single app caused significant battery drain,
I do not have the Facebook app installed and Low Power Mode made no appreciable difference in my testing when enabled at 20%.
If I had needed it to navigate me home or snap some pictures at night I would have to make sure I did a good charge before leaving the office. If I used it for maps for any walking or driving, battery life was much shorter.
To get through 24 hours, you’ll be forced to have a power adapter close by, shove it in a battery pack or charge at your desk, which means you won’t be able listen to music at the same time via cabled headphones – more on that later.
To make matters worse, the iPhone 7 has the worst of all worlds: short battery life and tediously slow charging. Even using the 12W charger that came with the iPad Pro it took well over two hours to fully charge the iPhone 7.