Kobo Arc Battery Benchmark Results

Having a high performance device doesn’t matter if the device discharges in two hours. Thankfully, even during constant usage the Kobo Arc was able to obtain respectable battery lives.

During our browsing test we burned through 35% of the battery in three hours and at this rate of use I would expect the Kobo Arc to be dead in around 8.5 hours.

During our E-Book test, I opened a book using the Kobo Application and started streaming music through Spotify. During this 3 hour tests the Arc used up 27% of its battery, which if this rate were to remain constant means that in 11.11 hours the Kobo Arc would be dead. Quite respectable for a device that Kobo claims to have a 10 hour battery life.

During our local 720p test we loaded a simple video file and let it loop until the battery died. During this test, I was able to get a measly 3hr 50min of charge out of the device. I was quite surprised by this and ran the test one more time, using the same video, only to get an almost identical score. This means that the average user should only expect to get through one or two HD movies stored locally.

Things get a bit more interesting with our Netflix test. I selected the show Battlestar Galactica as our test show. I let Netflix continuously play until the battery died and received quite a surprise, ending up with a 7hr 10min run time. This is long enough to watch at least three movies, or 7-8 episodes of show and quite impressive since our local test was only able to get 3hr50min of battery life out of the Kobo Arc.

I started our charge test right after I ran our local video test, during which I turned off the screen and let the tablet charge until it was at 100%. To go from 5% to full took around 3:50 the same amount of time it took to discharge.