How Long Was The First Samsung Galaxy Phone's Battery Life?

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra offers about 16 hours of battery life on average, with some users reporting more than a day's worth of use. That's a solid battery life, but it took a lot of advancements and ingenuity to get here. To see how far battery technology has come, look back at the first device to bear the Galaxy name. Launched in 2009, the Samsung Galaxy I7500 was the first ever series release. It came with a 1,500 mAh removable battery and a quoted talk time of 9 hours and 20 minutes over a 2G connection, and 6 hours and 10 minutes over 3G. CNET reported it would barely last a day without recharging.

Compared to the S26 Ultra's stats, of up to 52 hours of continuous talk time on a single charge, 6 to 9 hours doesn't seem like much. Yet, against some of the year's most popular phones, the Galaxy I7500 was about average. iPhone 3GS offered 5 hours of talk time via 3G, 12 hours via 2G. Meanwhile, the Samsung Eternity, another popular Samsung model, delivered up to 5 hours of talk time — though CNET stretched that further in testing — and the Nokia E52 could get up to 8 hours of talk time.

However, even in 2009, devices weren't quite as feature-rich as what you might get today. Apple's iPhone and Samsung's earliest Galaxy models were a big step toward the modern smartphones we have now, crammed with extra hardware and functionality. Though it covers only 2013 to 2016, PhoneArena's study of battery improvements also shows how far we've come. The Samsung S and Note lines saw several battery upgrades in those years.

It's easy to get caught up in capacity improvements, which are, admittedly, a core part of any device's battery life. The bigger the battery, the longer it lasts, for the most part. However, another aspect of today's phone batteries makes a huge difference for convenience and performance: charging times. If your phone has a huge battery but takes forever to charge, that'll slow you down quite a bit throughout the day. You'll need to plug it in and wait for it to replenish, maybe for an inordinate amount of time. Of course, fast charging and high-power ports have changed that big time in something like the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which can charge to full in under an hour despite its 5,000 mAh battery. Many additional phones today have batteries the same size or larger.

The original Galaxy, the I7500, would take about 2 to 3 hours to charge. That's nearly double what the S26 Ultra takes, but more importantly, its battery is less than half the size. Phones today can charge much larger batteries much faster. The PhoneArena battery study also shows battery charging times improving significantly between 2013 and 2016, decreasing exponentially.

Fast forward to today, the Galaxy S26 also supports faster wireless charging, so you no longer need a cable for a quick battery boost. That was absolutely unheard of in 2009. Look at us go.