The smartphone with the best battery life...is Sony's Xperia Z3

Sony's Xperia Z3 tops the test for battery life.

When Apple got on stage a couple of weeks ago to show off the new features on the iPhone 6 (bigger screen! Prettier bezels!) there was one spec that didn't get much of a mention: battery life.

The reason? Battery life stinks. It stinks for all smartphones and even Apple hasn't been able to do much to fix the problem.

The iPhone 6 makes it through a full day's toil pretty well (and the iPhone 6 will stretch to two on feathery-light usage) but it's still a far-cry from those plug-in-once-a-year handsets.

So if you're looking to buy a phone purely to avoid the hassle of running out of juice, which do you go for? The answer, it seems, is one of Sony's.

The Japanese tech giant may be hemorrhaging yen from its mobile division, but its handsets are consistently well received, with the recently-launched Xperia Z3 no exception: it's fast, slim ,waterproof and comes with a 20-megapixel camera. Sony's Xperia Z3

Even better, in test by PhoneArena, the Z3 was also crowned the "new endurance king," with the mobile specialist site reporting that it broke "all records in its respective category".

The Z3 stayed on for nine and a half hours during in stress test (screen permanently on and running apps) which compares more than favourably to the iPhone 6 (5 hours and 22 minutes) and the iPhone 6 Plus (6 hours 32 minutes).

This stat is even more impressive when you compare the Z3 to the number two in PhoneArena's tests - the Huawei Ascend Mate 7. The Mate 7 managed to clock in a battery test time of 9 hours and 3 minutes, but that's in a much bigger phone: 33 grams heavier with a 6-inch display to the Z3's 5.2-inches.

And what else does the Z3 have to recommend it? Well, apart from all the usual specs you'd expect from a flagship device (fully HD screen, MicroSD storage up to 128GB and quad-core 2.5GHz processor) because it's a Sony smartphone you can also run your PlayStation 4 on it via the console's Remote Play feature.

The Z3 (or the eight-inch Z3 Tablet Compact) just need to be on the same Wi-Fi network as the PS4, with users connecting a DualShock controller via Bluetooth and voila - PS4 games anywhere in your house, with all the graphics generated by the console and streamed straight to the smartphone.

- UK Independent