What's more important to you in a phone CPU: Performance or battery life? (Poll of the Week)

Last week’s poll summary: Out of over 1,500 total votes, 67.3 percent of voters said they prefer to use Bluetooth headphones, while 32.7 precent prefer using wired headphones with a dongle. The results on our social channels were just about the same — 77 percent of YouTube voters, 75 percent of Twitter users, 59 percent of Instagram voters, and 71 percent of users on Facebook all prefer Bluetooth headphones over the wired-with-a-dongle route.

You may not run into many performance issues with your high-end smartphone’s SoC, but there’s always room for improvement in other areas. Battery life, for instance, is a big issue for more resource-intensive processors. On the other hand, some of the less resource-intensive SoCs might offer stellar battery life, but fall short in performance. There’s always something that could be improved.

Luckily, smartphone CPUs seem to be improving across the board. Arm’s latest, the Cortex-A76, is basically meant to be the best of both worlds. Arm says it will offer a 200-percent increase in performance compared to current Cortex-A73 products, as well as a 40-percent increase in power efficiency over Cortex-A75 products. We haven’t seen these processors run in any hardware yet, but we’re certainly excited to see the improvements Arm is boasting.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you could only choose one or the other: performance or battery life. Would you rather have a smartphone that prioritizes performance, or would you rather have a slightly slower smartphone that has stellar battery life? Cast your vote in the poll below, and speak up in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to add!