A prototype made by Swiss company Avenor Devices translated spoken phrases for 22 hours and 17 minutes before shutting down, according to measurements released on Wednesday by the Neuchâtel Signal Bench, a device-testing laboratory. The result is the longest continuous on-device translation run the lab says it has measured, beating its previous best by more than eight hours.
The test used three pre-release Vale 1 handsets, each with a 5,200mAh battery. All ran the same translation software without a network connection; the screen stayed off, while a loop of recorded speech fed the microphone. The shortest run lasted 21 hours and 46 minutes. Avenor said the phones would reach customers in early 2027, if final testing goes to plan.
A test that kept going
Lab director Panna Fülöp said the team had expected the phones to last about 13 hours under the test conditions. “At hour 18, we checked the setup twice because we thought a cable or a setting had changed,” she said. “Nothing had changed. The phone was still translating, and the battery gauge was falling far more slowly than our models predicted.”
The lab measured power draw through calibrated equipment and checked the battery readings against a separate analyser. Its protocol used 12 language pairs and alternating voices, with a three-second pause between phrases. Translation ran entirely on the handset’s processor; the recorded speech was played from a bench speaker, and the phone’s own screen and loudspeaker remained off.
We expected a strong result. We did not expect to spend the night watching it refuse to stop.
Panna Fülöp, lab director
The finding is not a claim that a phone will last 22 hours in ordinary use. Bright screens, mobile data, video and calls all consume power, and the lab’s muted-output test excludes the energy needed to play translated speech aloud. Avenor has not yet published a full-day estimate for mixed use or allowed outside reviewers to test a retail-ready model.
Battery life enters the race
Avenor chief engineer Bernhard Müller-Neubauer said a new low-power processor and a translation model redesigned to run in short bursts accounted for the result. “We aimed to make useful features work without sending every request to a server,” he said. The company has spent CHF 18 million (about €19 million) developing the handset and its processor, according to figures it provided.
Tamara S. Pointner, a mobile-computing researcher at the fictional Alpine Circuit Institute in Lausanne, said the test was striking but narrow. “The number matters because people can repeat the workload and compare devices,” she said. “The next question is whether this efficiency survives when the screen is on and the phone is doing several things at once.”
The measurement arrives as phone makers prepare their next high-end models, where brighter displays, faster processors and more on-device features compete for limited battery capacity. Avenor plans to release the full test protocol and raw power readings in October. The lab says it will repeat the trial on a production handset before calling the result a consumer benchmark.
