What information is more reliable — battery capacity or stand-by time?

Question

Stand-by time (not talk) because I rarely use the phone actually ;-)

Let's say there are two phones -- Xperia Mini and Wildfire S -- both have very similar battery 1200 mAh and 1230 mAh (respectively), so one could expect similar stand-by times as well.

Yet for Xperia Mini it is "Up to 340 h (2G) / Up to 320 h (3G)" and for Wildfire S "Up to 360 h (2G) / Up to 570 h (3G)".

You can see that for 3G network the difference is huge (almost double). Wildfire S has slower CPU (600 MHz vs. 1 GHz in Xperia) but what kind of computation is done in stand-by mode? Another oddity Xperia is more efficient in 2G, while Wildfire in 3G.

QUESTION: without any head to head tests, what information is more reliable -- capacity or times? I.e. those two phones would stay on one charge for the same amount time or indeed not?

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I copied the data from GsmArena pages: Xperia Mini http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_mini-3947.php and Wildfire S http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_wildfire_s-3777.php

Answer 1

In my view, battery capacity i.e. the mAh value is best the way to compare. The reason why I say this is that the battery drain includes so many factors that even a small software glitch can show a remarkable difference. Hence the standby time is a combination of several factors which are not reliable for comparison, unless they are from from same manufacturer (with a hope that there will not be variations in test situation). The guide from GSMArena explains this clearly as:

Manufacturers measure talk time in controlled conditions and the quoted numbers are rarely reached in real-life scenarios. These numbers are best used as reference when comparing phones from the same manufacturer because battery life measurement methodology will probably vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

With battery rating at least you know your how much capacity the battery has and how it gets used or wasted is simply a temporary situation (i.e. by changing ROM, updates, platform upgrades etc).