iPhone 7: New Apple handset has the best battery life of any iPhone ever

Part of the extra life is achieved by using efficient cores that can step in when the more battery-hungry ones aren't needed

The new iPhone has a longer battery life than any Apple phone ever released.

Apple customers have long complained that the company seems intent on keeping its battery life down – despite adding more capacity in recent phones, it tended to also add more components that used up that battery, which meant that the battery lives tended to stay the same. But the company appears to have listened at last.

The new phone will last two hours longer than the exsiting iPhone 6s, the company said in its announcement on stage in California.

It didn't say how it had made up that extra battery life, whether it was through increasing the capacity or adding more efficient components. But it could partly be the result of optimisations in iOS 10, which is set to be released alongside the new phone and includes battery saving features.

All of that extra battery life is despite a much increased processor at the centre of the phone – which, along with the likewise improved screen, tends to suck up most of the battery. The new phone's processor is called the A10 Fusion – and as well as being much speedier, it also has extra features that make it more efficient.

The new chip has four cores built into it. Two of those are "high-performance cores", which mean that the phone can run up to twice as fast as the iPhone 6, but the other two are high-efficiency cores that can run using just one-fifth the energy that the others require.