Why are phone batteries still charging for only one day?
Why are phone batteries still charging for only one day?
Why are phone batteries still charging for only one day? Smartphones have been in our lives for nearly two decades, and we've seen huge improvements in that time. Yet one thing has remained mostly the same: charging your phone every day. Why hasn't battery life improved along with everything else?
Larger, higher-resolution screens, powerful processors, smart software features, and faster data speeds are just a few of the improvements over the years, but with all these advances in technology, I still charge my phone every night like I did in 2009.
Why is smartphone battery life still so poor?
You can make a strong argument that battery life has really gotten worse, and before smartphones, cell phones could last for days on a charge. Of course, smartphones are more advanced than those devices, but shouldn't their batteries age too? The truth is, the battery life of most smartphones is pretty bad, and unless you're using a super bulky model—like the iPhone 14 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra—you're probably keeping a close eye on the battery level and possibly running out of battery power before the end of the day.
So what is going on here? It's actually very simple when you get straight to it: smartphones are getting faster than batteries. Batteries have improved over the years, but advancements have been minuscule compared to those made in chips, displays, and other smartphone components, and in fact, it's the amazing advancements in other smartphone components that keep On battery life in the one-day range, internal components shrink, making room for larger batteries. This is still our best answer to improving battery life; increasing mAh will solve the problem, unfortunately, since the batteries in smartphones today still rely on technology from the nineties.
Will the batteries get better?
The big question is: Will we ever get out of this predicament? Everyone is waiting for the next big advance in battery technology, but it never seems like it will happen. I certainly never would have guessed that we would still be charging our phones every day when I got my first phone. There are several things on the horizon to look forward to. The first is called "stacked batteries." Samsung plans to mass-produce them in the future, and stacked batteries are literally multiple cell sheets stacked on top of each other to achieve higher capacity in the same physical space, but don't get your hopes up too much with that. Stacked batteries only increase capacity by about 10%, and a phone with a 5,000mAh battery can hold 5,500mAh with stacked battery technology. We also don't know when Samsung will actually start implementing this technology, if at all.
Solid-state batteries are another technology that can be a solution where conventional batteries contain two metal electrodes in a liquid electrolyte and ionic particles move between the electrodes when charging and discharging. As the name implies, solid-state batteries are well, solid, and the liquid electrolyte is replaced by a solid of metal or alloy.
Graphene is the biggest deal in battery technology. Graphene is a one-atom-thick crystalline lattice of graphite, and despite being almost two-dimensional, graphene is an excellent electrical and thermal conductor while still having a high level of stiffness and strength, and graphene batteries will provide 60% more capacity than lithium-ion batteries of the same size. It seems wonderful, isn't it? Graphene is actually a great material, but there are some big drawbacks. Graphene production is very difficult and expensive. It is not possible to make a smartphone with a graphene battery. Currently, the best we can do is hybrid graphene/lithium batteries, which you can already buy from companies like Elecjet.
