Smartphone battery life has hit a ceiling. While the industry continues to search for a replacement for the lithium-ion batteries that have us reaching for the charger every night (or sooner), manufacturers are seeking alternative ways to keep phones going.
Whether it’s enhancing existing battery technology or finding clever workarounds, everyone in the smartphone industry wants to beat the problem of users running out of juice.
“We see from different consumer surveys that battery performance is the single biggest frustration for consumers,” said Charlene Fang, U.K. managing director for smartphone maker Oppo. “And basically that frustration would lead to consumers changing their phones.”
While manufacturers continue to research longer-lasting alternatives to lithium-ion, they are exploring other ways to avoid the angst caused by a flat smartphone battery.
Battery Health Engine
With current lithium-ion technology hitting a plateau, the main way smartphone firms manage to increase battery life is by fitting larger batteries. That has two side-effects: it increases the size of the handset and the amount of heat it generates.
Oppo claims to have found a less cumbersome way to extend battery life, which it’s calling the Battery Health Engine.
When a lithium-ion battery is charged, the ions discharge from the positive electrode, traverse through the electrolyte, and embed themselves into the negative electrode. When the battery is being used and is discharging, the opposite occurs.
However, if after charging, an ion fails to return to the positive electrode, the battery loses capacity. Older phone batteries don’t last as long as new ones, because more and more of these ions become inactive with age.
Oppo’s Battery Health Engine basically keeps an eye out for ions that are in risk of becoming inactive. Its software algorithm identifies the signs of negative electrode potential and performs targeted charging to prevent the ion becoming inactive.
To put that into perspective, the Battery Health Engine will ensure that the recently launched Oppo Reno10 5G will still have an effective capacity of 80% or more after 1,600 full discharge cycles. That is the “equivalent to four years of usage if you charge your phone every day,” said Fang. “That will leave the battery to be still above 80% after four years.”
Don’t Charge, Swap
At the recent CES 2024 show in Las Vegas, a Qatar-based company took an entirely different approach to the battery problem: don’t charge it, swap it.
Even with the advent of fast charging, it still takes at least half an hour to charge even the most rapid smartphone from empty to full. Swapery claims to get this job done in less than ten seconds, by swapping the battery instead of charging it.
Swapery is a two-part solution. The first part is an attachment that’s stuck to the back of the smartphone, which contains an extra battery, similar in concept to Apple’s MagSafe batteries. The second part is a charging station, which holds up to four spare batteries.
When you’re running out of battery life, you slot your phone into the charging station and it automatically removes and replaces the battery in the case in around seven seconds. This will typically give a phone another eight-to-ten hours of battery life, the company claims.
Swapery CEO, Ali Salah, claims the solution creates a “new era of effortless charging, where users can stay connected without the interruptions of traditional charging methods,” although its convenience does to some extent rely on you being in the same location as the charge station.
Swapery will launch later this year, but the company is yet to finalize pricing.
Lithium-Ion Replacements
Ultimately, lithium-ion batteries are being stretched to their very performance limits, meaning the best prospect of being able to count smartphone battery life in days, rather than hours, is to find a better battery technology.
Successors to lithium-ion have been touted for many years, but we’re yet to see a significant breakthrough. Indeed, the mobile analyst firm CCS Insight predicts it will be 2030 before we see the rollout of one of the most likely successors, carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotube (effectively very thin, rolled-up sheets of graphene) batteries promise both faster charging and greater capacities, potentially leading to even slimmer phones with today’s levels of battery life or longer-lasting smartphones.
Oppo is among the companies looking at carbon nanotube technology, but Fang is reluctant to put a timeline on its arrival in smartphones. “I think we are all trying to optimize, [to get] the best that we could get out of our batteries,” said Fang. “And that’s not only Oppo, but we also see some technology from Honor, and I think everybody in our technology segment is trying our best.”
In the meantime, the industry will just have to keep finding the workarounds.
