how does an mAh work? How long will 1 mAh last on a smartphone? How long will 18000 last?
In: Technology
Batteries are rates in mAh, that’s milliamp hours. If a battery can provide 100 mA for 3 hours it can produce 300 mAh of output.
Smartphones are complex computers, with a bright display and 3-5 radios inside. The power consumption depends on many variables, so power consumption is always changing. 18000 is 18 times more minutes than 1000.
Completely depends on how much power the phone is using. A 1800 mAh battery can provide, on paper, 1.8 amps of power for 1 hour before being completely drained. Or it could provide 0.9 amps of power for 2 hours. How much power your phone uses can vary hugely. If it’s in airplane mode with the wifi and screen off you phone will use almost no power and a 1800 battery could probably last 2-3 days. On the other hand if you are playing a cpu/gpu intensive game while heavily using wifi you could probably blow through that in 2-3 hours.
think of it as a gallon of gas, and the battery is the tank. A battery and a gas tank store energy, just in different forms. But because you can’t store electricity as a volume of something cause it’s not tangible, we rate a battery off of the amount of energy can provide. mA is a measure of electrical current (conceptually very similar to a water current) which when multiplied by a unit of time and a voltage, will give you a “block” of energy, much like a water flow rate over an hour will give you some number of gallons of water.
Because pretty much all cellphones run at 3.3 volts, battery calculations disregard this and basically just calculate how long a battery can supply some current.
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