I am really wondering. so many technologies that i always used to hear about, but they never end up in new phones and stuff
In: Technology
Likely that the design is maintained so that your phone has enough charge to last a day. When they increase the battery capacity, they also increase the amount of power the phone uses to provide more features, like faster compute or faster communications.
Because amthe manufacturers know that people will tolerate nightly charging of their phones.
So everything is balanced to make it last a day. Faster CPU, brighter display etc: everything’s gonna draw more power, so all the gains the battery brings, are taken up by putting more energy intensive parts into the phone.
And if there’s still battery capacity to spare, the battery is made smaller. To make the phone thinner and match the current fashion trend for phones.
You could run a first gen iPhone for longer on a modern battery of similar dimensions.
But realistically no one needs a phone where the battery lasts more than a day; plenty of manufacturers have made phones that a twice as thick as the ‚standard‘ phones; with much larger battery sizes, but no one buys them.
The people with money will buy the current status symbol model, those without will buy used or basic Android phones, leaving the high quality high capacity phones to be bought by those few rare people who absolutely need a larger capacity, but can’t carry around a powerbank.
Also phones still use lithium ion batteries, because those are the most well ‚developed‘ battery chemistries for small scale, easy to carry devices, and many of the more efficient battery chemistries have some form of overhead, making them more useful for much larger scale applications, or are more dangerous than lithium ion, or don‘t do so well with charge cycles etc.
Takes a while for new basic physics research to end up as a marketable product anyway.
Smart phone batteries have doubled or tripled or more in capacity during that 10 year period. The phones are more energy demanding now (processors, sensors, high refresh rate screens, comms, background apps etc etc etc), and we use them more than ever before. That’s why you aren’t seeing a practical extension of battery life. THe tech is improving for sure.
Galaxy S3 – 2100 MaH battery (phone I had way back)
Redmi note 10 pro – 5000 MaH battery (Phone I have now)
Also, charging is much faster than it used to be, and batteries don’t like being at maximum charge for long periods. Thus frequent, brief top ups are also optimal for battery health and user experience, while limiting the size the physical size of the battery itself
It isn’t lost, but it’s used to make your phone thinner and more computationally powerful instead of increasing the battery life. You can enable power saving mode, and sacrifice things like screen brightness and background notifications for better battery life. My old Samsung has an extreme battery saving mode which turns off pretty much everything except phone, messages and the browser, and switches to night mode.
It is always about scaleability. It is expensive to make good stuff. Like Musk said, it is always about volume and cost.
You don’t really need more battery life than one day. Sure, some people might need to go without access to electricity for longer than that, but for those cases, external power banks are a much better solution than increasing the battery capacity within the phone itself. The average user simply charges their phone every night (or at least, once a day) and wouldn’t want a larger, heavier, or more expensive device in exchange for more battery capacity.
(Excess capacity can be helpful for when the battery degrades and loses some of its capacity over time. But even that only delays the point where the battery life becomes an inconvenience, and the real solution to that is replaceable batteries.)
What this means is that when phones get higher-capacity batteries (and they have, over the years), this isn’t necessarily used to extend battery life – at least not one-to-one. Instead, it’s often used to allow upgrades of other features, such as faster chips or higher screen resolution or refresh rates – all things that cost energy. Things that, with older batteries, would have drained the battery too fast, but which now are possible.
In parallel, charging has also become much faster than it used to be, which further reduces the need for ever larger battery capacity. If you can regain 50% charge in 10 minutes, then that means that there will nearly always be opportunities to quickly top up over the course of your day.
In addition, there isn’t just one type of battery that works for all devices. Not every advance in battery technology is relevant to phones. And also, not every advance is about energy density. Different battery designs have different strengths and weaknesses on other aspects as well, such as safety, life cycle, power output, etc. So (1) not every new battery technology ends up in your phone because your phone doesn’t benefit from every improvement and (2) many improvements *have* ended up in your phone, even if you weren’t aware of them (incl. actual improvements in capacity and density).
You can get phones that last days. Just not from the big manufacturers. They’re making big screens and light phones. That means smaller batteries to save weight and keep them thin. They make them just big enough to last the average person the day. Cheaper to build and lighter to carry around.
The innovation isn’t lost, but most people charge their phone at least at night and many charge them at work or school as well, which means that the increased capacity can be used for better screens, processors etc, if you look at newly made Nokia 3310s they can last a month on one charge of left on standby, and the have battery for a call lasting 22hrs
You’re doing 10x more with your phone today than you were 10 years ago.
Batteries *are* getting better. But our power use is also increasing. So we aren’t noticing.
If the processor (speed, number of transistors) and the display (number of pixels, brightness, size) had remained constant, then yes you would see longer battery life.
For example if you powered an iPhone 3G with the battery from an iPhone 15 Pro Max it would last for days. But you’d have the processor and the display of an iPhone 3G…
But processors and displays have NOT remained constant. They have progressed in huge leaps, and they consume more power.
This is balanced by improvements in batteries, leaving us with a phone that lasts around the same time.
Phone companies had to make a choice on balancing performance/display and battery life, and it was probably the right choice.
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