What stops us from producing portable batteries for handheld devices like phones or laptops that would allow us to use such devices for weeks or months continuously?
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The critical variable for battery life is quite simply the energy density, telling you how much energy per cubic centimeter you can store.
So let’s say we measure energy in hours (of device usage), and your phone has a 6 cm^3 battery which lasts for 24 hours of usage. Your energy density is now 4 hours per cubic centimeter. A month has 720 hours, so if we divide that with our energy density, we would get 180 cm^3 as the volume of a battery that would last a month without recharge. Is that a lot? Yeah, it’s about the same as a full cup of coffee. So the reason why you don’t have a month long battery life is simply the same as why you don’t carry around a coffee mug in your pocket – it’s quite inconvenient.
The second reason is safety. If you store an enormous amount of energy, then in the case of a technical mishap, that same amount of energy may be quite explosively released into its environment. You probably also understand why storing explosives in your pocket is a bad idea.
Obviously, the first issue of volume could be solved by using a material with a higher energy density. But inventing such a material that has a high energy density, is stable in regular usage, is safe and reasonably cheap to produce is hardly trivial, development of such a material can easily be a billion-euro business. But the safety issue is harder, storing more energy inherently makes malfunctions more risky, no way to get around it, really.
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