why with all of the advances in the phone industry most phone batteries don’t hold for long ?
In: Technology
There’s an old adage in computers “What Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away.” Most of the advances in battery are consumed by trying to make phones thinner and lighter, higher resolution, brighter screens, faster processing power, and other cosmetics. If you had a phone with an e-paper screen that did sms, calls, and basic functions a modern battery would last for weeks.
Batteries have improved a lot since 2000, compare a Nokia 8300 from 2001. Which has a 750 mAh battery. To a new iPhone 12 with a 2,815 mAh. Almost 4 times larger battery.
But we also got a lot of new battery draining features, larger color screen, touch screen, camera, Bluetooth, faster processor, etc. Hardware features are growing faster than battery technology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8310
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_12
There simply haven’t been very many advances in battery technology, at least relative to everything else.
So there are only two ways to make a phone’s battery last longer: make the phone take less power or make the battery physically larger.
More energy efficiency, and thus a lower power requirement, is possible to a point and we have been doing that. But really extreme decreases in the power requirements of a phone mean it’s less powerful. We are taking a slower phone with fewer features and a smaller screen.
And a larger physical batter means a larger and heavier phone
Neither of these are things that consumers want.
It’s quite difficult to make a battery better without making it *bigger*. Right now the limiting factor is the simple chemistry behind lithium ion batteries. To make things like CPUs and GPUs better, it’s usually a matter of making things smaller so you can put more stuff in the same amount of space. Unfortunately, more stuff means more power consumption, and we’ve yet to invent a way to get more *power* into the same amount of space. For now, more battery means bigger phone, but in the last few years the market has been competing to make the *smallest* phone possible.
This is aided in significant part by the propagation of external batteries though. Good internal battery isn’t so important these days as a lot of people are getting used to carrying around another battery to charge their phone as they’re out and about.
Because it’s a race between batteries and hardware. On one hand they keep making higher capacity batteries, on the other hand they make more demanding hardware – larger screen, faster processors, more RAM.
Battery technology hasn’t exactly seem a massive overnight breakthrough, and improvements in processor efficiency have often been countered by increasing processor speeds.
Making batteries larger isn’t an option because many customers are demanding thinner/lighter phones.
Quantify what “don’t hold for long” means to you.
To me, the 1.5 days my battery lasts on an average basis is “long” considering it’s super easy to plug in each night. However, I don’t stick my nose in my phone for hours on end watching videos or playing games and such, so that’s probably longer than the average person.
As others stated, batteries haven’t had huge breakthroughs on the scale of those used in phones. Other technology has constant advancements, which often require more power…so over time any improvements to the batteries themselves will be overshadowed by higher power requirements by the phone.
But considering all that, “long” is completely subjective, in my personal experience phone batteries do last pretty long…but again I’m not the average consumer.
Because your phone is always on and the processor is (nearly) always running. There should be a section in setting where you can look how much of the battery each app or system process is using. A lot of people keep stuff open all the time and never clear their running programs, making their battery die faster. Plus because of the form factor (size/shape) of the battery, it’s hard to get a large enough battery to last for a long time. The LiPo packs range from like 1500 to 10000 mAh, the bigger the number the longer it lasts.
Because of the voltages phone manufactures charge the batteries to isn’t conducive towards long battery life, only initial battery charge
Because more powerful chips use more power, which makes the better batteries last for but the same amount of time.
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