Smartphone Battery Life May Be on the Decline Because Lithium Ion Batteries Can't Keep Up With New Technology

redpandadev said:
I definitely want a phone powered by a brand new never before mass produced battery technology built by the same company that, by its own admission, built a battery with a major design flaw that caused it to frequently catch fire because they cut corners to rush it to market. That sounds like an awesome idea.
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Note 7 was 2 years ago and Samsung sold hundreds of millions of phones since then.
There is no reason to keep acting like Samsung has problems with batteries. Heck I would say their phones are the safest when it comes to potential battery fails.
 
TMRJIJ said:
Always knew this would be a problem at some point. Looks like my dream of having a paper thin smartphone is not happening in my lifetime.
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Your dream is having an object you can't even hold properly due to atrocious ergonomics?

Dream bigger.
 
ROGmaster said:
Because Samsung itself reported it.
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-battery-material-with-5x-faster-charging-speed

Rumors are only saying that the tech will be ready sooner than anticipated.
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That’s not addressing the question of how do you know Apple isn’t involved in any battery related r and d? You don’t. You only know what is reported and even if this will see the light of day. Samsung isn’t the only company involved in various aspects of r and d for consumer related technologies.

For me it’s less important how fast a phone charges vs how long the battery lasts between charges and if the battery is going to age with use.
 
I7guy said:
That’s not addressing the question of how do you know Apple isn’t involved in any battery related r and d? You don’t. You only know what is reported and even if this will see the light of day. Samsung isn’t the only company involved in various aspects of r and d for consumer related technologies.

For me it’s less important how fast a phone charges vs how long the battery lasts between charges and if the battery is going to age with use.
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Because there is no reason to know such a thing. And I'm talking specifically about new battery tech not L shapes or T's or anything like that.
Going by your logic I can assume Earth was visited by aliens. Certainly nobody can prove me wrong so why not?

Also why would Samsung report about something that will not see the light of day, like Apple did with airpower? Samsung is not Apple.

Samsung isn’t the only company involved in various aspects of r and d for consumer related technologies.
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No it's not the only company but it's certainly the most involved.
 
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UK-MacAddict said:
I have a bigger bulge in my pocket now with the iPhone XS Max than I did with my phones in the early 00’s. Phones were tiny in that period. I had the Nokia 8850, 8210, 8310. Samsung wise I was using the D600 and D900i. There was also the Motorola Razr.
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It wouldn’t be necessary to leave your phone outside.

My old Logitech solar keyboard charged from just the natural light coming into the room and the lights in the room itself. It was never in direct light and it never left the desk and it was always fully charged.
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Solar panels on devices don’t need to be in direct sunlight. They work from natural light coming into the room and light sources in the room itself i.e. a lamp or the main room lighting.

I’ve replied to a few posts in here that my Logitech keyboard was solar powered and it never left the desk, was never in direct sunlight yet it was always fully charged.
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Keyboards use a tiny tiny fraction of the power that a phone uses. You can hardly compare the two. An indoor solar panel would generate almost nothing, just as it does for a keyboard. Again, practically useless.
 
Am I the only one who read the headline and was like well duh? Next they are going to tell me water is wet?
 
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I heard through the grapevine that thinner-is-better strategy might have something to do with it. I don't know if it's true, but that's just what I've heard.

Seriously, if you keep making crap thinner, what a heck do you expect? Form over function at its best these days.
 
Does this mean this will force companies to push for better technology of batteries or different materials? Possibly graphene or what have you.


MacRumors said:



Overall smartphone battery life may be declining due to the increasing demands new technologies place on lithium ion batteries, according to smartphone testing done by The Washington Post.

In a series of battery life tests where multiple smartphone models from the past few years were set at the same brightness and forced to reload the same sites, newer smartphones were not able to last as long as older devices.

smartphonebatterylifetest-800x799.jpg

When it comes to the iPhone, for example, the iPhone XS died an average of 21 minutes earlier than the previous-generation iPhone X. Battery life impact was most noticeable with the Google Pixel 3, which lasted an hour and a half less than the Pixel 2.

According to The Washington Post, the iPhone XR, which uses an LCD instead of an OLED display, was a notable exception, performing well on the battery life tests. The iPhone XR boasts the longest battery life of any iPhone with 25 hours of talk time, 15 hours of internet use, 16 hours of video playback, and 65 hours of audio playback.

It lasted the longest in the battery test, besting the Pixel 3XL, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, and the iPhone XS Max. Nadim Maluf, CEO of battery optimization firm Qnovo, told The Washington Post that batteries improve at about "5 percent per year" but smartphone power consumption is growing faster than that.

The Washington Post consulted with other tech sites like Tom's Guide and CNET, and came to the conclusion that high-resolution OLED displays and cellular connectivity are major factors that impact battery life.

Turning down display brightness and using WiFi when possible, two well-known techniques for preserving battery life, are among the site's recommendations for eking more juice out of a smartphone.

The Washington Post's battery life test focused on the display, but other battery life tests, such as one conducted by Consumer Reports using a machine that opens up apps, had different results, with the iPhone XS beating the iPhone X due to improvements Apple has made with the processor.

Variations in battery life due to different tests and different real-life usage situations can make it difficult to tell whether overall battery life is increasing or decreasing over time, says the site.

Battery company Onavo's CEO believes that consumers should "start getting ready for compromise," settling for smartphones with increasingly bigger batteries that result in larger, heavier devices or lesser technologies like the LCD display in the iPhone XR.

Article Link: Smartphone Battery Life May Be on the Decline Because Lithium Ion Batteries Can't Keep Up With New Technology
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Make batteries great again! Make them yuge! So much energy. So electric. In terms of electric, the energy is the greatest it's ever been.
 
TMRJIJ said:
Always knew this would be a problem at some point. Looks like my dream of having a paper thin smartphone is not happening in my lifetime.
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Awwww.... and here I always figured thin would continue until eventually we'd have roll-ups, like fancy cookies. After all there are already circuit boards that print onto cardboard... next step, parchment paper. They'd run on power from a little module that stealthily hacks energy from room air molecules as needed every time you take the thing out of your shirt pocket and unroll it.

How About a Rollup iPhone.jpg

In truth I'd probably be happy to adopt an XR if they'd make one the size of my SE.
 
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i remember like 5+ years ago we'd constantly see news articles about college students figuring out ways to have a battery whose charge would last for weeks and it wouldn't wear out. wonder what happened to those.
 
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