It's a bitter truth: Smartphone battery life isn't long. Even with external battery packs, most modern smartphones can't make it through a demanding day, while the best devices can barely last two days.
In the past, batteries had a fantastic battery life, lasting many days without the need for constant charging. Yes, our phones today are much more powerful than they were, for example, the Nokia 3310, but why can't their batteries keep up with the pace?
According to Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Collaborative Center for Storage energy (Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science) and an expert in battery technology, the core of the problem is simple:
Ο Moore's law simply surpassed the technology of batteries, which means that our phones continue to improve at a much faster rate than developments in batteries.
It's not that there have been no improvements: we have been able to steadily increase energy density in recent years by shrinking internal components. But, according to Srinivasan:
Five years ago, it became clear that we could not remove other things, because there were fires. We have reached a stage where new improvements in energy density should come from changing battery materials, and finding new materials is always slower than what I would call mechanical progress.
That's because today's rechargeable smartphone batteries are based on lithium cobalt, a battery technology we've been using since the early 90s and have pretty much reached the limit of how much power we can get.
But there is hope for the future. Researchers are already investigating new ones technologies batteries, such as solid-state batteries, which could open the door to denser materials and could deliver more power to future devices.
However, there is one issue: while new batteries are being developed, the smartphone we are becoming more and more sophisticated which means they need even more energy.
So. upcoming battery technology will have to overtake this development, and generally have to pass or keep up with Moore's Law.
"Law" is named after its co-founder companyς constructionof Intel microprocessors, Gordon Moore, who described in 1965 the reasons why the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every year for at least a decade thereafter.
In 1975, looking back at the data for the next decade, he revised his "forecast" by setting the time required to double the transistors of a dense integrated circuit to two years.
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