It's a bitter truth: Smartphone battery life isn't long. Even with the external packages batteries, most modern smartphones can't make it through a demanding day, while the best devices can barely work for 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 are hopes for the future. Researchers are already researching new battery technologies, such as solid-state batteries, that could open the door to denser materials and provide more power to future devices.
However, there is one issue: as new batteries develop, our smartphones become more sophisticated, which means that 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.
The "law" was named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel microprocessor maker, who described in 1965 the reasons why the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every year for at least one decade since then.
In 1975, looking again at the data for the next decade, he revised his "prediction" to space required to double the transistors of a dense integrated circuit in two years.
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