Smartphones are a modern day miracle, but how come the battery life sucks? Do you remember those crap old cell phones we used to play snake on? Those phones lasted weeks on a single charge while the devices we use today last a whole day at best. The demand the new devices make to stay powered and connected are drastically different from what they are now compared to what they were back then
New devices power lights behind the screen so we can see in the dark, these new smart devices draw battery power to take photos in high resolution while possibly needing a flash for more light. These devices also need the energy to connect to radio towers and satellites to listen to music or to use GPS to navigate, not to mention GPSA for emergency responders to find you with relative ease in a crisis. Based on Moore’s Law, batteries do not scale at that same level as Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that roughly every two years, the number of transistors we can fit on a single microchip will double, which means we will get more powerful phones and computers. More powerful devices need a higher draw of battery consumption to maintain and power the new devices. Batteries have been evolving too, just not at the same rate as our technology. Now we aren’t saying batteries will never catch up to our devices the way we want them to, but it seems like the batteries we need will have to be made of better source material. The materials we are using can only take so much stress before they either break or max out performance. The stuff we are currently using is called Lithium Cobalt, and it has been stretched to its maximum potential as the only way to increase battery capacity at this point is to shrink the internal parts to allow more space for a larger built battery. The batteries we use now are also made of a liquid consistency and require separators to keep the phones from having a horrible chemical reaction and blowing up. The possible future for new battery technology would be through a solid state. If the batteries are made from a solid material not only will the particles be closer together but they will also remove the separators from the equation all together allowing us to have much larger batteries in our portable devices. A denser battery will allow for more available battery consumption, but how long will it take for the next big break to happen? Potentially we might be back to where we are now when that happens as our devices will continue to grow more and more powerful requiring the same battery usage just scaled up a bit more. Only time will tell overall.
How long does your battery life last? Let us know in the comments below. :)
