Speaker 1: Why in the year 2024, do I still have to charge my iPhone every night? Speaker 1: You would think given how much cell phones have improved over the last two decades, that their batteries would’ve also gotten better. And yes, there have been some improvements with higher end phones, like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the Pix Light Pro or the Galaxy S 24 Ultra, but those batteries still won’t last more than two days tops. And even as phones have gotten better, we’re still pretty much using the same battery tech now that we were in the nineties. So when [00:00:30] will I finally be able to stop stressing about my phone battery levels? The simple answer is that battery improvements haven’t been able to keep up with how quickly phones have developed. Smarter smartphones need more power, but right now, the only way to really get more power out of a battery is to make it bigger. But no one wants to carry around a giant brick. Speaker 1: Phone makers have found ways to shrink internal components to make space for slightly larger higher capacity batteries. But there’s a limit. And at some point the batteries themselves need to evolve, and that’s the [00:01:00] tricky part. Smartphones have used lithium ion batteries since the nineties and there have been advancements when it comes to boosting capacity and speeding up charging time. But we’ve pretty much reached the cap on how much power we can get from lithium ion batteries. That means we need a whole new type of battery. Researchers are exploring several new technologies like solid state batteries while lithium ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte to move charge around solid state batteries, use ceramics or other solid materials. This has a couple of key benefits. [00:01:30] One, you can pack more energy and less space and two solid state batteries move charge around more quickly, which means faster charging. Speaker 1: One type of solid state battery that could show up in your electronics one day is lithium metal. It’s super light and can pack lots of energy. The downside is it’s super expensive and as of right now, pretty unstable companies and researchers haven’t really found a way to commercialize these batteries yet, but they are working on it. One company that’s touting its lithium metal tech is quantum scape, which is looking to make the next generation [00:02:00] of batteries for electric vehicles. Volkswagen is one of the startup’s main investors and is testing the tech for its future EVs. If that’s successful, you could see the tech pop up in phones someday too. But here’s the ironic bit. By the time the next generation of batteries is ready for commercial use, smartphones will probably have progressed enough to demand even more powerful batteries. So it might just be this endless cycle where batteries can’t keep up with mobile advancements. In the meantime, there are ways to extend your phone’s battery life, like turning on low power mode or disabling [00:02:30] the always on display if your phone has one. And for now at least keep that external battery pack close. Thanks so much for watching, and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe for more tech content from cnet.
