Archief - Batterijen & de toekomst

Why your smartphone battery sucks

If your awesome new smartphone is to have any hope of lasting longer than a day on one charge, it’s going to need more power than a typical lithium ion battery can deliver.

Used to be, you could forget your feature phone’s charger at home, go on a long-weekend vacation, and–assuming that you didn’t use it to play hours of Snake–still come home with enough battery life left on it to call a cab.

Today, though, we’re wedded to our chargers, and glare hawkishly at people who hog airport and coffee-shop outlets for too long. Switching over to superfast 4G networks, as many smartphones will in 2011, is only going to exacerbate this problem; and reports already indicate that 4G devices tend to have pitiful battery life. In fact, the power requirements of the technology being built into mobile devices is growing at twice the pace of battery-capacity increases, according to one Verizon executive.

But catching up with mobile power requirements won’t be quick or easy for the battery industry, and continuing difficulty may discourage public adoption of new 4G devices. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t a simple matter of mobile battery R&D falling behind. It extends to the chemical nature of batteries, the way research and development is funded in the global market for mobile tech, and the many different demands users place on our phones and tablets.

Klik om te vergroten...