Mobile Battery tech

[miseryguts]

I don't have a a whole lot of experience with Android devices.. may be considering a phone upgrade soon & potentially a K1 Tablet after there's a few out in the wild, which brings me on to my question..

SOC's are advancing at a seemingly phenomenal rate, coupled with increasing pixel densities, but mobile battery tech has seen little/no significant improvement in years (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) particularly in these kinds of devices.. why? & what is the point of of ever increasing 'performance' SOC's/better screens if you need a power supply with you at all times, doesn't that render the whole mobile aspect of these devices moot.
I understand that if your primary usage is not gaming/multimedia battery life will most likely be perfectly fine (not for me btw) but as many are now marketed as gaming/multimedia focused devices why aren't we seeing better battery tech by now?

 

[Hadron]

"Why" is easy: you canna change the laws of physics, and batteries are constrained by electrochemistry. Currently people are getting more clever with chip designs, we haven't reached the limit of miniaturisation yet, so it's simply easier to improve SoCs than batteries. Batteries are improving (current ones hold more power for the same volume than older ones), but it's not as fast.

In fact chips and screens are more efficient than they used to be, which is one factor which makes battery life sustainable. My current phone has a longer lifetime relative to the battery capacity than my previous one despite having a 60% larger screen (which is also brighter) and 4 cores each of which is several times as powerful as the earlier phone's single core. Plus the battery has a higher capacity, so there is a real gain in lifetime. But of course if I were to run it flat out with the screen on full brightness it won't last more than a few hours. But a 10 Ah battery would mean a much bigger phone (you need a certain mass of electrolyte to hold a certain amount of charge), and not enough people are prepared to buy that for it to be worth making. There is a niche market for huge 3rd party batteries for some Samsung handsets, and external battery pack cases for others, but it is a niche.

 

[chanchan05]

Battery tech is waaaay better nowadays than before actually. Back then a 700mah battery was already awe inducing, now we're seeing 3000mah batteries on phones. Here's another example, a Note 2's battery and a Galaxy Fit's is approximately the same volume, but the Note's battery holds more than twice the charge (1200mah vs 2500mah). It's simply the fact that batteries aren't improving fast enough. It's not only meeting requirements, but trying to push the limits of physics. It's much easier to construct something that eats energy as opposed to something that stores energy. You could reword the question and say that we have driven cars for a hundred years, but a viable replacement for oil hasn't been found yet. Why?

 

[JnEricsonx]

Yeah, I mean, my Note 2 has 2.5x more power than my Thunderbolt, but a bigger screen, which sucks down more power. I mean, 4g+5.5 inch screen at half brightness+Netflix=5 odd hours tops. So, just grab one of those portable little batteries. I have a couple.

 

[mikedt]

What exactly is a "K1 tablet"? If it's what I think it is, the battery life can be abysmal on some of these things. Doesn't matter what the SoC is, a crap battery is a crap battery.

 

[Shocky]

Battery life has improved quite a bit over the years, it's just our displays have got bigger, brighter and SoC's are more powerful which offsets the improvements somewhat.

Still I would say battery life has improved, we just need to stop making displays bigger and bumping up the resolution for a few years...

 

[Tsepz_GP]

Exactly as Hadron said above.

Displays and SoCs have become far more efficient, today's FHD displays are equally if not more efficient than the HD displays we had in 2012, and there was an article recently about LG's new 5.5inch QHD (2560x1440) display that was unveiled some weeks ago, being as efficient as the current FHD displays, it was on Phonearena, can't seem to find it right now. Batteries have also become more dense, and many other components have become slimmer and smaller in general, hence why a GS5 can have a 2800mAh battery plus water and dust proofing vs. the 2500mAh battery in the much bigger Galaxy Note 1 which has no protection.

Phones have come a long way, especially Smartphones, which were notorious for poor batt life in the days of Windows Mobile and Symbian. Has anyone noticed how cool and frugal modern smartphones run when playing e.g. a movie? Thanks to the incredibly intelligent and efficient modern SoCs and displays, as well as better memory management and chips.

Ofcourse if you do a lot of streaming and gaming you can't expect a phone to run efficiently. HD games require a lot of resources; Memory, CPU and GPU power, display (not just brightness but also longer and more frequent touches), and they require all of that to run at max capacity. Streaming isn't as bad but it requires the phone antenna to have great signal strength be it LTE, HSDPA+ OR WiFi, and requires a constant high volume intake of data, and with LTE especially being relatively new, you simply can't expect phenomenal battery life.