Powersource: Improve phone batteries

10 breakthroughs that will greatly improve phone batteries.

There’s nothing worse than seeing your phone’s battery percentage meter drop below 20 percent, and it usually only happens when you need it most. Batteries haven’t seen much love in the last couple decades, especially compared to the tech they power, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new on the horizon. We’ve been talking about cool ways the battery and charging methods are gradually improving for a while. Here’s a rundown of all the most exciting new developments, which may make that low battery warning less of an annoyance in the future.

Ultra-rapid chargers make standby time irrelevant.

StoreDot gained plenty of attention when it released details about its clever, and very fast, charging system recently. How fast? A Galaxy S4 can go from zero percent to capacity in just 30 seconds, when powered by this impressive tech. Like you’d expect, it uses lots of complicated science (and probably some magic) to make this possible, and thus isn’t ready for mainstream release just yet.

While the 30-second charge time grabbed the headlines, there’s an additional benefit. The charger and battery combination will take more charge/discharge cycles than current battery packs, prolonging its life and leasing the impact on the environment, our wallet, and our sanity. It’s possible StoreDot’s tech will be on sale sometime in this year.

Using one gadget to charge another

Batteries require an energy source to recharge, so why not use another battery? External, portable battery packs are nothing new, but some companies are beginning to put big, fat cells inside other gadgets we actually use, ready to charge up a different device buried in our pockets. Asus started this trend in mobile with the PadFone, where the tablet section kept the phone’s battery topped up while docked.

More recently, ZTE demonstrated the cool Projector Hotspot, which stuffs in a 5,000mAh battery which can recharge a connected device while it’s in use. Huawei’s Ascend Mate 2 has a feature called Reverse Charging, where the giant houses a 4,050mAh battery can give other, more feebly equipped hardware a boost in times of need.

A massive battery pack, to charge all your gadgets.

A 5,000mAh battery pack can recharge your iPhone 5 battery a little over two times before it needs a trip to the power socket itself. Not bad, but compared to the Trontium Reactor, it’s a bit pathetic. This massive, $300 metallic cylinder, which would look more at home powering a flying saucer than your iPhone, uses a technology called USB Power Delivery, where the humble USB 3.0 connection is boosted to provide 100 watts of power to compatible devices.

The 290 watt-hour battery pack has three such ports on its shell, and can recharge an iPhone 50 times over before it needs a top up itself. It even has enough juice to recharge a MacBook Air five times. The Trontium Reactor is the first of its type, but we can expect other, similar products using USB Power Delivery to follow in the future.

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Is it a battery? Is it a capacitor? No, it’s a super capacitor.

Super capacitors are batteries that fit somewhere in-between regular batteries and rechargeable cells. They can be charged very quickly, store plenty of energy, then send it out over a sensible amount of time. Despite this fast-paced, hard-living lifestyle, the cells aren’t fragile, and can see tens of thousands of charge cycles before they give up.

We’ve recently seen a super capacitor battery used in the Blueshift Bamboo speaker, which charges up in minutes, and is then able to provide music for six hours before running out. In mid-2013, an 18 year-old student showed a supercapacitor battery off at Intel’s Science and Engineering Fair. Once properly developed, it was estimated the capacitor would take just 30 seconds to charge a smartphone battery.

Batteries in all shapes and sizes.

LG’s battery division, LG Chem, talked about its battery tech advancements at the end of 2013, specifically discussing cells that move away from the established shapes and sizes we’re used to seeing. Referred to as Curved, Stepped, and Cable, the batteries are designed to make the most of the available space inside our phones, and to power hardware which requires a more creative approach to fitting one inside, like smartwatches and other wearable gadgets.

An early example of a Stepped battery was used inside the LG G2 smartphone, and its unusual design made it possible to squeeze an additional 16 percent capacity into the cell, resulting in three hours more standby time than a standard battery design.