Samsung believes it may have found a way to double battery life without increasing size, potentially paving the way for devices which last days on a single charge.
Battery technology is one of the few things in mobile devices that never seems to move forward or improve, yet many companies continue to strive for that elusive glass ceiling. Samsung has been toiling away with various possibilities for quite a while now but it seems the Korean firm may have finally struck gold with its newest engineering efforts.
Business Korea reported that the company has successfully developed new graphene-coated silicon that could replace the ageing graphite cathodes in existing batteries. Graphene is essentially a very dense slice of graphite that has far more carbon atoms squeezed in than its predecessor. As a natural successor to the old battery material, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work on paper.
The implications for the technology should it be adopted are huge. Samsung believes that it could double battery capacity without increasing size, meaning we could one day all be using smartphones which last well over 24 hours.
Unfortunately the technology is still several years away and doesn’t have a clear release date in sight. For a new technology to be deemed commercially viable, it needs to exceed the old product in virtually all areas. This means checking to see how many recharges it can stand and rigorous safety testing to ensure they don’t explode in your pocket. Then there’s the production costs, which need to be cheap enough that it can be added to existing devices without inflating the cost by ridiculous amounts.
Fingers crossed that it makes it to the production phase.
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