The power that smartphones have is more than enough for most users and applications. But this is not as important as battery life, since it is the priority for many consumers. It seemed that we had reached a point where we could not make progress and the batteries were not improving. However, now the smartphone manufacturer Honor has presented the first silicon-carbon battery that promises a greater autonomy and energy density.
We increasingly have more powerful processors and graphics both on PCs, as well as on laptops, consoles or smartphones. The efficiency of these components is increasing, although as we have already seen on numerous occasions, speed is sacrificed for energy consumption. We see this represented in PC CPUs and GPUs and to a lesser extent also in laptops and mobiles. Companies compete to see who offers the more powerful processor and graphics, sacrificing energy efficiency following that path. If we add to this that we have been using batteries that have barely increased their capacitywe don’t feel like there is much progress in this segment.
Silicon-carbon battery increases energy density by 12.8%
Honor is one of the well-known mobile phone brands as it sells mid-range and high-end smartphones at quite competitive prices. This has allowed it to position itself as the best selling brand in china to early 2022, quite an achievement in a market as competitive as this one. This time we will not talk about the new smartphones the company is presenting, but we will focus on something that is usually very unusual. Yes, we are referring to an improvement in the batteries, specifically a new type of battery that promises greater autonomy.
Honor thus presents its first silicon-carbon battery, which has a energy density up to 12.8% higher than lithium batteries current. As an example, they have shown that the battery of 5,100mAh of the Honor Magic5 Pro would increase to 5,450 mAh (+6.8%) if we used a silicon-carbon one.
New batteries offer 240% greater capacity at 3.5V
That improvement figure may not be surprising to us and for this reason, the CEO of Honor, George Zhao, has prepared another slide on improvements to silicon-carbon batteries. In this case, he puts us in a situation where typical silicon batteries suffer and it is in low voltage situations. As we can see, one lithium battery barely has capacity (200mAh) once its voltage drops to 3.5V. Instead, with the new battery of silicon-carbon who has shown Honor, are able to achieve 680 mAh at 3.5V, which implies an increase of 240%.
Finally, phones like the Magic5 Pro that we mentioned earlier would arrive with 5,450 mAh to the Chinese market. This could mean that the company has already started to sell mobiles equipped with silicon-carbon batteries, although confirmation is lacking. However, now comes the bad news, and it is that this will only happen in Chinese territory. It turns out that at the level internationalthe Honor Magic5 Pro will arrive with 5,100mAh, which would leave us with the standard lithium battery. At the moment we do not know many more details, but everything indicates that Honor lacks regulatory approvals necessary to offer these batteries outside the country.