Mobile Battery Technology: Li-ion, Li-Po & The Future

One of the most frustrating experiences of a modern smartphone is running out of power in the middle of the day. Never mind the fact that you followed our tips for preserving battery life and that you only charged your phone yesterday evening – it’s a problem that we all still experience on a regular basis. As mobile phones become smarter and continue to integrate themselves into every aspect of our daily lives, we’re demanding more and more from them. We expect to find beautiful high definition displays, quad-core processors and power-hungry features such as GPS in our latest smartphones. At the same time, we’re asking our increasingly power-hungry phones to survive a day between recharging.

In this article, we turn our focus onto the batteries that are found inside mobile phones and tablets. We look at how batteries work, the different ways of measuring and classifying batteries and explore what the future for mobile phone batteries could look like. Finally, we ask whether the mobile phone of the future will see much improved battery life and how long we’ll have to wait before our smartphones can make it through the day without a charger.