TOKYO — Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has announced a new lithium-ion battery — like the one in your smartphone — that can give you a 48 per cent charge in five minutes.Other fast-charging batteries made by ASUS and Samsung often work at the expense of the smartphone battery’s lifespan or capacity, but Huawei’s battery has graphite atoms coating the anode, which preserves the battery itself while charging, and is also much quicker.The company showed two battery prototypes it has developed during an event in Japan. The first smartphone battery has a capacity of 3,000 milliampere-hours (mAh), similar to a smartphone, and charges to half-full in five minutes.
An even faster prototype reaches 68 per cent in two minutes, but it only has a 600mAh capacity, which is too small for a smartphone.Battery life is a huge limiting factor in all electronic devices. Today, 15-year-old lithium-ion technology powers everything from cars to spacecraft, but the big problem is they cannot keep up with our power-hungry consumer devices.
Most smartphones take up to two hours to charge to full capacity, and often die within hours if used primarily, or with 4G.Some of the fastest-charging smartphones on the market are ASUS’ Zenfone 2 and Samsung’s Galaxy S6. The former gives you 32 per cent power in just 15 minutes and the latter hits 100 per cent after one hour and 20 minutes.Analysts have said that the power requirements of our new mobile devices are growing at twice the pace of smartphone battery-capacity evolution.
The big constraint is the battery itself: They tend to age quickly, and efficiency has barely improved over the past decade or so.Several companies and research labs are trying to build new alternatives. An Israeli company called Storedot, for instance, has designed asmartphone batterybased on an entirely new organic compound that can charge your phone from zero to full, in 30 seconds. received US$66 million (S$94 million) from investors such as
Samsung.Currently, Huawei’s quick-charge batteries need a special charging platform, which is not bulky but is still an extra device you will need to carry around with your charger.