A dead end for smartphone batteries

The Great Smartphone Conundrum. The time has come — we're going to have to choose between performance and battery life. Smartphones keep getting faster. If you buy a new high-end phone this year, you'll find it's noticeably more powerful than last year's best gadgets. It will let you run more demanding apps, it will load up web pages more quickly, and it will deliver sharper, more advanced videos and games.

This might not sound like a big deal — aren't new gadgets always faster than old gadgets? Yes, that's true. But what's striking about phones is how quickly they're getting quicker. This year's top-of-the-line phones are likely to be twice as fast as those released last year. And last year's phones weren't slouches — they were twice as powerful as the ones that came out in 2011.
This pace is remarkable. If you study the speed increases of smartphones over time, you notice a thrilling trend: phones are getting faster really, really fast — much faster, in fact, than the increase in speed in the rest of our computers. If you scrutinise this quickening pace, though, you're bound to get disillusioned.

One of the reasons phones have been getting faster is that they're also getting bigger. A bigger phone allows for a bigger battery, which allows for a faster processor. But now we've hit a wall in phone size: Today's biggest and fastest phones carry screens of around 5in, and they're not going to get any bigger than that. (If they did, they wouldn't fit in your hand.)

So if the size of our phones — and, thus, the size of their batteries — is now fixed, phone makers (and phone buyers) must make a sharp trade-off. Over the next few years, at least until someone develops better battery technology, we're going to have to choose between smartphone performance and battery life. Don't worry — phones will keep getting faster. Chip designers will still manage to increase the speed of their chips while conserving a device's power. The annual doubling in phone performance we've seen recently isn't sustainable, though. Our phones are either going to drain their batteries at ever-increasing rates while continuing to get faster — or they're going to maintain their current, not-great-but-acceptable battery life while sacrificing huge increases in speed. It won't be possible to do both.

You, as a phone buyer, will have to make a choice. The most powerful phones are going to be much more pleasant to use — until about lunchtime, when you'll need to recharge them. The phones with the longest battery life, on the other hand, might stutter but they'll be around till midnight.

The Independent