Smartphone development encounters bottlenecks, battery becomes a nightmare for smartphone manufacturers
From the continuous explosions of Samsung Note 7 to the recent large-scale automatic shutdown of Apple iPhone 6S, the world's two largest smartphone companies have suffered setbacks in battery issues. Smartphones are rapidly iterating in terms of screens, motherboards, and computing speeds, but are increasingly exposing a shortcoming -& mdash; Battery technology, which may be a difficult problem to overcome within one or two years.
Why have batteries become a nightmare for smartphone manufacturers when the development of smartphones encounters bottlenecks?
Small battery trips tech giant
Although Samsung has not yet announced the specific cause of the Note 7 explosion, the truth is not far from external speculation. Samsung has injected numerous new technologies such as a stylus, frameless display, and iris recognition into the Note 7, and rushed to launch it before Apple's new iPhone, neglecting battery safety performance.
In order to meet users' demand for longer battery life, Samsung has increased the battery capacity of the Note 7 from 3000mAh of the Note 5 to 3500mAh, making the battery smaller and adding fast charging function, which poses a challenge to the manufacturing process and technology of the battery.
Samsung stated in its released statement that:& ldquo; We have learned from our investigation that there is an issue of isolated battery cells. When the positive and negative electrodes of a battery come into contact, the battery cells will overheat. This is due to very rare manufacturing process issues& ldquo;
In contrast, Apple is relatively conservative in upgrading smartphone batteries. The battery capacity of iPhone 6S is only 1715mAh, and iPhone 6S Plus is only 2750mAh, but this does not prevent iPhone from having battery problems.
The recent large-scale automatic shutdown incident of iPhone 6S ultimately forced them to take measures to replace some of the problematic phone batteries for Chinese users.
In fact, the headache problems encountered by lithium batteries are not unique to the smartphone industry. It can be said that the safety and reliability of lithium batteries have become the sword of Damocles for many technology giants. At present, no technology company in the world can guarantee the safety of lithium batteries 100%, and there are indeed many cases of recalling new products due to battery defects after they are launched.
As early as 2006, Dell recalled 4 million laptops due to battery issues; At the end of 2015, the electric vehicle manufactured by tech giant Tesla caught fire due to the spontaneous combustion of its lithium battery. In April of this year, Toshiba Corporation in Japan was found to be vulnerable due to defects in the lithium batteries of its laptops
Mobile phone battery development encounters bottlenecks
How to produce more durable and safer batteries has gradually become an urgent problem to be solved in the smartphone industry.
According to a report released by IT consulting firm Deloitte, the battery life of mobile phones will become a key factor influencing consumers' choices to purchase phones.
In the past two years, the emergence of fast charging technology has solved the problem of long charging time for mobile phones. However, the improvement in battery life and safety is still very limited. With the increasingly comprehensive functions of smartphones, users' requirements for battery performance will become higher and higher. However, current technology still cannot fully meet users' needs, and the research and development of mobile phone battery technology is facing bottlenecks.
The fundamental problem lies in the inherent properties of lithium batteries. Lithium, as the lightest metal on Earth, has an even greater ability to carry electrons. Meanwhile, the excessive reactivity of lithium can also lead to safety issues, such as low energy density and high storage costs.
Researchers are trying to solve this problem with new materials and structures. Last year, Apple applied for two new patents, named“ Fuel cell system for portable computing devices; And“ Coupling of portable computing devices with fuel cell systems;. From the names, these two patents suggest that Apple may be researching the use of fuel cell technology to solve the battery life issues of its iPhone, iPad, and Macbook computers.