Apple to improve battery life by increasing cell density

By on Feb 17, 2011 at 10:04 PM
Hardware February 17, 2011

An Apple patent uncovered on Thursday describes new technology Apple is experimenting with in an effort to increase the battery life in its device lines. The patent filing, entitled Increasing Energy Density in Rechargeable Lithium Battery Cells, describes a unique multi-pronged approach to the problem of poor battery life in consumer electronics. Apple is investigating the use of a new “multi-step constant-current constant-voltage (CC-CV) charging technique,” which would increase the volumetric and gravimetric energy density of energy-storing material within a battery. According to the filing, this would increase the capacity of a battery without impacting battery size or charge time. Relative to competitive products, Apple’s mobile device and laptop lines are often praised for exhibiting impressive battery life. There can never be enough time in between charges, however, and as more features and better displays are added to future devices, manufacturers will always struggle to ensure battery life is not overly degraded as a result.

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  • http://twitter.com/redigits Steve

    Sounds good to me.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Simon-Yu/100000989859895 Simon Yu

    How unfair.. if the patent it; will they sell it to other manufacturer’s? not likely. But they did it make it their own.. so they will lead the market in battery then, and all us Android users must dwell with poor battery life. :

    • Anonymous

      doesn’t Android already suffer from that? And there’s a software element to the denser battery, it needs smarter charging, dependent on temperature and density. That would be more patentable than a denser battery–that technology doesnt really belong to Apple.

    • http://moeedm.com Moeed Mohammad

      Whoever is in charge of the innovation gets to control it. Seems fair to me. Should push other companies to follow suit.

  • Anonymous

    Dear Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung executives:

    You should follow in this trend, rather than worrying about quad core processors in phones.

    • jason6g

      ah its more cost effective to add a bunch of apps noone will ever use and reduce battery life than actually innovate something.

      droid 1 – was nice, htc incredible was nice, nexus 1 was nice, evo was nice. all others are expensive toys with corporate crap all over them and nothing new, exciting, revolutionary.

      yes i am praying that the next series of android phones are not a complete joke

    • Alexander530

      I agree. Single core is substantial for smartphones. There are other much more important aspects that needs to be improved on smartphones than implementation on quad core cpu’s.

      • Allen Walker

        New quad core phones will consume 60% less battery…

        Is that not a step in the right direction? … Idiot

      • Anonymous

        how?

      • Alexander530

        There are no factual basis in you saying that quad core phones consume 60% less battery.

      • Joel

        Its common computer sense the more cores you run the more power efficient the processor is in it self. TI OMAP multi core processors use less battery because it can decode things straight from the processor dye instead of using additional software.

        We live in the 21 century, get a clue !

  • http://twitter.com/DoubleONegative Nerdherder

    I just switched to an iPhone after using Android and experiencing the woeful battery life associated with that platform. Couldn’t be happier. If Apple were to increase the battery life in their devices, they would be light years ahead of the competition.

  • Bonnie

    Is this some minor “10% improvement”?

    Or 7 times better battery life?

  • Anonymous

    I have an iPhone 4 for work purposes only On Verizon and it’s battery life is double plus more over my Droid incredible. I attribute it to the fact the DROID OS is far more complex than iOS.

    • Alexander530

      And how’s the droid os more complex than the ios? Are you a software engineer who actually know the logarithms between the two OS’s?

      • TheTruth

        Logarithms? LOL idiot.

  • heh

    I don’t own a single Apple product, but I recognize their ability to innovate. I prefer when people take their innovations and improve upon them, personally. That said, good for them for working on the biggest bottleneck in the mobile phone market – batteries. With one Android phone after another being released with a triple-core, dual screened, multi-dildoed interface the mind wonders how in the hell you’re expected to live your live next to a wall socket.

    • Drew

      Well, it doesn’t help when they’re putting in lame ass 1230MAh batteries on a 4.3″ screen. Right HTC??Thanks for that awesome battery in the Inspire 4G. Was 1500 a problem or what?? WTF??

  • Anonymous

    Whatever they do won’t come close to the 3-4 months battery life you can get off your run of the mill Android phone. All the while running 300 applications at the same time. Ahhhh, the power of freedom and openness! Only Google could pull that off!

    • Alexander530

      Fragmentation does not equal openness. A lot of android 2.1 users can’t even upgrade to 2.2 froyo. Is that what you call openness?

      • Drew

        Can we stop beating a dead horse with the same tired and stale fragmentation argument?? Yes, openness = Root your fucking ROM and stop complaining.

      • Anonymous

        Can we stop this stale and bullshit argument of Root your f**king ROM and stop complaining. Because all of us are not GEEKS. Last I looked average users outnumber geeks by manyfold.

      • Anonymous

        No offense intended here but if you have to root your rom and void your warrenty to install the software that you want how is that open – or at least how is that any more open than having to jailbreak your phone to install software that doesn’t make it onto the App store?

  • JNM

    That might convince me to use an iPhone. Battery life is number one on my list of features for smartphones. My MyTouch 4g does quite well usually but more is always better when considering battery life.

  • Rocurs

    I think Apple should come out with two variants of the iphone, one of which contains an extended battery. So what if it makes it a few millimetres thicker, let the consumer decide what suits their needs better.

  • Anonymous

    So, including Apple, my tally counts 1 corp. who is actually actively improving battery technology. If there were ever a time to play follow the leader in this ecosystem, it would be with this.

  • Drew

    @Anonymous —-> Well, then you should do 1 of 3 things: You can choose to purchase Google ONLY or Vanilla devices to ensure timely updates or…. Reach for your feature phone as you do not have the aptitude for such things as modifying your device or…. STFU and deal with it. Terribly sorry if you’ve purchase that Moto Cliq and can’t get an update. How smart were you to buy that in the first place??

  • rme

    After market batteries can help a lot. But, they seem to often use low density cells. So, they are bigger but don’t give you the full bang for the buck (thickness increase). For example, seidio battery for droid2g is 3-times thicker than stock 1400mAh battery, but only provides 2800mAh of capacity (not the 4200mAh you would expect as proportional to the increase in thickness). Stock uses Li-polymer; seidio aftermarket uses older Li-ion.

    We need high influence “customer”, such as vzw or att to push handset makers into offering 5000mAh capacity (maybe just two 2500 batts side by side).
    But that is not likely to happen!

    Because, the carrier benefits if your phone goes dead (and even if you curtail use out of fear it will go dead): they get paid for the month of service, but don’t need to invest as much in network upgrades because traffic load is moderated. From their point of view, the WORST thing is a handset that never runs out of juice.

  • educatedshrimp

    I think display technology will start becoming less of a power draw than more in the future, Pixel Qi for example is the in the milliwatts these days.

  • Anonymous

    Yes improving battery life is important, but i have owned smart phones for over a decade now and simply just buy two batteries with every smart phone purchase. It would be nice to have ONE but two is good to have in case of emergency’s or at least thats how i see it. Thats a plus with android phones that you have that option in case of emergencies. Apple does not have that option, so thats why im happy they’re looking into this issue. In my opinion it battery life effects us all but impacts the iphones more.

  • teh lulz

    When it gets to the point I can charge my phone and have it last a week on heavy use, ill consider it an innovation.

    • br14

      Apple has good battery life compared to which manufacturers? Not BlackBerry. And their batteries are significantly smaller than Apples.

      Interesting that finally people are waking up to the inconvenience of having to charge a device every few hours.

  • http://moeedm.com Moeed Mohammad

    Think different.

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