Sony “finds answer to smartphone battery woes”

Sure enough, most high-end smartphones today take advantage of features such as Quick Charge, but the cold truth is that there aren’t many top-tier devices out there that can offer more than a day’s worth of battery juice. However, Sony researchers are looking into new ways to increase battery life for its Sony Xperia handsets by at least 40 percent. Battery technology has always been the “turning lead into gold” of the tech industry.

Join us after the break for the full story. There’s a caveat though, because if it were this easy, somebody else would have commercially released it by now. Although the Japanese manufacturer has been losing a lot of ground in this market segment lately, in the coming years Sony will try to regain its former glory by introducing a new battery technology that might solve our current problems.

But Sony, it seems, appears to have something interesting up its sleeve.

Sulphur batteries, which store more energy, have been explored in the past, but their electrodes normally dissolve power more rapidly than lithium.

The only real solution is to develop new battery chemistry, but this has proven hard outside the lab. Alternative chemistries tend to be less stable, and are worse at maintaining a high capacity through the hundreds of recharges that consumer electronics require.

Nikkei notes that Sony hasn’t even ironed out the technical challenges yet, and that its lithium-sulfur batteries are still prone to “heat generation or ignition”. People would say they could come back several years on, turn the phone back on and it would still have a decent amount of battery life left.