ALMOST everyone owns a smartphone these days. The devices are the digital equivalent of Swiss-army knives, having dozens of uses in one package. We can do almost anything on our phones from chatting with a friend to booking a promo flight.
Yet with all the functionalities these phones afford us with, there seems to be one common complaint – battery life. It’s a common thing these days to run out of battery in the middle of the day. Ever wondered why? Let’s look at four reasons for this power struggle.
1. Batteries have very limited lifespans.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are the ones used in our mobile devices, do not last a really long time. On average, they last for two to three years, depending on usage. If we ask the engineers, typical lithium-ion batteries last for 300-500 charge cycles, with one cycle going from 0 percent to 100 percent.
So if a phone’s battery goes empty once a day, and it’s charged to full, that’s one cycle. In 500 days – that’s less than a year and a half – the battery begins to degrade. That means it won’t hold as much charge as when it was new, and it will have to be charged more often. Doing that would only wear the battery even further, until the time its capacity becomes too low to be useful.
2. A phone’s battery is usually the first component to fail.
Without a power source, the phone would essentially be a brick. Even if all the other parts are in perfect working condition, how will the device function without energy?
Sure, there may be extra-high capacity power banks that one may bring along. But those things are bulky, and it requires plugging in a cable to the phone. That makes the experience of using a mobile device unnecessarily cumbersome. Phones are meant to be wireless communication devices; needing to be jacked into a power source really defeats that purpose.
3. Batteries used to be easily replaceable.
Logically, the best thing to do in this case is to replace the spent battery. That used to be very easy back in the Nokia heydays in the early 2000s. All cellphones of that time had removable battery packs, making them very easy to replace.
Also, back then, power banks were not a thing; spare batteries were. It was common for business people, for instance, to pack in extra batteries for their cellphones in case they ran out of power during the workday.
But now, all modern phones have sealed-in batteries. No one who doesn’t have a knowledge of electronics wants to tinker with the insides of a phone, so most users cannot even replace old batteries. Even if the rest of the phone is in almost mint condition, most people would rather just buy a new one. This is all because of batteries going bad through normal wear and tear.
4. This battery design is bad for the environment.
What would happen to people’s old phones (that aren’t really that old)? Most of them get thrown out and end up as electronic waste, or e-waste. The countless phones that are disposed of contribute to the growing mass of global e-waste,
How about repair centres? They’re too costly, and most of them would recommend buying a new phone anyway. There seems to be no other recourse.
Sustainable manufacturing is the key here. Why not use the components of old phones, recycle them, and use them as raw material to make new ones? With this kind of manufacturing practice, it’s possible to sustain the “upgrade lifestyle” while still being eco-friendly. Hopefully this idea will catch on with tech companies sooner than later.