New Sulfur-Based Sony Battery Offer Longer Smartphone Charge

New All-Solid Sulfur-Based Battery Outperforms Lithium-ion Technology. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today’s electronics. The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries.

New Sulfur-Based Sony battery design has real potential to reduce cost, increase energy density and improve safety compared with existing lithium-ion laptop battery and smartphone battery technologies.

Currently smartphones have become thinner and more powerful with each new generation, but if there’s one aspect that still lags behind most other technological advancements, it lies in smartphone battery life. 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.

The world’s largest battery makers are always working on solving this puzzle, and according to a recent report from Nikkei, Sony might soon come to the rescue. The Japanese tech giant has developed a new high-capacity smartphone battery that can offer 40% more juice on a single battery charge compared to current lithium batteries.

Sony used to be one of the most prominent battery manufacturers in the world, and the same company was the first to release a commercially-viable Li-ion battery back in 1991. 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.

Reportedly, Sony is working on a new high-capacity Sony vgp-bps2c laptop battery based on a sulfur compound as opposed to lithium, which should be capable of storing 40% more energy. Calculations show that if the iPhone 6s were to be powered by Sony’s sulfur-based unit, it would offer roughly 14 hours of web browsing.

The report also reveals that Sony’s new battery could offer the same runtimes as current lithium-based units in a 30%-smaller package. Technically this would allow smartphone makers to develop even thinner mobile devices, but we’re truly hoping that this will not be the battery’s main selling point. Today’s smartphones are thin enough in our opinion, and OEMs should address the battery life issues instead of aiming for even thinner profiles at the cost of shorter recharge cycles.