Like many other newer offerings from Chinese OEMs, this phone also has a silicon carbon based battery instead of traditional Li-on.
“Just $600…”
That is cheap considering it comes with bleeding-edge tech. The Snapdragon 8 Elite will mostly be seen in the $1000 range.
Yeah I recently got a year old pixel new for 400, and I bet the camera is a lot better. I don’t care about gaming performance in a phone.
Right? I got to try a 350€ Nothing Phone 2a for a couple weeks, it was far better than than my current S22 which cost twice as much. So from now on my budget for new phones is going to be 350€.
If they can fix the cycle life on those new batteries, I’m the first to buy them.
But I’m not buying a phone with higher battery degration as of right now.
Do Silicon Carbon batteries have a lower lifespan than Lion ones? I know they allow for more dense and higher batteries to be packed in slim packaging but didn’t knew if there is any potential downside.
They have two downsides but more upsides.
The silicon is not without limitation and will degrade faster. You will see your battery becoming worse and worse, but I’m not sure how fast it will break even with a traditional Li-Ion battery, calculating in the higher density in silicon.
The other downside is that silicon does not work as well in higher temperatures, and that can be a problem if the battery gets too hot. It’s the same mechanism in CPUs also consisting of silicon. They will be considerably worse performing at high temperature.
I hope they can improve on this, but it might be limitations of silicon as a material, meaning not much can be achieved.
Also the silicon expands as it’s charged considerably more because it can hold a lot more. Many people don’t realize charging isn’t just holding electricity in a bucket, it’s a physical change to the battery.
I’d never heard of this before. What are the upsides? And just make them user replaceable and standardized, and we’ll worry much less about cycle life.
The upside, in short, is density.
The silicon batteries can store alot more power in the same size and weight.
That means you can put alot more power into your existing size of hardware.
It’s also extremely beneficial for electric cars, which can either lower the weight on the car or put more juice in it. Both increasing the range.
For your point about replaceable batteries, it’s true. If we can replace batteries, the hardware will not be lost. But everything comes down to how often we need to replace them. How fast does these batteries really degrade in real world use? It can leave us with even worse ecological challenges and might be very expensive. We need a strong reuse culture for this to not be a new catastrophic environmental case.
The real deal is this though:
A third option is Solid State Batteries and is still the best solution for the future, but it’s not fully ready for commercial use yet. They do not seem to have any of the downsides from both lithium and silicon. But again, it’s not ready.
Cycle life is probably fine if you avoid their super fast chargers that make the phone hot
Yes, in phones we can limit the damage by using slow chargers.
But when it gets hot, it’s also a lot worse than with lithium. Not only do they degrade permanently, but they also loose more power while in the given operation.
Meaning while hot, your battery might burn 10% but only use 5% worth of power.
Some phones also gets hot when gaming or shooting pics or videos because of the CPU. If the thermals are manged poorly, it can permanently damage the battery as well, which we do not see in lithium.
