Waiting for a breakthrough

Let’s talk about batteries (Part III)

“It’ll cost you $500M to set up a small manufacturing line and do all the minutiae of research you need to make the product.” — Gerd Ceder, Professor of Materials Science at Berkeley

2014 survey by The Guardian showed that consumers were asking for better batteries ahead of all other features.

At CES 2015, Fortune and SurveyMonkey sent out a survey, asking, “What new or improved smartphone feature are you most excited about?” The #1 answer was “improved battery life,” and it got twice the number of votes of the next most wanted feature: “faster processor.”

That was two years ago — so, where are we now?

Well, the battery in your phone hasn’t fundamentally changed in the past 2 years. If you’ve noticed any increased capacity in your battery life, it’s probably because you have a bigger phone or because the underlying software has improved the operating efficiency. Or, you got it at some tradeoff — for example, if you have a phone with increased capacity, like Sony’s Xperia Z3, then you have a thicker phone that charges slowly. Or if you have Motorola’s Moto X, your phone has one of the…