Tag: mobile tech

You may be able to use your smartphone for double the time as early as 2017 with new tech.

Smartphone tech is moving forward at a lightning speed but mobile battery technology has not managed to keep up. Our phones are an increasingly important and central part of our daily lives. For this reason, they are becoming faster, more powerful and with higher resolution displays. Those features require energy.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy they require is too much for the average smartphone battery life.

Among the main struggles faced by smartphone owners is the need for a better phone battery. Mobile battery technology is falling short of an average user’s usage requirements. As smartphones become more awesome, they are consuming a larger amount of juice in a smaller amount of time. The phone lithium-ion batteries have not increased in capacity at the same rate as phones have increased in need.

However, new technology under development by SolidEnergy Systems may have the potential to change that. The company has been focused on improving drone battery life, but this tech could also have other applications – smartphones, for example.

This mobile battery technology uses lithium metal foil anodes instead of using graphite.

The foil makes a considerable difference. Today’s mobile battery graphite anodes are considerably thicker. In fact, the foil is only 20 percent the thickness of the anodes made from graphite. This is important because it gives batteries more physical space for improving capacity.

SolidEnergy CEO Qichao Hu said this difference will let tomorrow’s batteries hold twice the capacity. Said simply: batteries will be able to fit much more power into the same amount of space. Hu explained that this means twice the capacity in the same physical size battery or the same capacity in a half-size battery.

Moreover, SolidEnergy isn’t just working on a concept anymore. Its prototype battery was unveiled last year. At that time, the prototype was already half the physical size of the battery in an iPhone 6. Yet, it had a 2.0 amp hours capacity. The iPhone 6 battery has a 1.8 amp hours capacity. Therefore, in half the physical space, the mobile battery technology already offered more than twice the capacity.

The smartphone division of the company is experiencing a staggering number of job losses.

Microsoft has made an unhappy mobile technology news announcement of 3,000 upcoming job losses. The majority of the lay-offs are the result of the astounding failure of the Nokia deal and the redundancies it created.

The affected employees will be losing their positions over the next year within that division.

The Microsoft smartphone hardware business and global sales division will experience a massive reduction in size. Moreover, this is only the latest bad mobile technology news the company has issued this year. Back in May, it confirmed that its mobile branch would be downsizing by 1,850 jobs. At that time, Terry Myerson, the vice president of Windows and device said “we’re scaling back, but we’re not out!”

This all stems from the mobile technology news when Microsoft bought the devices and services business at Nokia.

The acquisition occurred in 2013. Microsoft made the purchase for $7.1 billion (€5.4 billion). Not only did it buy the devices and business, but it also took in all the associated problems. As it unfolded, it became one of the most disastrous tech acquisitions in history.

Three months after the acquisition closed, Microsoft eliminated 18,000 positions. The majority were from the phone hardware division. This mainly removed employees who had become a part of Microsoft by way of the Nokia buy-out. One year after that point, Microsoft wrote off $7 billion and laid off 7,800 more employees.

This downward spiral continued into May when the vast majority of the feature phone business was sold at a tiny fraction of its purchase price and additional 1,850 jobs were lost.

Now, the mobile technology news trend continues at Microsoft. In the elimination of redundancies, the company is slashing 2,850 jobs. Within a U.S. regulatory filing, the software giant explained: “we periodically evaluate how to best deploy the company’s resources.” Microsoft also said the restructuring would primarily affect the smartphone hardware business and global sales. These latest position eliminations will be in addition to those announced in May and will not include those figures in their total.