Frustrated with your phone running out of battery before the day is out? According to telecommunications company Nokia, those days could soon be over.

Nokia Bell Labs, a subsidiary of Finnish manufacturer Nokia, has now announced a new smartphone battery design reportedly packing “2.5 times the battery life than anything currently on the market”.

Crucially, the battery design was engineered so as not to increase the weight of the device, meaning you’re not just packing in more batteries to cope with the demands of modern smartphones. It should also be able to better handle energy from renewable grids – solar, wind, etc – which tend to fluctuate in the amount of energy being provided throughout the day.

Nokia Bell Labs developed the technology with AMBER, a research centre in Ireland that connect material science researchers with partners in industry.

Paul King, technical staffer at Nokia Bell Labs, added that “By packing more energy into a smaller space, this new battery technology will have a profound impact on 5G and the entire networked world.”

While Nokia no longer makes its own smartphones – preferring to license out the brand to HDM Global – we can be sure Nokia will be looking to license the technology out for commercial use down the line.

A representative for Nokia added that “A patent has been filed to protect the technology and we don’t have any specific timetable to offer, especially as we anticipate that other companies will bring the batteries to market.”

Down the energy drain

As smartphones have grown increasingly advanced in recent years, so too have their energy needs multiplied. Long gone are the days when you could keep a brick handset going for a week of light use.

Those bright displays and fancy cameras tempting you these days consume a lot of power, and plugging your phone in at the end of the day has become as much of a ritual as locking the front door or filling the dog’s food bowl.

Finding new ways to expand mobile energy capacity is going to be crucial to keep offering meaningful upgrades to today’s smartphones – while the demands of 5G networks, which allow for incredibly fast data transfer and connection speeds, is only going to sap handheld devices even further.

We don’t know when we might be seeing this arrive in commercial handsets, and have asked Nokia to clarify when this might be. But, for the sake of our current fast-draining smartphones, we hope it’s sooner rather than later.

Via CNET