Like many other newer offerings from Chinese OEMs, this phone also has a silicon carbon based battery instead of traditional Li-on.
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.
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.
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.
