The Indian smartphone landscape has fundamentally changed over the past few years. With shifting buyers' priorities, while most still care about the specifications, the recent advancements in battery technology have upped buyer expectations. In a recent poll that we conducted, where we asked users how much battery they want in their next smartphone, the answer wasn't a modest 1,000 or 2,000mAh bump. It was more than that.
Even if we try to exclude the users who may have voted for the maximum battery capacity as a joke, the poll paints a clear picture of the shifting user priorities, enabled by Silicon-Carbon batteries. Beyond raw performance, it's clear that users want to curb their battery anxiety. Here's what the polls said and what we can understand and learn from them.
With great power comes great longevity
According to the poll we conducted on X, a staggering 43.9% of users wanted a 12,000mAh battery, and another 29% are asked for 10,000mAh. If we had interpreted these numbers three years ago, we would've assumed users are effectively asking for a power bank with a screen attached. However, this extravagant want is a result of a growing technology that we call Silicon-Carbon batteries.
We've explained Silicon-Carbon batteries in detail, including the tech and the science behind them. And besides the fact that Silicon-Carbon batteries are much denser compared to Lithium-ion, the art of improving them is hard to master. One of the manufacturers that recently set the benchmark is Honor, with its Honor WIN series featuring a 10,000mAh battery.
The smartphone market, especially the Indian market, loves to play the number war. It's why AnTuTu benchmarks are so popular because the higher the number, the better the phone is expected to be. That's even more true for battery capacities because, unlike performance, which has reached a saturation level, a higher on-paper battery capacity is bound to give you more screen-on time.
The death of the "all-day" battery standard
For years, manufacturers have treated "all-day battery life" as the gold standard. However, as we've become more dependent on our smartphones, the "all-day" promise is no longer enough. The Indian user context is unique because of recent developments around 5G, increasing content consumption and the commute factor.
5G is power-hungry, and it drains batteries a lot faster. Most still consume content on phone screens, and with high-brightness AMOLED screens, 5,000 to 7,000mAh batteries tap out sooner. Lastly, for millions, a phone is also the primary entertainment device during long commutes.
And we don't talk much about the elephant in the room. The battery anxiety is still very real. It makes users wish for a smartphone that not only lasts to the end of the day, but also on day two or three, even if they forget to charge it in the morning.
Silicon-carbon batteries on phones have matured, but...
Historically, a 10,000mAh phone could've been a literal brick, thick, heavy and ugly. And this is where Silicon-Carbon batteries have changed the game. They allow manufacturers to pack in as much battery as possible while keeping the size of the battery the same, if not slimmer, in the same physical chassis space of the existing smartphones that are 7mm to 8.5mm thick.
It already feels as though we're defying physics with the battery technology, and manufacturers still want to push it to its limits. Therefore, while the 12,000mAh option won, and we can scoff about it for now, it won't be too long until we'll be bawling our eyes out when someone announces a phone with a battery of the same size.
Brands like Realme, OnePlus, iQOO and Honor are aggressively adapting higher capacity batteries with 8,000mAh being the new baseline now. The OnePlus Turbo 6, for example, packs a 9,000mAh cell. Meanwhile, Apple and Samsung have remained conservative, sticking closer to 5,000mAh. The giants are expected to ignore Silicon-Carbon technology for the next two years.
However, our data does suggest that this conservative approach could soon cost them. In a market where, in the sub-Rs 20,000 phones, battery life has already overtaken processor performance, it won't be too long before users start asking more from major brands. That also includes Google.
While manufacturers have mastered the art of fitting these batteries into phones, getting the energy out of them efficiently is a different story. This brings us to:
The efficiency trap every phone manufacturer ignores
Despite the skyrocketing numbers, there is a technical aspect that specs sheets conveniently ignore. And that is, runtime does not scale linearly with capacity in Silicon-Carbon cells. In our Poco F7 review, we observed that despite the high-capacity battery, the end screen-on time wasn't very impressive for a phone with a 7,550 mAh battery. And I have a theory that it's due to the Conductivity tax.
You see, graphite anodes in Lithium-ion batteries are highly conductive, but silicon is naturally resistive. It struggles to attract more electrons efficiently, meaning a portion of that massive 10,000mAh battery is burned off as heat, simply to overcome its own internal resistance. Furthermore, these batteries suffer from a steeper voltage sag at the end of their cycle.
It reminds me of the Jevons paradox. As battery density increases, manufacturers aren't using it to give you a three-day phone. They are using it to justify the 6,000 nit displays and power-hungry chipsets.
This leaves users in a strange limbo where we have double the battery sizes of 2022, yet we still end the day with the same 20% charge. That's the physics and chemistry no one wants to tell you about. So while the 10,000, 12,000mAh wants are justified, it's important to tone down our expectations that create this false hype around high-capacity batteries.
