Hello and welcome back to Talking Tech with Nolan! Today I am going to tell you why you should not let your phone get hot for any reason. That might be a weird way to start this blog but hear me out! I am trying to help save your phone’s battery life.
Source: MacWorld
This all started when I keep hearing that when you used a faster charging brick to charge your phone, it was worse for the battery. After hearing so many people say it, I started to take people’s word for it, but I wanted to know why.
I did some research on my own and actually found a video by my favorite youtuber and source for tech news, MKBHD (link). In his video he broke down everything you might need to know about batteries.
Cell phone batteries are nearly all lithium-ion batteries. They are highly concentrated power cells in which lithium ions flow through an electrolyte solution from the negative side to the positive side when the device is using power. When it is getting charged back up, the ions flow the opposite way.
The interesting thing about charging lithium-ion batteries is that they absorb the most power at low charge percentages and when the phone gets almost all the way charged, the rest of the power is lost in heat. When you phone is charging, your phone smartly accepts less and less power as it charges to reduce this heat, but heat is unavoidable especially if you are charging and using the phone intensively simultaneously.
When you use a larger power brick to charge your phone, it puts more power into the phone and despite charging the phone faster, it also generates more heat.
The problem with this heat you may ask? Well, it is simple, heat degrades the battery of your phone. Heat causes the electrolyte solution to crystallize making it harder for the ions to pass through to charge the device resulting in less battery capacity.
So should you avoid these fast chargers at all cost because they cause your phone to heat up and consequently degrade your battery? No not necessarily. There is more to this battery story.
Source: Apple
Phone batteries naturally degrade each time you charge them. You might know this if you ever checked your phone’s battery health in settings or heard about Apple’s battery scandal a few years back. The industry standard is such that a phones battery will degrade to 80% capacity after 800 charges. That is a relatively reasonable number. If you think about it, that is after two years if you charge your phone once a day. Even with new phones being able to do faster and faster charge times, this standard has stayed the same largely due to new cooling technology and innovative ways to work around this.
New phones all have new cooling systems aimed at keeping the battery at a stable temperature. On top of that, there is new technology that puts two different battery cells inside and charges them simultaneously achieving faster charge times. With a little sacrifice for battery size, healthy charge speed is achievable
New cooling technology should not quell all of your fears about battery health, but smartphone companies are also implementing new software options to maximize battery health for your benefit as well.
I think the takeaway should be that smartphone battery health is better than ever before and while you should still be careful with your battery to maximize it, there are a lot of factors working in your favor to keep your phone as long as possible.
Join me next week for the latest in tech news and tips!