Each year, the hardware that powers our electronics becomes progressively more efficient and more powerful, all except for batteries. While every other component has enjoyed steady progression for years, the improvement of battery technology has been comparatively small, and with more and more of our devices relying on batteries, this is becoming a serious problem. Google recognizes this, which is the company has reportedly been researching new battery technology for almost three years.
Ask any user of digital-things-not-tethered-to-the-wall, and one of the bigger worries you’ll likely hear from them is battery life. It stinks when your laptop can’t go as long as you want it to on a charge; it double-stinks when you have to plug in all of your smartwatches, tablets, mobile phones, and handheld gaming devices each night just to ensure you’ll be able to use them the next day. Unlike microprocessors, however, we just aren’t seeing the kinds of steady evolution in battery life that one might expect to find in each successive generation of digital devices. Sure, manufacturers can make all the other components in a device smaller and more efficient—which either allows a device to consume less energy or, on the flip side, allows a manufacturer to stuff more or bigger batteries into the device to begin with. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, an internal team at Google is allegedly researching battery technologies, and has been since late 2012 or so. The main focus is on improving the potential of lithium-ion batteries—common to most devices nowadays—and the potential development of solid-state thin-film batteries that could be mass produced without costing a fortune.
