The usefulness and appeal of smartwatches has been significantly held back by the poor batteries that the gadgets tend to have equipped, but LG may have a solution to that problem. By necessity, smartwatches have some pretty minuscule batteries, which means that they’re not nearly as good as smartphone batteries, so LG has found a rather simple way to increase the size of the batteries without the need to make the smartwatch bigger by changing the battery’s shape.
If there’s one problem that most smartwatches share, it’s battery life. Smartwatches from the Motorola Moto 360 to the Apple Watch eke out a full day only after the lightest usage, a fact largely attributable the the tiny batteries that power them. Luckily, LG Chem, LG’s battery research division, may have just the solution to wearables’ battery woes: hexagonal batteries. The hexagonal batteries are an intuitive approach to the problem of efficiency. The batteries in current-generation smartwatches are the shrunken-down, misshapen equivalents of the rectangular ones found in smartphones, tablets, and the like. In round watches — such as the LG G Watch Urbane — that leads to a lot of wasted space, as the corners of the watch’s enclosure go unused. By filling that space with more battery, LG says it can increase battery by up to 25 percent, which amounts to about four more hours of battery life.
