We know what's making your phone's battery drain so quickly

I would wager that everyone watching this video right now has a pretty good idea of what their

phone's current battery percentage is. Or, you know, you can just see it in the top right corner

of the screen because that's what you're probably watching it on. Seeing your battery percentage tick down can be so anxiety-inducing that there's an entire ecosystem of portable battery banks and

chargers to help ease it. Battery life is a huge reason why people choose to upgrade their phones

because being anxious about your phone's battery all the time is no fun. And I should know, I am

currently on the iphone 13 mini and i had this thing plugged in almost all the time this thing

is nearly five years old at this point and the average healthy lifespan for a phone battery is

about three years and it's already at a disadvantage because it's you know mini i would consider myself

to be an iphone person at this point but say the only thing i cared about with a new phone was

getting the best battery life what should i be looking for and is there any new battery tech on

the horizon worth holding out for well fortunately there are tons of experts that i work with that i

can ask directly. So we have with us, Cnet's Patrick Collin. You were really involved in the

recent CNET Labs phone battery testing. Is that right? Correct. So with this CNET Labs battery

testing experiment, was there anything that really jumped out at you that surprised you about the

results? Yeah, I think the first thing is how high Apple ranked. Apple's not known for having the

largest batteries in their iPhone, but they're able to be very efficient with it. So they ranked

very, very steadily in those top five rankings. But the other surprise were the Android phones

that showed up. We didn't see Samsung in there. Instead, we saw a lot of Chinese brands that have

this new type of technology battery called silicon carbons. We had like the OnePlus 15

the Poco X7 Ultra, a lot of phones that maybe most consumers might not even know exist

Let's talk about your iPhone 13 mini for a moment here. This phone was released, what

five years ago? How long have you had this phone? Oh, I've had it for three, but I bought it

It was a little bit out of date when I bought it. Yeah, so if you bought this three years ago

you hitting like that prime battery life cycle So iPhone Android Samsung you name the brand lithium batteries have about a three lifespan before they start to degrade a little bit right

And that's probably what you're hitting there. Is battery life more of a hardware thing or a software thing, would you say

Oh, that is such a good question. Is battery life about the hardware or the software

Let's touch on the hardware component there. There's a little chicken and the egg thing

If I make a bigger battery, that's going to power more features. and maybe I have things like AI and generative AI

that drains some of those features. So then we kind of see these things like

man, my battery life doesn't feel like it's increasing, even though Apple put a bigger battery in

But then there's the software side where you have efficiencies through things like iOS

you have efficiencies through the processor itself. I think this is what makes Apple unique

is they're able to control all those efficiencies and run off a very tiny battery

comparative to a lot of Android phones. And they're able to get insanely good battery life out of it

For Android, I have to be able to have that software work on a foldable phone, a tiny phone, a phone by Samsung

a phone by Google. And some of those phones might have smaller batteries

Some might have ginormous batteries. Some might have silicon carbon batteries. So there's so many variables

It makes it hard for it to be as efficient as the one coming out from Apple

So hopefully that answers the question there. Yeah, yeah, I didn't think about that, that Apple, you know, gets to really optimize just for their one phone and one software, while Android has so many directions it's going

Yeah, I think the metaphor I'd say is it's like kind of comparing what Apple's doing to like someone like having a personal chef make food for you versus having a chef kind of do catering

It's like you're both going to have a really good meal, but one might be a little more to your preference and use a lot less material to do so

So with me now to talk about phone batteries is CNET senior technology reporter, Abrar. And you've been doing a sort of deep dive on phone batteries in the last couple of weeks. Is that right

That is absolutely right I heard more about batteries than I think I heard in my lifetime but it been great I been looking into why our phone batteries aren as good as we think they could be and what it take for them to last more than just a day of regular heavy use

Well, in my case, it's only about a couple hours of heavy use with how old my phone is

at this point. But in this deep dive you've been doing, what would you say is the most surprising thing

that sort of jumped out at you that you've learned? So the lithium ion battery in your phone is actually really great, right

Like it is built to be durable and to last through a pretty significant amount of use, but we are just using them so much

And, you know, the fact of the matter is lithium ion batteries in our phones get better every year

It's pretty incremental, just, you know, like a one to three percent change from year to year

But because we just use our phones so much and because there are all these AI features that are being loaded onto our phones, all of that puts so much strain on our batteries

So it's really interesting to take a different approach to it and think, hey, maybe we are part of the problem here

Yeah, I don't want to say what my usual screen time stats are on camera

I'm sure most people are a little shamed with their screen time stats. If it is something that's, you know, sort of our fault, did you learn any tips on how I can make my phone battery last a little longer

Yes. So apart from, you know, like getting up and taking a walk and not using your phone, what you can actually do with your phone battery is set your charging limit to 80%

Because when you're charging that last 20%, a lot of stress and heat can build up and that can degrade your battery more rapidly

The other thing to avoid, your biggest enemy is going to be heat. So if you're out on the beach, don't just like leave your phone next to you out in the sun

Don't leave it in a hot car. And then another common issue is wireless chargers can often heat up your phone a lot too

So keep an eye out for that. Be wary of what charger you're using and just give your phone a little bit of shade

It needs to cool down just like us. So right now, phones use lithium-ion batteries

And is there any new sort of battery technology that coming in the future that we have to look forward to Well the next chapter of lithium batteries is silicon carbon batteries This isn an entirely new battery category but it just the next generation of what we already have in a lot of our phones So these are more efficient They can last longer

throughout the day and they can also charge faster, which is really great because if you need to head out the door and you realize your phone's at 10%, this is a really great option here

A lot of Chinese phone manufacturers are already using silicon carbon batteries

The main US manufacturers, the Apple, Samsung, Google of the world, those have not adapted

silicon carbon batteries just yet, but Motorola has. So we're going to see more phone companies that are adopting this technology in the coming years

The main difference between the battery in your iPhone, for example, and a silicon carbon

battery is there is in your battery something called the anode, which is the negative electrode

when your battery is discharging. the one that is in your phone right now is probably made of graphite, but the silicon carbon batteries

use a silicon carbon composite. So what does that mean? The silicon can actually hold more lithium

ions. And the reason why carbon is in there is because the silicon expands and contracts so

dramatically when it's charging and discharging. So the carbon is kind of like a buffer and a

stabilizer. So hopefully your battery life, your battery doesn't degrade as much, even though it's

able to charge and hold that charge for a lot longer. Well, that sounds like we have a lot to

forward to. I'm glad that there are people much smarter than me who are working on this technology

Honestly. So there is a lot to know about phone batteries. There's a potentially exciting things

on the horizon with silicon batteries or solid state batteries maybe making their way into our

phones in the not too distant future. But for now, given how well the iPhone 17 did in the

CNET Labs battery testing, I'll probably just get one of those to replace my mini. But maybe my next

phone after that will feature some kind of new battery tech, especially since I don't tend to

upgrade my phone very often. Still, with what these phones can do in 2026, maybe the current

standard of battery tech is good enough, at least for now. For more on the current state of battery

tech and what we can expect in the future, be sure to check out this month's cover story on

cnet.com, as well as the CNET Labs report on which current phones have the best batteries

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one