Realme Charts Path To 10,000mAh Phone Batteries by 2026

Realme plans to double smartphone battery capacity to 10,000mAh within its three-year strategic roadmap, the company said at tradeshow MWC on Tuesday. Current flagship devices typically offer 5,000mAh, while Realme's latest models already ship with 6,000mAh cells. The company expects to implement 7,500mAh batteries next year before reaching the 10,000mAh target, PCMag reported, citing the firm.

Nothing but an ad

[pipatron]

This is nothing but an ad for a specific brand of phones.

Everyone has a "three year roadmap", it's always three years in the future because that's when everyone has forgotten the empty promises. They have nothing to back this up, other than "we will add more battery".

They could have it today

[rossdee]

They could have 10,000mAh phone batteries today, the phones would just be a bit thicker.
They would still fit in your pocket though.
(they would also have room for an audio (3.5mm) socket and a microSD slot.)

Re: They could have it today

[TwistedGreen]

A microSD card and headphone jack? Hey wouldn't that be something... But it seems like consumers actually enjoy having useful features removed. I's a sort of flex. I think they'd actually want a smaller battery and maybe some hooked barbs on the sides, so that it draws blood whenever you take it out of your pocket. They should put that on the roadmap.

Re:

[msauve]

>the phones would just be a bit thicker.

Or keep the thickness, get rid of the camera bumps, and still have larger batteries.

Re:

[CubicleZombie]

Maybe make it durable enough that it doesn't need a protective case. Half the thickness of my phone is the case.

Bad units

[Chris Mattern]

Does anybody else think that milliamp-hours is a stupid unit? You've got a simple SI unit for charge: the Colomb. It's 3.6 kilocolumbs (kC). Why overcomplicate things?

Re:

[Teun]

I don't think mAh is a stupid unit, as a matter of fact it means for 20 hours it should be able to sustain 5 Volts with 100 mA.
(10.000/20=500/5=100) Or do you believe it's easier to transform the kC's in actual voltage and current?

Re:

[aaarrrgggh]

I'd perfer just saying Ah rather than mAh when you are talking about 10k mAh, but Wh is really the "right" unit to be using if you care about the energy stored and are not providing a cell voltage.

Re:

[pipatron]

But you demonstrate yourself why it's a stupid unit when you're using it wrong. 5 volts has nothing to do with it, it's whatever voltage the battery happens to spit out at the moment, which varies. 3.7 or 4.2 would be more accurate but still not right.

Re:Bad units

[thegarbz]

Does anybody else think that milliamp-hours is a stupid unit? You've got a simple SI unit for charge: the Colomb. It's 3.6 kilocolumbs (kC). Why overcomplicate things?

No we don't. Mainly because the amper is something you can intuitively measure with gear that is visible and known while the Colomb is not. You cant convert to Colomb if you want, but it doesn't help anyone's understanding. There are electrical engineers the world over who have never worked with the unit of Colomb but daily have to deal with amps, volts and watts.

Coulomb not Colomb or columb

[anonymous scaredycat]

1Ah=3,600C
10,000mAh=10Ah=36,000C
Would you prefer 36kC or 36,000C or 36,000,000mC?
I would say that 10Ah is the simplest.
Not many people are familiar with the Coulomb not sure why you think it would be a good choice for consumers in the context of cell phone batteries.

Re:

[crow]

Yes. Just lower the Wattage, and the amp hours goes up. So if they're planning on lower-wattage phones, then they can achieve the target without changing batteries at all. Just use Watt-hours.

Why do people have so much trouble with metric?

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation for the metric illiterate: that's 10 Ah

For the people who really like zeros it's 10,000,000,000 nAh

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Because marketing knows that 10,000 is more impressive than 10. As I stated above, it really should be Colombs anyways.

Re:

[thegarbz]

No one is having trouble with metric here. mAh is a metric unit. just like the Ah is. Batteries for portable devices are universally measured in mAh so why not stick to it and save people doing math. We don't indicate road signs in meters per second either.

Re:

[pjt33]

Batteries for portable devices are universally measured in mAh

If only. Airlines have policies on batteries which can be carried in luggage defined in Wh, which makes more sense (energy being the actual quantity of interest) but usually requires checking the voltage and multiplying by the "capacity" in Ah.

More capacity is nice and all

[rsilvergun]

But not if handset manufacturers just gobble it up. I have a newish Motorola phone with crap battery life because they slapped an OLED screen on it. The screen looks nice and all but it chews through battery life so my much older Motorola phone had better battery life because it had a LCD screen.

You've kind of got to have both ends working together. Yeah you can increase capacity but you also need hardware manufacturers to not just use it up. Sort of like how Microsoft has a bad habit of guzzling RAM.

Let's get into physical!

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Doubling battery capacity in three years? Is that even physically possible? I think historically it's taken more like 30 years, and that's with the support of Lawrence Livermore National Labs, or some shit.