Xiaomi – Reality of physics.

Battery stuffing may not be worth it.

• Xiaomi’s new ability to fully charge a smartphone in 10 minutes sounds great but it will in all likelihood damage the battery so much that Xiaomi may need to move back to user-replaceable batteries and provide a replacement in the box.
• The technology media (see here) is touting this as an incredible breakthrough but it has been well known for years that the higher the wattage you apply to the battery, the faster it will charge.
• Xiaomi has merely taken this to a new level by applying 200W to the battery up from the 120W that it demonstrated last year.
• If there has been a breakthrough made it will be how to charge a battery in 10 minutes without completely destroying its longevity.
• Rechargeable batteries mostly work by transferring chemically stored energy into electricity through the movement of ions which is then reversed when current is applied to the battery.
• As with all things, when something is executed with an excessive amount of force, damage occurs and the more force that is applied, the more damage occurs.
• The same is true for batteries and the result of excessive force being applied to pushing the ions back into their previous state means that the lifespan of the battery is reduced.
• General expectations are that a smartphone battery will have around 1,000 charging cycles in its useful life meaning that charging once a day will give it a useful life of around three years.
• These days, many smartphones often don’t last that long making this longevity more than acceptable.
• However, very aggressive battery charging is going to lessen that number very considerably meaning that the battery may need to be replaced before the end of the smartphone’s useful life.
• Generally, this is not a problem as there are plenty of repair businesses that will replace a battery for the major brands for a nominal sum.
• Despite this, the destruction of a battery’s useful life is a negative aspect at the point of sale.
• This means that any technological breakthrough that Xiaomi has made is not in the speed of charging the battery but in methods to minimise the damage while doing so.
• There is no data being provided around this and so it is impossible to judge just how much of a breakthrough Xiaomi has really achieved.
• Overall, I am somewhat skeptical about the need for ultra-fast charging.
• This is because battery life in smartphones continues to improve thanks to the energy efficiency of using smaller nodes to make the processors but also due to improvements in chip design.
• Apple’s M1 processor and the A13 Bionic (and beyond) have demonstrated excellent improvement in efficiency which means that under normal usage an iPhone can do up to 2 days without a charge.
• This is rapidly becoming the standard required to compete which I think is making charging less and less of an issue.
• The vast majority of the human race goes to sleep every night which is ample time to charge a device at a regular pace which combined with improvements in battery life makes these sorts of innovations much less important.
• More importantly, I think that Xiaomi will use this as a way to differentiate its products from all of the other Google-toting Android devices available.
• I think that Xiaomi is making a beeline for Huawei’s market share both at home and in China and it has some heavy competition in the form of Samsung, Oppo, and Vivo.
• However, if it can take a large slug of Huawei’s Chinese share, it might just begin to justify the valuation at which it trades.
• One to keep an eye on.