Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Smartphone battery life has too often felt like a game of cat and mouse. Whenever battery capacity makes a meaningful jump, brighter screens, faster processors, and gargantuan camera arrays come along to set our dreams of multi-day battery life back to square one. But as 2025 ticks on, that narrative is finally starting to shift.
Thanks to breakthroughs in battery chemistry, display technology, chip efficiency, and even networking hardware, the industry is quietly assembling the ingredients for a genuine leap forward. We’re not just talking about squeezing out a few extra minutes of screen-on time — we may finally be entering an era where a full two-day charge is the norm, not the exception.
Will battery life decide your next phone upgrade?
27 votes
Let’s break down why the next wave of smartphones might finally feel like a real upgrade when it comes to staying power.
Bigger battery capacities
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Batteries with bigger capacities would obviously solve all of our woes, but no one wants a smartphone that’s as thick as a brick. Unfortunately, lithium-ion cell technology has reached a bit of a capacity ceiling. While capacities have crept up in the region of 5-10% in the past three or so years, the 5,000- 5,500mAh cell size has been pretty much at the top of the range for most of this decade, at least until this year that is.
A few 2025 flagship smartphones, primarily out of China, have adopted silicon-carbon infused batteries (Si/C Li-ion) this generation, boosting their capacity to the 6,000mAh mark without making the phones absolutely colossal. That’s a considerable boost over handsets from just a year ago.
Expect many more phones to adopt silicon-carbon batteries in the next year.
The OnePlus 13 is one such example, packing a gigantic 6,000mAh charge capacity, a decent increase over last year’s already impressive 5,400mAh cell. During our review, the phone managed to survive two days of consistent usage. Broadly speaking, the move to silicon-carbon infused batteries can increase capacity by around 10-15% over standard lithium-ion cells without an increase in size. Depending on usage, that could translate to up to 30 minutes more screen-on time, or several hours more in standby.”
Unfortunately, we haven’t seen Apple, Google, or Samsung adopt silicon-carbon battery technology into their latest products, but it’s surely just a matter of time. Once that happens, many more smartphone users will start seeing the benefits of more screen-on time. Either that, or the technology could be used to slim down smartphones and foldable without making a dent in their battery life – though sadly Samsung hasn’t adopted the tech for the Galaxy S25 Edge.
Efficient displays
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Speaking of screen-on time, your phone’s display is understandably one of the biggest battery consumers. While the move to dynamic refresh OLED panels, dark themes, and always-on-display technology has already made modern displays pretty frugal, some meaningful improvements are still set to come.
First up, there’s Samsung’s M14 OLED panel, which has already debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro series, is reportedly in the Pixel 9 Pro models, and will surely appear in next year’s Galaxy S26 range. It’s said to be substantially more efficient than its predecessor, in the range of 15-30%, depending on the brightness level. M14 also offers higher peak brightness and an extended lifespan over M13. It won’t be long before more handsets ship with this premium-tier panel and consumers reap the benefits.
Not every OLED panel is the same, and the newest are much more efficient.
Then there’s LG’s newly announced Hybrid Tandem OLED, which promises 15% better power efficiency than traditional OLED panels. It accomplished this through the use of phosphorescent blue emitter materials, improving energy efficiency without compromising on lifespan. Samsung is also reportedly working on its next-gen M15 panel, which is also rumored to introduce blue phosphorescent materials for another jump in efficiency.
Both of these technologies help refine OLED’s biggest lingering issue: the blue LED. It’s more power hungry and doesn’t last as long as the red and green emitters. By adopting new approaches to blue emitter construction, next-gen smartphone display panels should offer longer battery life and improved longevity.
Smaller, frugal processors
Rushil Agrawal / Android Authority
Of course, screens aren’t the only power-hungry component. Behind the scenes, your phone’s processor and modem can quietly drain your battery — or preserve it, if they’re efficient enough.
We’ve already seen some of these benefits with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, built on TSMC’s latest 3nm node. However, the chip also moves to a new custom CPU architecture, contributing to some of the battery life benefits we’ve seen from the latest Snapdragon flagship. Still, Apple and MediaTek silicon have also shown signs of notable battery life improvements through a combination of more efficient processing nodes and improved CPU architectures.
Google is finally expected to move to TSMC 3nm for its Tensor G5, which will give the Pixel series a shot in the arm. Likewise, mid-range processors will be moving down to new nodes in the coming months, even if it’s not the same cutting-edge 3nm process as these top-tier chips. For instance, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 and Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 are built on 4nm, which was considered top-tier not long ago. These chips are designed for phones in the affordable $400 to $600 price bracket.
Between AI, gaming, and 5G roaming, an efficient chip makes all the difference.
However, the manufacturing process used for a phone’s external modem is equally essential. Given that a modem is responsible for 4G/5G and Wi-Fi communication, an inefficient modem can spell bad battery life at home and away, as Pixel 6 owners found out. Samsung’s Exynos 5400, for example, is built on 4nm EUV and has notable efficiency gains for the latest Pixel smartphones. Qualcomm’s older Snapdragon X65 and X70 were already on TSMC’s 4nm, and while Qualcomm hasn’t confirmed the manufacturing details of its X85, it’s expected to be even more frugal and more capable, with features like satellite connectivity baked in. Significantly, more affordable phones are quickly benefiting from more efficient modems too, such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE, delivering improved battery performance for budget-conscious consumers without sacrificing connectivity.
OK, we’re not approaching the good old feature phone days when a single charge would last most of the week. But more frugal processors paired with more efficient networking mean that roaming away from home won’t have you reaching for the outlet before the day’s end.
Putting it all together
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
While individual improvements of 5%, 10%, or even 15% don’t sound like a lot, compounding these gains across the most critical aspects of smartphone power storage and use quickly adds up. A major jump in battery capacity, combined with more frugal displays and processors, will undoubtedly be a huge net win.
Combined, we could conservatively look at overall battery life gains in the region of 20%, with 33% or more being a more optimistic scenario. That’s potentially huge, adding perhaps another two hours or more of screen-on time to our smartphones. Two days of use could become the new baseline, with many more users making it through three days on a single charge.
Individual gains are nice, but combined they should be game changing.
We’re already seeing early proof: phones like the OnePlus 13 and Xiaomi 15 Ultra cruise to the two-day mark. And with silicon-carbon batteries, next-gen OLEDs, and efficient 3nm chipsets becoming more common, even smaller phones, long held back by their limited space for bigger batteries, stand to benefit. Not forgetting that hardware is just one piece of the pie, software features are helping too, such as Android 15’s standby improvements.
Multi-day battery life is no longer a pipe dream. It’s the new frontier, and it’s arriving faster than I expected.
