Smartphones today are progressing in a fashion with thinner chassis, faster performance, larger screens and shrinking bezels. Smartphones are implementing new technologies every year, however, one aspect of the smartphone has always remained stagnant. Battery technology has only improved marginally and nothing exciting has been happening — until now. 

Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology is implementing a new material in their batteries to give the Korean company that extra edge. Samsung has come up with another use for graphene, a material that has previously been used to purify seawater and detecting cancer. The same material can also do wonders when put inside lithium-ion batteries. Samsung used the material to create a "graphene ball" – a special coating that's used inside a typical lithium-ion battery that's found in most modern smartphones. This, in effect, would increase the overall capacity by up to 45 percent and will also speed up the charging process by five times. 

© OnePlus

We already have impressive fast charging features such as OnePlus's Dash Charge and Huawei's Supercharge that can fully charge a smartphone in a very short amount of time. If this new technology is fruitful, you should be able to charge your smartphone from 0 to 100-percent in less than 20 minutes. 

© BCCL

Samsung has been working on the new technology and have reported that even after 500 total charge cycles, the battery still manages to retain 78 percent of charge. In other words, the new battery tech is able to last extremely long without having the degrade the battery life and still manage to achieve super-fast recharge times. 

© Samsung

The South Korean company has already filed patents for the application of graphene balls in batteries. It is however still unclear as to when we will be seeing this technology in smartphones and when it will make its way to consumers. Li-ion batteries are used in various other gadgets such as electric cars, drones, smartwatches and others. This application of fast charging could benefit other gadgets as well and can be adopted on a wider scale. Samsung says that it is possible to scale up this technology for larger batteries. We will just have to wait and see what the future hold for us and we hope we can see this technology implemented in smartphones safely and with caution in the near future. 

Source: nature.com, DigitalTrends