If you find yourself reaching out for your charger quite regularly, you are not alone. Smartphones, today have become so indispensable and so much of our daily activities are carried out on one, that the batteries just can’t keep up.

Despite all the technological innovations in this space, like computing power, increase in storage capacity, better cameras and so on, one area has always been lacking and that is the battery life of our phones.

Our overuse of our smartphones is another reason too but the main reason has been the battery tech that has remained essentially unchanged for the past several decades.

It’s true that recent innovations like fast charging and increased capacity have made things a little bit easier for the consumers but we are yet to see a radical solution. Well, if Samsung has it’s way, then we might just be at the cusp of one.

A Battery That Charges In 12 Minutes

A typical day of an average person may last for anywhere from 15 hours to 18 hours and as we are all aware, our smartphones have to be on duty for the time we are awake as well.

So, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a smartphone that could charge from 0 to 100 in just 12 minutes? I mean, your smartphone could be done charging by the time you are done with your bowel movements in the morning!

Contrast that to the typical hour that they usually take and the difference becomes so stark. That is a 5 times faster charging speed than today’s phones. This is even much better than the fast charging tech of today which typically allows you to charge 50% in about half an hour.

The breakthrough comes from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and they are making use of a material called Graphene, that has been dubbed as a “wonder material” for so many years now and it looks like it is finally arriving in the hands of the consumers.

How Did Samsung Do It?

Image Credits: Samsung

Well, instead of coming up with an entirely new battery technology, it seems like Samsung has rather modified the current lithium-ion batteries by leveraging the benefits that Graphene provides.

For this the researchers had to come with a way so that Graphene could be mass synthesized into what appears to be a popcorn-like form using silica. Hence the name, “graphene ball”.

This graphene ball is then applied to both the anode layers and the cathode materials in the existing lithium-ion batteries giving them much faster charging speeds.

The batteries equipped with this tech are also able to maintain really stable temperatures which is really crucial or it might lead to exploding batteries (ahem). Samsung also hinted that this tech, owing to stable temperatures, would be a perfect fit for electric vehicles which are rising in popularity by the day.

So, it looks like the days of us having to plug in our phones (or place them on a mat) all the time might be numbered. There are so many other companies and research teams that are working on revolutionary new battery technologies that our current woes would be no more in the next decade.