Cell phone manufacturers focus on switching to battery capacity

A new generation of high-end smart phones are equipped with a power-consuming 5-inch display screen, so that more and more mobile phone manufacturers have begun to focus on larger batteries, rather than a thinner body.

Since HTC deployed a 5-inch full-HD display on its Droid DNA phone, Sony and Huawei have shown similar products at the 2013 International CES Conference in Las Vegas. On Tuesday, LG's Optimus line added new G Pro.

At the spring product launch of NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese mobile phone operator, LG launched its new smart phone. The phone will begin selling in Japan in early April this year. In addition to the 5-inch screen with a resolution of 1920*1080, the Optimus G Pro smartphone is also equipped with a Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.7 GHz quad-core processor and a 13-megapixel camera. This specification is similar to HTC's Droid DNA, except that it has a larger battery capacity than the Droid DNA's 2020 mAh battery. LG equipped its Optimus G Pro smartphone with a 3000 mAh battery, the same capacity as the Huawei Ascend D2.

For users who value battery life rather than mobile phone size, this new trend is tantamount to a good news. "They decided to put a 3000 mAh battery on the Optimus G Pro because we all believe that this phone deserves a battery that allows its 5-inch display to run all day. It also gives a lot of battery life. The short-shouldered consumer delivered a clear message,” said LG spokesman Ken Hong via email.

The effect of the LG cell phone's large battery on its body thickness is very obvious: it is about 0.4 mm thicker than the HTC Droid DNA phone.

Of course, not all mobile phone suppliers have jumped onto the chariots of large battery phones. The Sony Xperia Z, which also made its debut at the International CES Conference, only had a 2330 mAh battery.

However, the improvement of the battery is not only the increase of its capacity. The Xperia Z phone also introduced a new feature called Battery Stamina. It automatically shuts down all battery-consuming applications when the screen is turned off, and restarts these applications when the screen is turned on, thereby extending battery life. Sony claims that the more applications a user installs, the more effective this feature will be. Huawei, on the other hand, automatically closes the transmission circuit when the data transmission function is not in use, thereby reducing battery consumption and allowing the Ascend D2 to run longer.

Chip suppliers are also beginning to work hard to reduce their processors' energy consumption. Nvidia recently introduced the Tegra 4 processor, which is based on the ARM Cortex-A15 processor design. Nvidia said that due to its second-generation battery-powered core and more advanced power management methods, it typically uses 45% less energy than Tegra 3. When it comes to power efficiency, the Tegra 4 will be comparable to processors based on ARM-sized core architectures.

Samsung's world’s first eight-core mobile processor Exynos 5 Octa will support smartphones and tablets. The company did not disclose when it will launch products equipped with the processor, but if Samsung is equipped with Exynos processors and large batteries in the new smartphone, it may have a killer phone.