Antony Leather for Forbes on Qnovo:

Today, the company has revealed Sony as one of its partners and investors and its next-gen Xperia smartphones will boast reduced charge times and increased battery lifetimes that are doubled compared to the current Xperia range. You can usually expect to see battery capacity drop off after a year or so, or around 300-500 charge cycles. Qnovo claims the new Xperias drastically increase battery lifetime to around 800 charge cycles before they start to lose capacity.

Considering that many people don’t tend to update their phone once a year (unlike yours truly), such a feature would go a long way towards ensuring optimal performance and experience once year one ticks by. But there is more:

The benefits of Qnovo’s technology are that it could improve all aspects of battery performance, including a longer lifespan, more daily use, faster charging without degrading the battery and allow for thinner devices.

Robert Nalesnik, VP Marketing of Qnovo on the subject of Sony

 from a commercial standpoint, Sony’s Xperia smartphones announced this week at MWC will be the first devices that are available to use our technology. 

A lot more information about Qnovo battery tech after the jump.

When it comes to Qnovo and their battery technology, there is both a hardware and software component.

There have been several things. Firstly, we’ve transitioned completely over to a software implementation and it’s this that Sony will be including in its new Xperia handsets. We are working on newer versions of our technology that will improve performance even further, but for this first generation of products it will be all software-based.

When asked about the possibility of this tech coming to other devices:

 The announcement this week is purely relating to its new Xperia smartphones and at the moment there are no plans to include it on other devices. 

Some more details:

I think the important thing to take away from Sony’s announcements are that our technology encompasses three important features. Firstly we believe that a battery should last between one and two days – one being a minimum. Secondly, that charge times should be kept to a minimum and also that a quick 5-minute charge should provide you with at least 2 hours of battery life.

Perhaps the most important aspect is cycle life and this isn’t something that’s often listed in the specifications nor understood by customers. After 400-500 charge cycles (1-2 years), your smartphone’s battery will likely have degraded  to the extent that if you saw it lasting a day, you’d now see the battery is dead before you get home from work. We are drastically increasing the cycle life in Sony’s new smartphones.

Of course, we’ve seen fast charging in smartphones before, but the manufacturers don’t tell you about what’s happening to the cycle life – it could be reduced and you could even be damaging the battery by doing this. However, with our technology, we’re increasing the cycle life too.

Like all battery technologies that claim to change the game, it’s hard to tell what impact Qnovo will have on the Sony Xperia X line until we’re able to get them in our hands and test them in real world scenarios. If what Qnovo claims does pan out, it means that we might finally begin to see some progress in battery technology that’s been fairly stagnate for many years and has acted as a bottleneck for mobile devices.

Discuss:

Do you think Qnovo battery technology inside of Sony Xperia X phones will make a meaningful difference?

[Via Forbes]