A major innovation is about to hit the mobile phone and electric car industry, and it’s silicon-carbon batteries . In this sense, this technology promises to considerably increase the energy capacity of current batteries without increasing the size, and that could change the landscape in the not too distant future. In fact, there is already a pioneer device that incorporates this technology, and it is the Honor Magic5 Ultimate Edition, a luxury model of the Magic5 series that Honor took to MWC 2023 .
Silicon-carbon batteries promise higher energy density
Returning to the main topic, the premise of silicon-carbon batteries is to replace the graphite anode of current lithium batteries with a silicon-carbon anode. For those who don’t know (like me 5 minutes ago), the physicochemical properties of silicon allow the anode to store a greater amount of lithium ions.
Theory dictates that each silicon atom can bond with 4 lithium ions; so they have the potential to store up to 10 times the energy charge of a lithium battery with a graphite anode .
Obviously that sounds too good to be true, and they are correct, there are still technical challenges to overcome in order to squeeze the full potential of this technology; but it is already possible to make batteries identical in size to current ones with higher energy density, and to show a button, Honor has done it with the Magic5 Ultimate Edition .
The Honor Magic5 Ultimate Edition is the first mobile phone with a silicon-carbon battery
The Honor Magic5 Ultimate Edition is an even more advanced version of the Magic5 Pro, which introduces new technologies and a different design, but what concerns us about it is that it uses a happy silicon-carbon battery. As a result, it has a 12.8% higher power density than the Honor Magic5 Pro . This translates into 5,450mAh compared to 5,100mAh for the Pro model.
Additionally, Magic5 Ultimate makes other changes to the formula. For starters, it has a ceramic back cover and a redesigned camera module, which gives a rather premium touch to the matter. Finally, it incorporates a C1 chip that accompanies the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and whose purpose is to improve 5G coverage by 35% and the speed of the WiFi connection by 200%.
Otherwise it maintains the same specifications as the Magic5 Pro, so there is no need to repeat them.
With all that said, don’t expect to see this mobile on the market anytime soon, as it probably won’t leave China, where it was confirmed that it will cost 6,699 yuan, about 900 euros at the exchange rate of the day.