Anyone who’s purchased a smartwatch up to this point knows that battery life can sometimes be a challenge. Some smartwatches are inherently better on battery life because of the technologies they use or the methods they use to keep the battery life up, but at the end of the day almost every smartwatch on the market gets by with barely a day’s battery life. The biggest problem is sheer physics at this point; there’s only so much room to squash a rectangular battery in a watch without making it a massive behemoth on your wrist, and that’s been difficult to change for many OEMs. LG has used a couple different strategies for their smartwatches including the rather large LG Urbane LTE which packs double the battery inside its shell.
LG looks to be trying to use the space inside that watch a little better this time around though and will likely be providing these batteries to other OEMs as well. With smartwatches looking to take a significant portion of the market in 2015 it makes sense for LG to help in providing tech that furthers the wearables market in a tangible way for consumers. These new batteries are hexagonally shaped instead of being rectangular, which means they not only fit better inside of a round smartwatch but they are also larger capacity because of the extra surface area. This all while taking up less thickness because of the available spread from the design.
These batteries are slated to go into mass production this year, which means we would even see them in a refresh from LG and other manufacturers by the end of this year, or the beginning of 2016 at the latest. These 25% higher capacity batteries will most assuredly get the next generation of smartwatches through a day with ease, possibly more than one day depending on the rest of the tech that’s used inside the watch of course. LG is quoted to say that these will guarantee four more hours of battery life in most smartwatch designs which could mean the difference between having a cool toy on your wrist and having an awkwardly shaped paperweight.