Sony has long been a major player in battery technology, you might remember that it was the first to release a commercially feasible Li-ion battery more than two decades ago. The company appears to have faded in the background in this particular arena over the past few years but if new reports to be believed then in the next few years it’s going to make a big comeback. Apparently the company is going to offer much better mobile batteries that use sulfur instead of lithium.
Sony’s next high capacity batteries are said to be based on sulfur instead of lithium and theoretically may be able to store 40 percent more energy than existing batteries. There’s a caveat though, because if it were this easy, somebody else would have commercially released it by now.
In sulfur based batteries the electrode dissolves in the electrolyte at a much faster rate with each charging cycle and this ultimately decreases the battery’s capacity. Sony is believed to have worked around this issue by reformulating the electrolyte solution and is now said to be verifying the safety of this product prior to starting mass production.
It’s also claimed that Sony’s sulfur based batteries could offer similar runtimes as their lithium counterparts in a package that’s 30 percent smaller, thus potentially enabling smartphone manufacturers to make even thinner devices. The report doesn’t mention though precisely when Sony intends to commercialize its new battery technology.