The iPhone X Has the Weirdest Battery We've Ever Seen

The iPhone X is supposed to have longer battery life than the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. A new iFixit teardown shows that the X's battery is, in fact, larger than the one in the 8 Plus—10.35 watt-hours to the 8 Plus's 10.28 watt-hours. But that isn't the weird thing about the X's battery.

The crazy thing is the battery's shape. As the teardown shows, there are two cells in an "L" shape, which iFixit says is a way to fit more battery into an oddly shaped space.

We've never seen a dual-battery smartphone in the US before, but there have been a few unsuccessful ones in other countries. In 2008, the Philips Xenium 9@9j used a removable AAA battery to supplement its standard rechargable lithium-ion cell. The Gionee Marathon M5 and the Innos D6000 hit Chinese shelves back in 2015 with two batteries each.

This iFixit guide, meanwhile, shows how to build your own dual-cell battery, although looking at the instructions, you're more likely to just start a fire.

While screens, cameras, and storage have all been making strides over the past few years, there hasn't been much of an improvement in battery technology. We keep seeing new experimental chemistries appear in labs, like this solid-state battery, and someone even crammed a hydrogen fuel cell into an iPhone 6 two years ago. Samsung and LG have both had flexible, bendable batteries since 2015, but they haven't made a splash in the market; LG had a line of flexible phones called the G Flex for a few years, and then stopped making them. Samsung is rumored to have a foldable phone coming out in 2018, but we don't know whether that will involve a foldable battery, too.

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As ExtremeTech explained in 2016, funding in the battery development world is so spread out, and lithium-ion is basically good enough, so we aren't seeing massive leaps forward. Chemistry is also a different kind of skill than most tech startups are set up for. Tesla is doing a lot of work on batteries, but not at the tiny physical sizes smartphone makers would need.

Still, some innovation is better than no innovation. Maybe the iPhone X ($999.00 at Verizon) will herald more flexibility, if not for the batteries themselves, then for where the manufacturers can put the batteries into phones—which would mean more capacity and better battery life overall.

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