Some, including Sam Cooper of the Dyson School of Design Engineering, have questioned whether companies would actually want to put a device that lasts that long into their products. “There is a clear profit incentive for phone companies to have the device die in time for the next release.This race may not exist,” he says, bluntly. Voller admits that among the 30 or so patents that ZapGo holds is a way to artificially degrade the life of its cells, to stop them from lasting for three decades. “We wouldn’t do that, but we have the ability to offer it to our customers if they choose to do it,” he says.
Carbon-based energy storage has another major advantage over existing technologies. It can actually be used as part of the external structure of the phone. Instead of designing batteries to fit into current phone designs, Voller is preparing for a future of flexible screens and foldable devices, where all our data is pulled from the cloud over 5G, and battery life becomes even more important.
