Samsung’s Solid-State Battery: A New Lease of Life for Wearables?

The more things change, the more things stay the same. Has such a sentiment ever felt truer than for the humble battery? The lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery that powered your Sony camcorder in the 1990s is based on the same technology as the one in the iPhone 15 and the Tesla Model 3. That’s over 30 years of technological evolution, still working on the same battery.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons for this. Lithium is the lightest metal in the periodic table and maturity in manufacturing has made Li-ion batteries more efficient, powerful and cheaper to produce than they were in the 90s. This has helped pave the way for viable electric vehicles and smartphones capable of running powerful on-board AI tools.

Now, an innovative battery created by Samsung could herald a new era for consumer electronics.

The limitations of Li-ion batteries have been notable hindrances to the evolution of electronics. A flammable liquid electrolyte can make them a fire hazard, they can degrade quite quickly, they’re difficult to miniaturize and they require an array of rare-earth metals like nickel, manganese and cobalt.

An important question, then, is why has the industry struggled to develop a viable alternative to the Li-ion battery? Equally, is Samsung’s recent announcement that it has indeed created one — the solid-state battery — a new era for battery technology in consumer electronics?

This is my first blog article for CCS Insight, and I’m not going to start throwing (many) punches straight out of the gate. However, I find poor battery performance as irritating as the next person — if my smartwatch can’t survive a long day of tracking my ventures out on the ski slopes, it’s not much use to me.

Our 2022 smartwatch survey suggested I’m not alone, with 57% of smartwatch users citing battery performance as the highest-priority improvement for future devices. Although most traditional watch users are happy to take their watch off at night, overnight charging is frustrating for people who want to use a smartwatch to monitor sleep patterns. Charging is equally a problem for electric vehicles — it seems to me that it’s in everyone’s best interest to develop a new battery.

As for why a new battery has yet to truly emerge onto the scene, it’s not for a lack of trying. In 2021, CCS Insight predicted that solid-state lithium metal batteries would be offered as a premium option in smartphones in 2024. We slightly missed the mark, but we were in the right ballpark.

Ideas have come but haven’t solved all the problems they needed to fix. Sodium-ion batteries are heavier, Lithium-sulphur batteries are less chargeable and solid-state batteries are less scalable (in power output) than the traditional Li-ion powerpack. With the notable exception of Tesla, which is sticking to its cylindrical Li-ion designs, most electric car and device manufacturers have invested time and resources in creating a novel battery. The rise of electric vehicles has brought a swathe of new players into the electronics industry, making it harder for consumer electronics companies to access reliable streams of lithium and other rare-earth elements needed to fulfil the ever-growing demand for batteries.

So, we come to Samsung and its announcement of a breakthrough in solid-state design. The company says these batteries are non-flammable, more flexible in design and easier to miniaturize than their Li-ion counterparts. These facets make them perfect candidates to power Samsung’s range of wearables.

The Galaxy Watch has been earmarked as the potential debut for these new batteries, and we expect to see this development on the device in a few iterations’ time — perhaps near 2026. Samsung could use the additional battery bandwidth to build on its established range of health, sleep and activity monitoring tools in other wearable device types, and new Galaxy Rings that could survive on a single charge for several weeks could blow the competition out of the water. Personally, earbuds that allow me to listen to podcasts for hours on end would have me at the front of the queue.

There’s no doubting the potential that solid-state batteries can bring to the wearables landscape and the technology market as a whole. Overcoming limited battery life, one of the major downsides of wearables, could become a massive selling point for devices powered by this new technology. If ongoing tests prove successful, Samsung could be about to breathe a new, and longer, lease of life into its wearables range.