Just imagine only having to charge your phone four times a year—not per day, not per week, not even per month.
According to a super-sciency paper penned by Cornell researchers, they've figured out a way to engineer a "magnetoelectric multiferroic" material (that's as geeky as we're gonna get) that essentially allows devices like smartphones to literally operate 100 times more efficiently. Thus you'd need to recharge your device way less frequently.
Other ways we've heard about combating recharge rage include:
Higher Capacity Batteries
This tends to make the device bigger and heavier and doesn't really solve the problem. Especially cause increasingly bright, high-resolution displays—not to mention all the gyros and radios running all the time—will still suck up whatever juice they have.
Quick Charging Batteries
Phones like the new OnePlus 3T, which offers a full day of uptime after only a half hour of charging, makes life a little easier. At least it'll take less time to top off. But again, it still means we need to disrupt our important, busy lives to find an external power source at some point.
Energous and a few others are working on a way for us to get recharged anywhere in the room in the same way we get online via Wi-Fi, without having to be tethered to a cord. We're all in favor of this technology and look forward to seeing more of it.
Not Having to Charge
Of course, finding ingenious ways (as with this watch) to not even need to power or change the batteries in our myriad electronic devices in the first place is best of all.