What is battery life in a device?

A modern-day panic situation is when your device’s battery is running low, and you can’t connect to a charger anytime soon for some reason. One of the biggest problems of any portable device that runs on rechargeable batteries is the battery life. Simply put, battery life refers to the amount of time a device can operate on a single battery charge before it needs to be plugged in for charging again. It is perhaps one of the most crucial buying factors for all portable devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, and wearables among others. 

Battery life directly dictates the amount of use you can get out of your device on a single charge away from a power source. A slightly confusing term similar to battery life is battery span. Battery span refers to the amount of time a battery lasts until it needs to be replaced and can no longer retain a charge. The battery life of a device is impacted by a number of factors, including the type of battery used, the energy efficiency of the device, its components, display tech, the amount of processing power required by running applications.  

In general, it is accepted that devices with larger batteries have better battery life, but this is not necessarily true in every case, as even with a small battery and better optimisation, a device can have a better battery life than a device with a larger battery.

With the dawn of machine learning, there are a few types of devices, such as smartphones, that can learn the user’s behaviour to optimise battery life. Many times in the case of smartphones, battery life can improve after new updates as well.