Even the best phones can sometimes leave you wanting when it comes to battery life, and today’s best phones – such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max – last about a day of heavy use.
Bigger batteries, of course, come at the cost of portability – but that hasn’t stopped one Reddit user from trying to answer the question: what would happen if you strapped a huge power adapter to the back of a cheap smartphone?
As noted 9to5Google (opens in a new tab)Redditor u/Downtown_Cranberry44 (opens in a new tab) did some tinkering to successfully attach a working 30,000 mAh battery to his Samsung Galaxy A32 5G. Yes, you read that right – a 30,000 mAh battery. For context, that’s six times the original Galaxy A32 5G’s 5,000mAh battery, which already gives you around two days of moderate use.
You do the math: if you’re getting two days of juice from a 5,000mAh battery, a 30,000mAh battery should – on paper at least – provide almost two weeks of battery life. So there’s a good chance that u/Downtown_Cranberry44 owns the world’s longest-running smartphone. Check out some photos of the modified device below:
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Of course, this is not the kind of do-it-yourself modification that we recommend doing yourself at home. For starters, it looks like the 30,000mAh battery has made this particular Galaxy A32 5G almost useless, adding about a pound (half a kilogram) of weight and 3cm of extra size to an otherwise slim and light smartphone.
The bigger problem, however, is security. As 9to5Google notes, PSUs of this size are more prone to leakage and external damage; there is a reason why, under current US law, you cannot board an aircraft with batteries larger than 27,000 mAh.
So for now, these kinds of experiments at home are nothing more than that – we don’t expect Apple to add huge batteries to the back of the iPhone 15, for example. But such experiments Power help us appreciate how much clever engineering goes into a neat package c. 5000 mAh batteries in today’s smartphones.
As for the phones that offer the longest battery life in 2023, you’ll get around 16 hours from the Asus ROG Phone 6 and just over 13 hours from the recently released Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
If you often find yourself in need of your own phone’s battery, consider checking out our ranking of the best portable chargers.