Honor unveiled a new battery type, a silicon-carbon battery, at the Magic5 series global event last week. And this isn’t just a paper rollout like so many new battery technologies, we’ve confirmed that the Honor Magic5 Pro and Magic5 Ultimate units sold in China use power cells of the new type.
Long story short, the carbon-silicon battery has a capacity of 5,450mAh while the more traditional battery inside the global Magic5 Pro has 5,100mAh. The Ultimate, announced today, is unlikely to be available globally, so we’ll focus on Pro.
The Global Pro measures 8.77mm thick and weighs 219g. The Chinese version has the same measurements, while having a larger battery capacity. That extra 350mAh represents a 7% increase in capacity. Both phones support 66W fast charging, by the way.
When Honor announced the silicon-carbon technology, it claimed a 12.8% higher energy density. We’re not sure where the discrepancy is coming from – maybe different packaging is needed, Honor was terse with the details.
However, a 7% increase is nothing to sneeze at. If the company could achieve the same improvement with smaller batteries, a phone that would have had 4,000mAh with the standard design could have 4,280mAh with a silicon-carbon battery, all without any increase in weight and size.
If and when the company brings this new technology to the global market, this will be a real competitive advantage. By the way, we have the Honor Magic5 Pro to review, but it’s the global version with a standard 5,100mAh battery, so we won’t be able to test the silicon-carbon technology ourselves (yet).
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