Many of the best Android phones of 2025 are expected to use a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset, such as the Galaxy S25, OnePlus 13 and many others. But the new chip could have a knock-on effect on the battery capacity of these phones.
Digital Chat Station over on Weibo (via WCCFTech) claims they know of three unnamed phones currently in development with 5,500 mAh batteries and featuring "high-density battery core materials" in order to prepare for the power draw of the new chip. Some may even be targeting a 6,000 mAh capacity, as DCS suggested in a later post.
Most Android phones today offer between 4,000 and 5,000 mAh of battery capacity, with a few larger outliers that inevitably end up on our best phone battery life list. Larger batteries could mean longer-lasting phones if you don't try to use the new chip's alleged full potential, or will hopefully at least keep battery life stable between generations.
Why big batteries might be needed
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 may be hungrier for power than previous Snapdragon 8-series chips due to its new core set-up, which differs from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's design by ditching its efficiency cores in favor of more performance cores, and running them at higher clock speeds (up from 3.3GHz to 4GHz according to a previous leak) in pursuit of performance. However, it's also expected to be built on a more efficient 3nm process, like the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip, which will hopefully mean some of this extra power requirement gets offset.
These larger, higher-density batteries could also mean we see slower charging speeds. As well as having more milliamp-hours to fill up, the greater energy density means the rate at which the battery fills is slower too. Manufacturers will have to increase the supported charging wattage of their phones to compensate, or accept slower refueling speeds.
Qualcomm has suggested that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will announced in October, with the first phones using it likely appearing by the end of 2024. We're looking forward to seeing how it behaves in actual phones, as this could finally be the chip that allows Android flagships to beat the latest iPhone's benchmark results, in this year's case the iPhone 16 Pro. Although the current benchmarks still seem to suggest that this battle could still go either way.
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