Honor Power 2 from the inside. This smartphone consists of only a battery

Manufacturers are racing for increasingly larger battery capacities, and thanks to the use of silicon-carbon (Si/C) anode cells, which allow for higher energy density, batteries grow to capacities of 7,000, 8,000 or even 10,000 mAh, without significantly thickening the casing. The record-breaking smartphone among traditional smartphones (not armored smartphones, because it’s a completely different league) is Honor Power 2, equipped with a 10,080 mAh battery placed in a housing only 7.98 mm thick and weighing 216 grams.

Honor’s achievement is impressive, but there is also the other side of the coin. Despite the reduction in size, Si/C batteries still need a lot of space under the housing. This was noticed by leakster Ice Universe, who posted a photo of the inside of the Honor Power 2 on X. As you can see, the battery takes up almost the entire space in the housing.

Another photo from the same source shows that the smartphone volume consists mainly of the battery.

On this occasion, Ice Universe also provided a simple answer to the question why photographic flagships rarely have batteries with above-average capacity. The explanation is very simple – because the camera modules and the motherboard do not really leave room for this.

According to Ice Universe, the space allocated for the camera cannot be painlessly reduced in the design of smartphones, because it is an element that cannot be reduced at the expense of quality in top models. The side effect is obvious: the larger and more extensive the photo module, the more difficult it is to find space for a really large battery.

What does it look like in practice? The manufacturer’s top photo flagship – Honor Magic8 Pro – in the Chinese version has a 7200 mAh battery (ours only has 6270 mAh), which currently seems to be the maximum of real possibilities without increasing the size of the phone. Magic8 Pro is even thicker and heavier (8.3 mm and 219 g) than Honor Power 2, so further increasing the battery capacity in such a design required further thickening of the equipment, which would also negatively affect its weight.