Mobile devices such as tablets and smart watches could become quicker to charge and slower to run out of juice thanks to a new approach to designing batteries from Microsoft researchers.

The battery inside any given gadget today typically has one particular chemical design that defines its capacity and how quickly and efficiently it can charge and discharge. Our devices might be much improved if they instead had multiple smaller batteries, each with slightly different chemical makeups and performance, says Ranveer Chandra, a principal researcher at Microsoft.

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