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If you’ve been dreaming of a phone with a huge battery for a long time, things are slowly moving in your favor. The launch of the Honor Win2 gaming phone, with a 10,100mAh battery could be interesting.
It is a huge battery that joins a great specification, including a 10,000 nit peak brightness display with 185Hz refresh rate, a 200 megapixel main camera and IP ratings up to 69K, with the details shared by 9to5Google.
To ensure that a large battery does not take ages to charge, there is 100W wireless and 80W wireless charging. The bad news is that Win models often don’t launch outside of China – and this phone could also have regulatory issues.
For those paying attention, phones in China often launch with a higher battery capacity than global counterparts and that often comes down to regulation. The European Union has many rules regarding battery size, as well as transport restrictions.
As T3’s Tech Editor Mike Lowe found out when reviewing the global version of the Vivo X500 Pro Max, such restrictions mean that the battery capacities of devices in Europe are lowered to meet regulations.
In this case, the 8,000mAh battery of the Chinese Vivo is reduced to 6,750mAh, apparently a reflection of transport restrictions in Austria where the device is sold.
EU rules set a transport limit for individual cells on smartphones. This limit is 20Wh, which is about 5,200-5,400mAh in a single cell. Manufacturers often get around this by using multiple cells in a device. This not only meets the restrictions, but also allows better thermal control during charging.
So there are considerations for devices coming into the EU – and by extension the UK which uses the same regulatory framework. It’s not just a case of changing the software and keeping the hardware that China uses.
Even if you damn the EU rules, there is a consumer protection that also comes into force, which has seen a change in many devices. From February 18, 2027, devices such as smartphones must have a user-replaceable battery that can be accessed without specialized tools – while replacement cells must be sold for five years after a phone’s launch.
There is an exception, however, which comes in the form of a performance guarantee as part of the EU’s ecodesign rules. If a device retains 83% of its rated capacity after 500 charge cycles – and at least 80% after 1,000 charge cycles – then the replacement requirement does not need to be met. For these devices, they must also be at least IP67 rated, which means that many major smartphone brands are already compliant.
This is all to ensure that batteries and devices are safe in transit – limiting “thermal runaway” where a combustion cell ignites itself and basically burns out of control – while also ensuring that the battery in your phone lasts a long time to reduce the rate of redundancy in electronic devices.
So, if you can’t get phones with big batteries and you’re jealous of these devices in China, at least you know there are reasons why.