Silicon carbon battery technology that delivers longer lasting life has finally made it into a flagship Samsung phone: the Galaxy Z Fold 8 series. My December prediction was right, just wrong about which device we'd see it in. Now that Samsung has taken the leap, it looks like the Korean company will deploy a more extreme version of the tech in the Galaxy S27 Ultra and new Galaxy S27 Pro .

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Samsung Galaxy S27 To See Big Battery Life Increase

According to Galaxy Club and Korean tipster Lanzuk on Naver , the new Galaxy S27 Pro is expected to carry a rated battery capacity of 5,087mAh, advertised as approximately 5,200mAh.

The S27 Ultra goes further with a rated 5,534mAh, expected to be advertised at around 5,700-5,800mAh. Galaxy Club notes both figures indirectly confirm silicon-carbon technology will power both devices.

For the uninitiated, silicon-carbon batteries are still lithium-ion batteries. The difference is in the anode, where silicon is blended with carbon instead of using pure graphite. Silicon can store significantly more lithium than graphite, which is why you can fit more battery capacity into the same sized cell.

The downside is that silicon-carbon expands by up to 300% when absorbing lithium during charging, which can crack the anode over time. That means a shorter life cycle before it has to be replaced. Some smart engineering controls that expansion but it's a trade-off gadget manufacturers have to accept when using silicon carbon.

T3 spotted that the Galaxy Z Fold 8 series lists a minimum battery endurance of 1,200 charging cycles in its own spec sheets, down from 2,000 cycles on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7. That's a 40% reduction in Samsung's own minimum guarantee, and the real trade-off of silicon-carbon in a smartphone. For now, at least.

Will Apple's iPhone 18 Follow The Galaxy S27's Battery Plan?

I’m not convinced Apple will go all-in on silicon-carbon batteries before trying it out on a less exposed device first. If the iPhone Air 2 launches with silicon-carbon and there's no new 'battery-gate' entries to Apple's Wikipedia page, you can expect the iPhone 19 Pro to follow.

Looking at the numbers, it wouldn't be a particularly big risk for Apple to make the switch.

Samsung's 1,200 cycles drop sounds bad until you compare it to Apple. Apple's official documentation for the iPhone 15 and later states that the battery is designed to retain 80% of its original capacity at 1,000 complete charge cycles under ideal conditions.

So Samsung’s silicon-carbon cells, despite the reduction from their own previous standard, still clear Apple's published target. Moving to silicon carbon could be advertised as both an increase in battery size and longevity for the iPhone maker.

And, as I've written before, Apple being the only manufacturer with older battery technology in its flagship smartphones, even for a company that likes to take its time, might be a hard pill to swallow for buyers who are seeing wild battery life stats on the Galaxy S27 and other Android phones.