Posted 10/30/09 at 08:42:11 PM by Ryan Whitwam

More than anything else, battery technology holds back mobile innovation. Sure, we’d all like super fast mobile CPUs, but the 10 minutes of battery life we’d get isn’t a good trade off. Battery technology has, thus far, advanced at a depressingly slow rate. However, rechargeable zinc-air batteries could actually deliver changes next year.

A company called ReVolt claims to have developed a way to make zinc-air batteries rechargeable. The batteries use oxygen from the air to generate current. Also, they don’t contain any of the toxic materials that are found in lithium-ion batteries, which are estimated to only hold one-third as much power.

In sciency terms, these batteries rely on reduction/oxidation reactions between a zinc and air (oxygen) electrodes. By using new gelling and binding agents, the previously single use batteries can be recharged. They have been tested for up to 100 cycles, but could be capable of 300-500. Smaller batteries for cell phones and hearing aids are supposed to show up in 2010. If that goes well, larger versions for electric cars could be produced. Will this revolutionize the tech world, or is it just so much hot air?

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Posted 10/06/09 at 01:15:39 PM by Paul Lilly

From wireless controllers to tail-less mice, it's a good bet you own a set of rechargeable batteries, but even these are good for only so many uses before they no longer hold a charge. Sanyo's "eneloop" brand, which was first announced in late 2005, has won a following thanks to the batteries coming pre-charged from the get-go and offering up to 1,000 recharges before giving up the ghost, and the newest batch performs even better.

According to Sanyo, a breakthrough in battery technology now allows its eneloop brand to be recharged up to 1,500 times, a 50 percent improvement over the original design.

"Incorporating new technologies for 'material,' 'manufacturing methods,' and 'structure' developed through the knowledge gained since the first release of eneloop in November 2005, the number of times a battery can be recharged has been increased by 1.5 times to approximately 1,500 times compared to conventional models, which makes the total number of times it is able to be recharged the industry No. 1," Sanyo stated in a press release.

The technologies involved include the development of a "highly-durable super-lattice alloy," an advanced manufacturing method consisting of a new additive being added to the negative electrode material, and the continued use of a thick, outer case.

Read more here.

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Posted 08/21/09 at 09:42:01 AM by Paul Lilly

Still getting up off the couch to plug your iPod and other mobile gadgets into an outlet so they can recharge? Pfft - real couch potatoes juice up their devices wirelessly, with the newest way to do so being Duracell's new myGrid charging pad.

If Duracell's myGrid looks oddly familiar, it's because WildCharge has a similar device on the market called the Wire-Free. Like the Wire-Free, the myGrid is stupid-easy to use. Just plug the pad into your wall and drop your power-hungry devices onto the pad, up to four at a time.

Duracell boasts compatibility with a number of mobile devices, including the iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, both the Blackberry Pearl and Curve, and several Motorola and Nokia devices.

The myGrid will be available in October for $80.

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Posted 08/18/09 at 06:44:28 PM by Andy Salisbury

If you’ve got a Lenovo laptop with a battery that’s providing sub-par performance, you just might be eligible for a free replacement.

The batteries in question don’t present any fire or safety hazard, so there’s no reason to worry about your health – the folks at Lenovo are simply looking to make nice. “Irreparable damage” and “battery cannot be charged” error messages from the Power Manager or Message Center are the main indicators that you have a bad battery.

If you’re not sure, but you have a ThinkPad R60, R61, T60 or T61 with battery FRU part numbers 42T4546, 42T4566 or 92P1141, and/or a model X60 or X61, with battery part numbers 42T4550, 42T4567, 42T4568, 92P1169, 92P1173, 93P5028 or 93P5030, it’s suggested that you should run the Battery Diagnostic Tool (available here), to find out if you need to swap it out

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Posted 08/12/09 at 12:15:02 PM by Paul Lilly

Sony on Tuesday announced it has launched a new type of lithium ion secondary battery using olivine-type lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material.

What exactly does that mean? According to Sony, both high-power and long-life performance in a single package. The company claims olivine's robust crystal structure and stable performance make the material an ideal fit for use as a cathode material. In addition, Sony says its new battery technology is able to charge rapidly.

Sony has already started shipping the first battery to use the olivine material, which the company sells under its Fortelion series branding. It holds a capacity of 1.1Ah with 80 percent capacity retention after 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, and is able to recharge to 99 percent of its full capacity in 30 minutes, Sony says.

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Posted 07/29/09 at 11:30:33 AM by Will Smith

Battery-life claims never seems to line up with reality. You’d think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results—in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time. Both Intel and AMD make mobile CPU platforms designed for low power consumption, but due to the massive number of variables involved, I’ve found it nearly impossible to determine which architecture sucks the least juice.

Think about it. There’s a lot of hardware in a laptop that can affect battery life besides the CPU and the battery itself: the LCD screen and backlight, the optical and hard drives, the GPU, chipset, and memory config—to name just a few. The upshot is that if you want to fairly compare Intel and AMD hardware, you really need to test what we’ll call core power draw, isolating all the other variables. There are just a handful of ways to do this fairly, and each comes with its own problems.

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Posted 06/18/09 at 04:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly

AMD isn't happy with the way some battery claims are made, saying the reliance on a test called MobileMark 2007 doesn't yield an accurate indicator of what to expect. The problem, says Patrick Moorhead, a vice president for marketing at AMD, is that the parameters for the test include dimming the screen the just 20 percent brightness, turning off WiFi, and making sure no music, video, games, or webpages are running. Not only is the test flawed, says Moorhead, but it also favors Intel.

"Intel is advantaged in this environment because they have optimized their architecture to have bettery battery life when the computer isn't doing anything," Moorhead said.

Intel shrugged off AMD's complaint, saying if the No. 2 chip maker is so passionate about the subject, it would "encourage them to bring any new proposals or edits to the nonprofit industry consortium called BAPCo."

But is AMD out of line? Not likely. In the June issue of Maximum PC, Editor-in-Chief Will Smith discussed the topic in his Ed Word titled "Notebook Battery Life is a Trap."

"You'd think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results -- in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time," Smith wrote.

AMD warns that either the industry starts better regulating itself, or there's a high possibility of a consumer filing a lawsuit or the FTC stepping in.

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Posted 05/22/09 at 04:56:42 PM by Andy Salisbury

Earlier this week Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Vehicle Energy Ltd. announced a new battery that they claim has the world’s highest power density.

The new lithium-ion battery has 4,500W/kg power density, a number that clocks in at about 1.7 times the output of their current batteries. The increase in power allows for smaller size, and is thanks to a new manganese cathode and a unique battery structure. The structure employs thinner electrodes, a new power collection method, and more effective configurations.

Hitachi plans to make this technology available for notebooks and cell phones once the automotive industries have had a chance with it, but there’s no official word as to when we could see this technology implemented on a grand scale.

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