Three Wise Men

Another Week, Another Battery

Every now and then you are able to read about new kind of batteries with higher capacity, faster recharge, new technologies, new materials used, cheaper production, and so on, and so on. However this first half of the year was really charged up with battery news.

We’ve been reading about new batteries on a monthly basis and if all those predictions come true and all those announcements turn into workable products then in the next five years our notebooks will need to recharge once a week and we’ll never have to worry about power management again.

A quick recap of some¹ battery news so far².

• With winter coming to an end MIT announced reduced recharge time for batteries.
• Some other smarties at MIT surprised us with batteries based on liquid metal only a week later.
• Then, two weeks later it was Toshiba with more juice in their batteries.
• Cheap Scotsmen came up with the idea of St. Andrews Air battery. Five to ten fold increase in capacity! Approximately one month behind Toshiba.

Are we done? Not yet.

• Again a month later there were Canadians at the University of Waterloo. They merely tripled the capacity of their batteries.
• Basically at the same day IBM apparently invested in batteries that will last ten times more than batteries last today.

Now we just have to sit and wait and hope for the mixed solution from Scotsmen and IBMers!

1. I am sure that I missed a few [↩]
2. Source: Slo-Tech [↩]

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