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Friday, October 17, 2014

Progress on Longer Battery Life

An ABI Research report predicts there will be eight billion mobile devices in use worldwide by 2019, but adds that power storage and charging technology has not kept up. That could be about to change.

“Short battery life remains the biggest irritation to smartphone users and is a clear opportunity for handset vendors and carriers to improve the user experience by adopting new, longer-lasting battery technologies,” Nick Spencer of ABI Research told Campus Technology. “Additionally, the growth in size-constrained wearable devices makes the problem even more acute.”

Silicon stores 10 times more lithium than the graphite, used in rechargeable batteries, but also tends to crack and become unusable. Researchers in the United States are also finding success 
using coatings made of germanium and pure lithium to increase storage and charging capabilities.

“The battery-charging market beyond wired Micro-USB chargers is also ripe for change with multidevice inductive charging mats reducing in price and integrating into public environments like cafes and airports; a bit like Wi-Fi,” according to the ABI report. “More subtle forms of charging may also be made possible like ambient radio-frequency energy harvesting and even dedicated beamed radio-frequency energy routed to your device.”

Researchers in Singapore are working on a battery that can be recharged up to 70% in just two minutes and can last more than 20 years, according to a report in Teleread. The batteries replace the graphite used in traditional lithium-ion batters with a gel made from titanium dioxide.