Smartphone Battery Breakthrough

A new battery technology, which is soon to enter production, may be able to double the battery life on your smartphone by early next year.

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who spun out and created a start-up called SolidEnergy - have created a new type of lithium metal battery, which comes anode-free and allows for twice the density in charge.

The technology has proved safe and is almost ready to be used in electric cars, smartphones, wearables and other portable devices; it's even set to launch in drones by November this year.

Qichao Hu, CEO of SolidEnergy, said "With two-times the energy density, we can make a battery half the size, but that still lasts the same amount of time, as a lithium ion battery. Or we can make a battery the same size as a lithium ion battery, but now it will last twice as long."

It works by switching graphite - a traditional battery material - for a very thin lithium-metal foil, which as well as being smaller can even hold more ions than normal cells.

 

Courtesy of TechRadar

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Oppo R9 Plus Big screen, big power, big battery

The R9 Plus has a 6-inch screen, compared to the 5.5-inch of the R9. The bigger screen has the same 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution, which means a slight reduction in pixels-per-inch from the R9 (367 vs 401), but you're not going to notice. The rear camera has been upped from 13-megapixels to 16-megapixels but, again, that's not going to change your world. (The front camera is the same 16-megapixels as the R9 -- it's a selfie-lover's dream.)What you will notice is the big in both battery and processing power that the R9 Plus offers over the R9. The Plus has the Snapdragon 652 CPU. It's a 1.8GHz octa-core chip, but what matters is that it has a big uptick in both general performance and graphics processing power over the basic R9 model. In fact, in our benchmark testing, it was up there with the Sony Xperia X and the Huawei Mate 8.

Battery life is the other big bonus. With a 4,120mAh battery, I was expecting something good, but the R9 Plus exceeded my expectations with a test result of 17 hours and 30 minutes. That makes it one of the best batteries we've seen this year.

Courtesy of CNet

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Low Battery??

A number of devices now exist to provide extra power to mobiles and wearables, such as power packs, mobile hand generators and solar cells. But although external power packs have become popular, they add size and weight, and mobile hand generators and solar cells produce only limited amounts of power.

Instead, an invention called PowerShake allows mobile and wearable devices to wirelessly charge other mobile and wearable devices on the go, even when those devices are being held or worn. Wireless-charging technologies are becoming more prevalent, but many of these stations are fixed, and do not account for devices near or in contact with skin.

The researchers experimented with a variety of power transmitter and receiver coils. They also devised electromagnetic shielding made of ferrite plates and copper tape on the back of coils in order to prevent any transmitted energy from reaching human tissue. They noted flexible coils were also possible, and potentially embeddable in watch straps.

In experiments, PowerShake fit into small devices, met wireless power transfer safety guidelines, and performed about as well at power transmission as commercial alternatives, such as the Qi wireless charging pad, transferring about 3.1 watts of power, the researchers said. They estimated that about 12 seconds of charging would support 1 minute of additional talk time, while 2 minutes of charging would support about 4 minutes of video watching.

For information check out LiveScience

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Wearable tech and "Band Aid Batteries"

Wearable tech might actually be the future if only low battery life wasn't keeping it down. Most developers of wearables rely on advances in processor efficiency than hoping for a new battery life. A new development might be the advancement wearables really need —in fact, they can be worn just as easily as the wearable tech they'll power.

These are batteries that can be applied to the skin like a Band-Aid and could even recharge with exposure to sunlight.
A team cut a regular lithium ion battery into very thin tiles, and then tied those tiles together  with wires to make them all a singular power source. These were then embedded within multiple rubber layers, creating a battery that is stretchable, mobile, rechargeable and even waterproof.

Beyond integration into clothing, there's the potential for "chip-scale microelectromechanical technologies, radio devices, mechanical/thermal energy harvesting" and other devices which would need tiny, flexible batteries.

Technology is making leaps and bounds everyday! Don't forget to properly dispose of your old tech; check out WikiWoo.com for more on proper disposable.

Courtesy of Popular Mechanics