Smart phones are the real technological wonder of our modern age and have become all the more ubiquitous in our daily lives. I bet you have your phone only at an arm’s reach away and frankly you’d feel a bit naked and lost without it – we certainly do.
They are superb tools no question but all this technological sophistication is continually subdued and held back by poor battery performance and mammoth charging times.
Juice Guzzler
We love playing GTA Vice City on our smart phone devices here in the office but doing so means we run out of juice before the evening, knowing we need to find a wall to anchor our phones up for hours to charge them. Battery consumption is a continual and subconscious niggle for all smart phone users.
Step forward Israeli start-up company StoreDot who have recently developed a battery that can charge in under 30 seconds! In tests they took a power hungry Galaxy S4 with a dead battery and filled it up in 26 seconds. Amazing.
At the moment the device is still in the prototype stage and with more successful testing it will hopefully go to market in about 3 years. Its size is bigger than conventional batteries as we know them today with a bulk similar to that of a cigarette packet, but the team behind the new battery are working hard to reduce this significantly.
The Science Bit
So how does it work? Frankly, it’s complicated. I had to lie down after reading the science behind it but it works a little something like this; the battery harnesses tiny self-assembling nano-crystals that were apparently first identified in research being done into Alzheimer’s disease at Tel Aviv University over 10 years ago. These nano-crystals store massive amounts of energy when charged and are very robust meaning they can hold higher charges than what we currently use, plus they absorb the charge super quick, hence the 30 second charge time.
The battery will reportedly be significantly more expensive than the ones found in phones today due to a more complex manufacturing process, but within time this will decrease.
Anyhow, we think you’d agree that paying more for this evolution in battery technology is actually a good investment both economically and time-wise. It’s just a shame that we’d have to still find a wall with a plug socket. If only electricity could be conducted safely with out wires so we could all charge through the cloud…now that would be good!
Let us know what you think? How long does your battery last before is packs in? Oh, and don’t forget, you can follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook for all the latest developments in mobile gaming.
