geekosystem

With the advent of sealed battery devices -- like your iPhone or iPod -- there's been mounting concern not only for how long a battery will last on a single charge, but how many charges you can expect to get from a device. Deciding at what point to begin recharging a battery is now a thing to be fretted over, as batteries have a limited number of charge cycles in their functional lifetime. Now, new research could do away with such fears and pave the way for rechargeable batteries that last decades.

Sony has introduced a battery and uninterrupted power source combo that can store up to 2.4kWh of power and supports a maximum load of 1000VA. Kind of amazingly, the battery can achieve a 95% charge in only two hours time, and Sony the battery should have at least ten years of optimal performance since Sony has used olivine-type lithium-ion iron phosphate batteries. The power source could keep a small datacenter running for a short amount of time, which means it could keep your single computer running for quite a while.

Well, this is wonderfully self-referential: Essential TPE sells an external iPhone 3G/3GS battery pack called Icon for $50, which, as the name suggests, looks like a giant iPhone battery icon. Powered by a 1000mAh lithium-ion polymer battery, it uses electroluminescent film to very clearly display how much power it has left, and its vendor says that it can "extend your iPhone talk time up to 3 hours and audio play back up to 18 hours." Below, check out how it looks attached to an iPhone, if you're interested:

Still waiting on a completely contained cell phone that's small enough to wear as an earring? That's because while most electronic components are getting smaller every day, batteries have remained the exception. Ever looked at the size of your laptop battery in comparison to its other components? Enterprising scientists have been addressing this problem, most recently by making a battery that is smaller that the width of your pinky nail and can only be viewed in action with a electron microscope.

A group of scientists headed up by Washington State chemistry professor Choong-Shik Yoo have created the most powerful battery known to man. Yo describes it as the "most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy," only this battery won't give your goldfish a third eye. And not only is it incredibly cool to imagine how long this could power your flashlight for, the process through which it was made it equally deserving of drool-infused awe. The material of the battery is a white crystal, xenon diflouride (XeF2). And for the battery to be created, this crystal needs to be put under a lot of pressure. And we're not talking strongest man in the world squeezing it pressure (though that would be an awesome way to make batteries), we're talking halfway to the center of the planet pressure. Enough to squeeze Magnus into a Wall-E sized cube. This pressure is applied with diamond anvils. Diamonds!