Your smartphone is a minor miracle, a pocket-sized computer that can fulfill almost every whim. But none of its superpowers matter a bit if it runs out of juice. With removable batteries becoming more and more rare, you’ve got to take good care of the one you got. Fortunately, it’s not to hard keep the lithium-ion powering your everything machine happy if you follow a few simple rules.
What’s the point of carrying around a backup battery that’s larger than the smartphone it’s designed to boost? It defeats the purpose of carrying a pocketable device in the first place. When it comes to backup batteries, slim is the only way to go, and with a set of pop-ports that keep its USB ports free of dust and crap, Paick’s Noble will easily slip into a bag or pocket.
Vorson, maker of all sorts of portable and professional batteries for a variety of gadgets, has introduced its latest offering: the Bookmark, said to be the thinnest backup battery ever. As its name suggests (and title confirms), the Bookmark is roughly shaped like a bookmark, and, while not as thin, is still slim enough to […]
You know the drill. Your smartphone’s battery rarely lasts a full day, but carrying around a clunky external backup sounds like a hassle coupled with a burden. Unless you’ve opted for Vorson’s Bookmark which packs a 2,500 mAh battery into a remarkably thin housing that’s just 4.7 millimeters thick. There are magazines thicker than that, so this should easily disappear inside your bag.
Filed in things you now know are possible but should probably never try in your lifetime unless your life depended on it but maybe still shouldn’t: jump starting a dead car battery with an AK-47. Yes, you can do that. Watch these insane Iraqi soldiers use the metal of the AK-47 to bridge the two batteries. Metal conducts electricity! And I guess AK-47s are basically Swiss Army knives, right?
One of the modern “problems” that mobile devices suffer from is this – the lack of battery power, or rather, a capacity that is not enough to get the job done throughout a busy day. Sure, scientists have worked hard to make sure that the popular li-ion battery has made some gains in its performance, capacity and charge times, but here we are with the possibility of a new breakthrough with the implementation of Li/S batteries that are said to feature double the capacity of li-ion batteries.
Apart from that, the new Li/S batteries are also touted to do away with them nasty conflict minerals from the construction process. This is made possible thanks to a team over at Berkeley Lab, where the battery researchers that were led by Elton Cairns managed to work on an improved lithium/sulfur (Li/S) cell which will deliver a long cycle life and a high discharge rate simultaneously – a first of its kind, all without breaking the bank and retaining the lightweight characteristic of Li/S batteries. So far, initial tests point to the Berkeley Lab Li/S cell boast of an estimated specific energy of nearly 500 Wh/kg, which is over twice the amount that existing Li-ion cells have.
The big question is this, when will the consumer electronics industry be able to adopt such battery technology on a mass scale? [Research Paper (PDF Link)]
Li/S Batteries Gain Double The Capacity Of Li-ion Batteries original content from Ubergizmo.
3D printing has certainly taken off over the past couple of years as we’ve seen some amazing products created only using 3D printing. As impressed as we’ve been in the past over 3D printed goods, being able to 3D print batteries has just completely blown our minds.
In the past, 3D printing batteries has caused way too many issues to actually be implemented, but new inks and tools are now making the possibility of printing a 3D lithium ion battery a reality. Technology Review recently visited Harvard materials scientist Jennifer Lewis to see how her work in 3D printed batteries is coming along, and even though it’s in its early stages, it seems it won’t be too long until we are able to print out a pair of batteries. (more…)
3D-Printed Batteries May Come Sooner Than You Think original content from Ubergizmo.
Nokia has released a somewhat misleading commercial having a go at a tablet that could be interpreted as an Apple iPad while touting its own, new Lumia 2520 tablet. The ad focuses on the competitor tablet’s lack of a keyboard and allegedly shorter battery life. The problem with the ad is that it fails to […]
From the front it looks a bit like a catfish. From the top it looks like a water strider. From the side it looks like a great white shark. This odd-looking flying car is under development at a technology company near the Google X research facility–although so far it looks like Google is not involved […]