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For your first question, unlikely. People like to compare supply/demand for lithium to petroleum. Unlike petroleum, you aren't "consuming" lithium. You're making it into stuff. Stuff which can be recycled. So, if you're seeing articles about "Peak Lithium" (a reference to "Peak Oil"), you can safely bet they're full of it.

Your second question suggests a basic understanding of supply-demand. Good.

As the demand for lithium increases, the price WILL go up in the short-term, which will stimulate investments in creating supply. We're already seeing the ramp-up in supply coincident with the ramp-up in demand. A few years ago, Electrovaya was advertising Lithium Ion batteries, large-format, for $300 / kWh in volume. That's what Elon Musk claims to be paying for his batteries, today. But the demand is at least an order of magnitude higher. We've already passed the "hump." And Elon Musk's investment, with Panasonic, in the "Gigafactory" is intended to push the supply higher, pushing the price lower, on the cheaper side of that hump.

A sudden, HUGE spike in demand could create another hump, but most manufacturers are sensitive enough on price that they will probably avoid it.

Blizzard has done a fantastic job at being able to support many systems. I have a Tablet PC with an Intel Integrated Graphics card (aka: modern-day piece-of-crap graphics card), and it still has no problems. I might not have the best settings (they're not all min'd out either), but I get extremely smooth game play.

They do make it out of the lab, and you do see them. We just don't have the breathless "this is cool" announcements when they start to be commercially available, we get it when they are invented.

Ni-Cd was a "wow, this is cool and will be on the market in 2 to 3 years" technology once. So was Li-Ion. Heck, so was Alkine (a long time ago).

Your laptop still dies after 1.5 hours because some engineer decided that 1.5 hours was all you needed. Some of today's laptops draw 2 or 3 times as much current as older ones, and some have smaller batteries. So battery technology has improved radically in order to get the same run-time.

The laptop designers need to trade off processing power, run-time, weight, cost and size. Because of constantly improving battery technology, they can improve many of the factors without hurting others. But they still need to make that trade-off, and they seem to have have picked a run-time to remain constant. When this new technology does find it's way into production, I don't think it will result in laptops with 2 or 3 times as much run-time. I think it will result in smaller and lighter, and more powerful, and possibly cheaper laptops. That's the pattern we've seen for the past few years.

If you don't like the trade-off they made, you can purchase a 3rd party batter with much better run-time. It may cost more, weigh more and take up more space than the one in your laptop, but you'll get the runtime you want. I suggest you look at http://www.electrovaya.com/product/powerpad_produc t.html for some batteries that are designed for max life.

This fuel cell system weighs as much and is as large as a 1 Liter bottle of water... and gives 10 hours of charge?!

Clearly you could have a Lithium ion battery that lasts many more (20? 30?) hours at the same size...

...and clearly there has not been any marked for a notebook with a clunky battery- The closest thing to a laptop ever released which emphasizes battery power over weight is the Electrovaya Scribbler- I have the 300 model and can get well over 10 hours out of it!

Maybe by the 3rd generation (and a decade from now) it will be able to compete with standerd batteries, assuming standard batteries haven't improved by then this technology might be worth a second look (which is unfortunately a possiblity, given the slow progress in battery technology)...

1. I have cycled through about 6 laptops in the past 4 years and
2. I still travel once in a while.

I wonder if buying the external battery might be a better investment than this new tablet?

"I mean, if most car's MPG and tank capacity give them roughly 300 miles of range, why should the industry let you get away with using your laptop unplugged for more than 2 hours?"

Hmmm...let's see now. Gasoline has a volumetric energy density of, what, about 8kWh per litre? A Lithium-Ion battery has a density of 0.2-0.3 kWh/l. Petrol has about 30 times more enery stored in it by volume than a LiIon battery.

OK, so your average battery doesn't have to contain enough juice to push a car, but at the same time, the cells in your laptop's battery aren't usually 10 gallons in volume or anything like that. They have to be small(ish), and you just can't pack a lot of energy into 'em.

If you want your laptop to go 10 hours on a single battery, then you need to end up with a massive battery along the lines of one of those Electrovaya thingies.

Alternatively, methanol has about half the energy density of gasoline, or over 10 times that of current LiIon batteries. Once fuel cells eventually arrive, you'll be able to drive your laptop a good bit further on a full tank...

I had the DX kit from ZAP for several years when I was at college in San Francisco. I had a number of interesting experiences.

I opted for the dual battery kit because the claims of distance on a charge were optimistic by about a factor of two. I'm sure if you were on some ultralight bike riding on perfectly flat roads at low speed you could achieve the rated numbers, but in the real world cranking up twin peaks with both you and the motors straining for all you're worth it was alot shorter.

The motor will become less efficient as it heats up. It will heat up as it has to provide more torque, so it will usually quit right on the steepest hill in your journey about the time you've become too tired to pedal the heavy bike without it. Then you'll walk the rest of the way up.

If you have a friction drive like the zap kit did, where the motor drives the wheel via a roller that rides on the tire, it will be useless anytime the tire is wet, dusty, or you're going up a hill where it produces significant resistance. The solution I found to this was to install an extra gear shift on the handlebars, and run a line down the frame to a point opposite the motor. Then ran the cable to a convenient mounting hole in the motor casing so that when I pulled the lever the motor would be pulled into the tire. This let me keep traction in any condition, even snow. I showed this to some people from zap, and they thought it was great. But not great enough to put in their kits apparently. I also designed a roller that worked kind of like a thick spring that could change diameter with pressure so using this you could change gear ratios, but that never went anywhere either. If anyone wants the design to work on building it, let me know.

It won't electrocute you or short out in the rain, even in El Nino, even if you're stupid and go out in El Nino and get drenched. Your brakes however, will fail when they're hydroplaning on your rims as you careen down into the Noe valley at breakneck speeds.

Bike thieves will still steal your bike despite the fact they don't have the charger for it. Either that or someone will steal your battery and headlight and smash them in the street for no good reason. Kryptonite locks will not save you, it'll still be stolen even in broad daylight at a busy mall. I gave up after losing 2 bikes.

If you have to transport it a long distance, like to another state, don't ship it, fly with it. Most airlines have a flat $50 bike fee, just get a bike box from the local bike shop and pack it. Pack your batteries seperately in your luggage on top, so you can show them to the people at the counter in the airport before they check your bag. Lead acid gel cells are safe for commercial airline trainsport, and will likely have this printed on the batteries themselves, as mine did.

If you use the bike every day expect to replace your batteries every year or two, as they'll wear out.

Beware of other cyclists, alot of them will be mad at you for "cheating".

You'll hear lots of interesting things about better technologies, such as improved lithium ion batteries, and small fuel cells which are always "just around the corner". I waited and searched for 5 years to get either one. Even when they actually demonstrated a bike with the same kit as mine running on a li battery with half the weight and 6 times the range, they wouldn't sell it to me. They went on to make $450 laptop batteries instead and refused to license the tech to anyone interested in other applications and refused to build any other size or shape batteries unless you wanted like 100,000 units. As for the fuel cells, saw one on a bike too. But they were always experimental and "Oh we'll have this out in 2 years." It won't happen anytime soon.

You'll also hear about new and improved electric vehicles that are

You can also get the Powerpad from Electrovaya which is compatible with any laptop. I bought one to replace my Thinkpad battery after it died -- and am really happy with it. Yes, it's a bit klunky, but it gives me 10 hours of active use on a single charge.

I've seen a lot of people commenting on the battery life of tablets, but I havn't seen anyone mention Electrovaya yet. They're a Canadian company who specialises in long life batteries for laptops who are selling rebranded tablets. After much research I settled on thier heftiest model (the scribbler SC-2010). With a detachable keyboard stand and -9- hours of battery life it had everything I needed. All the advantages of being a slate, but with a keyboard if you needed it, and a battery that could go all day.

Some things that I've come across in my tablet research that might help: 1) 256 megs is not enough for XP Tablet. You'll need at least 512, so include the upgrade in any prices you come across. 2) MS One Note is a really sweet app. Multiple 'notebooks', several ink colours, and the ability to move around drawings and text. I've got it installed on my work laptop and found it did everything I needed it too (though it should have an 'convert this handwriting to typed text' option...)

Unfortunately for me I'm living in scandanavia right now. The price of the tablet itself is high-yet-doable, but combined with a 24% import tax it was too much. For the same amount of money I'm going to build myself a sick desktop and buy a tablet input device that I haul into work when I need it. Hope that helps some.

My fiancee has been using the Scribbler SC800 for almost a year, and she finds it very useful. Unlike the Toshiba or Acer models that she looked at, the Scribbler is more like a slab than a notebook. This keeps her from breaking an already fragile joint. The processor isn't anything special (866 MHz), but it is fast enough for most uses, including data analysis using MATLAB. The real advantage to the Scribbler is the battery: the Li-ion battery gets about 10 hours out of a single charge. After almost a year of use, the battery is holding up under daily recharge cycles after a full workday. DISCLAIMER: Neither of us is associated with Electrovaya.

I haven't used one in real life, but the Electrovaya PowerPad 160 may be what your looking for. It's a slim pad that goes underneath your laptop and offers up to 16hours run time. It's not a laptop battery replacement, it's an addon. Looks like you can charge both the laptop and the powerpad at the same time in under 6 hours. A product brief (fun PDA so I havent read it) is here.

But at 500$ for it, it may be out of your budget.

I haven't used one in real life, but the Electrovaya PowerPad 160 may be what your looking for. It's a slim pad that goes underneath your laptop and offers up to 16hours run time. It's not a laptop battery replacement, it's an addon. Looks like you can charge both the laptop and the powerpad at the same time in under 6 hours. A product brief (fun PDA so I havent read it) is here.

But at 500$ for it, it may be out of your budget.