Slashdot Mirror
Batterylife Activator Reviewed
Daniel Rutter writes "Slashdot chewed over the BatMax Battery Life Booster - a nanotechnomagical sticker that's meant to rejuvenate lithium ion batteries - a while ago. Now I've reviewed the strikingly similar Batterylife Activator, and subjected it to actual empirical testing, with automated datalogging and everything. The results confirmed my original suspicion -- that the local Batterylife branch made a serious error of judgement when they decided to send me their product."
...they actually did some testing instead of just assuming various things. I'd have to say that it's a step in the right direction, even if the outcome was largely going to be known beforehand.
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Well, he says that big institutions like Osaka University, NTT DoCoMo have certified this sticker. How could the BatteryLife people have managed to get this certification. Isnt someone smelling foul play or something? Cant they be sued over this?
I wrote to the FAA district office that covers Waco, Texas, asking if that endorsement was legitimate.
A few weeks later, I received a call from an anti-terrorism investigator at the Defense Criminal Investigation Agency. Apparently, someone had looked at the claim of FAA approval and the claim of U.S. Army approval, and decided that this might be a case of selling unapproved aircraft lubricants to the Department of Defense. So the case was referred to the sabotage/anti-terrorism investigators.
I'm not sure what happened then. But the spam has stopped, and XLPI is down from $0.50 to $0.04.
There are four different kinds of force that we know of in the world: gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak.
Would you care to explain which of those causes the Casimir effect?
As an aside, I agree with you that a sticker will not make batteries last longer. However, if someone else has tested it and found some anomalous effect, legitimate science has an obligation to try to reproduce the experiment - Most likely to refute it, but maybe, just maybe, to discover a radically new phenomena that no one noticed before.
Like the shape of the Earth. Or its location relative to the Sun. Or that rocks fall from space. Or the true spectrum of black body radiation.
Most of the time, such rigor will simply unmask charlatans. But to completely ignore reports of an unknown effect reduces science to no less a discipline of "faith" than any mainstream religion.
Bit of revisionism going on here isn't there?
Slashdot didn't "chew over" the original story. Slashdot simply re-posted the company's bullshit press release in it's entirity.
Was the story posted in the funny section? No.
Was there any comment from the editor regarding the product's obvious scam factor? No.
Was there an update to the story to say, "Whoops! We got suckered! Sorry." No.
So you see Slashdot didn't chew it over - Slashdot swallowed it whole.
Of course the sticker works, when used as directed. Then again, if you power cycle a lithium ion battery 5 times it will work the same as if you power cycle it 5 times with the sticker.
You see, the instructions quoted in the article tell you to fully charge and discharge the battery like 4 times.
Here is why:
If you discharge a lithium ion battery completely to 0 it could explode when you charge it. So there is a meter in the battery (usually) or on the logic board of the phone (not usually) that prevents total discharge. That is, at a pre-defined level of discharge, it turns the phone off. Now, the meter can get out of callibration. When you fully discharge and recharge the phone it can put the battery meter back into calibration, and doing it repeatedly will fix it better.
So you see, you might get up to about 30% more battery life, because the meter is out of whack and is cutting off your phone when there is still plenty of charge.
Basically they are selling you the instructions to fix your battery, plus a sticker that does nothing.
Computer batteries are the same way.
Disclaimer: Fully discharging Lithium batteries is bad for them. They do not develop memory like other battery types. However, when the meter is out of calibration it pays to do this a few times, just don't over do it, since you only get between 500 and 1000 full use cycles out of the batteries regardless of what you do.