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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."
If I put it on me will it help me get up in the morning?
There is no sig
Why even waste time verifying if it's true? What's next, a test of whether penis enlargement pills work?
Does it function well as a sticker?
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
...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.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
It's worth it just for all the amusing links alone. The author liberally sprinkles links throughout his text, and it's not ads, it's some links to some odd, and often amusing websites. It's worth the read, even if you aren't interested in the actual test.
Here in the US they just recently started looking into the "Enzyte" (penis growth stuff) people, I knew it was a scam 4 years ago when I saw the first commercial. I read the enzyte people have made 50 million dollars so far (and that was sometime last year). Would you goto jail for a couple years for 50 million dollars? I would.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Actual tests of batteries always show that the cheapest batteries are the best value for money, in terms of watt hours per dollar.
Oh well, what the hell...
Praying to the he-God Nemod on the 3rd day after a new moon, and dancing for him the great triumphant nerd dance of Praytor which involves spinning around in a circle and yelling "hemannamannamanna" at the top of your lungs works much better to bring batteries back to life. Everyone knows that!!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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?
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/395
I hate to say it, but he has flawed results that do not demonstrate that the sticker is a placebo.
He used only one battery to do his test. He should have used two; one with the sticker and one without. By only using one battery, running 3 tests, then putting the sticker on and running a 4th test, he's introduced an additional variable into the equation. It could thereofre be argued that his graph (http://www.dansdata.com/images/batterylife/activ
Dont worry, I have invented a Homeopathic version of this device - thats right - based on the principle that the more dilute it is the stronger it is, you can place a single-atom sticker on your battery which will yeild UP TO 2000% improved battery life!!! It will extend the working life of your mobile phone by UP TO 1000 years!!!! Not only this, but your erectile function during intercourse will be improved by UP TO 700%!!!!
Yes, just click on the Nigerian PayPal link below, and I will send you that miracle homeopathic atom!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
"The real question is why aren't the governments in places where these are sold stomping these people to bits?"
Ya know, while I'm not one to worship at the altar of free market and deregulation and all that crap, I really have to wonder at this statement. If people are stupid enough to pay money for something like this, maybe they deserve to loose their money. It isn't like there's a big potential for collateral damage here. Stupid people get punished, smarter people make some money, and maybe with time people will start learning to think for themselves for a change.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Activator doesn't work, how come so many people say that it does?
It's very simple, really. Placebo effect and confirmation bias. These things drive all manner of quackery (naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc.) and other pseudoscience. Confirmation bias is particularly powerful here as people don't want to admit they're stupid enough to have been duped into buying an overpriced sticker, even though they are.
A great piece of writing, but there are a massive number of variables that he failed to control:
1. Charging/Discharge period between inital tests and activator test were completely random.
2. Only one battery was used.
3. The setup was not similar to the conditions under which the activator would be used.
4. The battery type was not similar to a cellphone.
5. The device handling the charge and discharge of the battery was not a cellphone.
I certainly don't think this product is any good but a more controlled test would have been better.
Also, according to his test the activator gave a 3% boost to the battery. What is interesting is that it is 13 discharge cycles away from Run 1. The first three charge/discharge cycles clearly showed a dependency between # of cycles and battery life. To help clarify, it would have been nice if he kept the data from the intermediate 10 runs.
Maybe it did do something? I find it hard to believe though.
But what if it was something that was fraudulent but not so obvious? Should there be a difference in how they are handled? Obvious or not, fraud is fraud. These guys shouldn't be cut any slack just becasue their fraud is a little more obvious.
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.
The test by no means disproves this device. The tester chops the sticker up so he can use it with his smaller digital camera battery. Something that the manual apparently claims should work, but this is clearly not its intended use, and thus quite possibly not its optimum use either.
He also fails to repeat the experiment at all or do a control experiment, and even the one test run he does isn't exactly thorough. Also, he does appear find some improvement when using the sticker, just not as much as the company claims, so I don't see how he thinks he has shown that it doesn't work at all (except through his scientific arguments with which he apparently convinced himself even before he did the test of the impossibility the thing could work).
Most importantly - according to the company's website the device has been tested by TÜV and found to work! I'm MUCH more likely to believe the results of TÜV certification than some hobbyist's tests (TÜV is a government body which tests + approves almost everything in Germany - cars, buildings etc. People trust it to tell them if their car is fit to drive, so it is presumably capable of sufficiently thoroughly testing in determining whether some battery enhancer works as claimed.
Of course, given the incredibility of the claims regarding the device, I'm still not neccessarily convinced. I'm just saying lets not discard the possibility that it might actually work to some degree so quickly.
Instead of doing some quick hack-up test of the device, it would be much more useful if someone could start by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests (A-U-F is another independent body which allegedly found it to give a 31% increase in battery life to an old Nokia phone) and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
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.
While I'm fully convinced that the Battery Life Activator is nonsense, the experiments trying to prove that it is are as poorly done as those trying to prove that it works. Grabbing a random battery out of a photo bag and cycling it a few times with and without the sticker isn't a good experimental test.