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Batteries Becoming Limiting Step For Portable Toys
grqb writes "Reuters is reporting that strong growth for portable devices such as laptop computers, game and music players, PDAs and mobile phones is expected to pressure battery manufacturers to improve their products, which are quickly becoming the limiting step in portable technology development. The lithium-ion battery technology that is commonly used hasn't changed in several years. The race is on to find battery technologies that are lighter and have increased life, but major breakthroughs don't seem to be on the horizon other than the lithium polymer battery, which can squeeze roughly 10-20% more life than lithium-ion. Micro fuel cells that run off of methanol are touted to be the next major wave for portable power, although logistics and price still make these fuel cells long shots, which is why Nokia recently dropped development of this technology."
I thought DRMs and other proprietory license BS is holding the market back.
They have been the limiting step ever since devices started using batteries.
PDAs and mobile phones is expected to pressure battery manufacturers to improve their products
Battery manufacturers are expected to pressure PDAs and mobile phones fanboys to stop producing inefficient and power-hungry products.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Seriously, Batteries have been the limiting factor in toys since I was a kid, and that's a /long time/. Remote control cars were and still are a joke, and handhelds are just as bad. "Good" mp3 players measure their battery life in hours, not days and even my cell phone can't hold a charge for the entire weekend, and all it is is a battery with a phone attached.
"Becoming?"
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It seems to me that most of the devices we have nowadays would have a pretty good power life with current batteries if they didn't have a plethora of "extras." When you combine a phone, PDA, and mp3 player together and then connect it to the internet, you're taking 4 different devices and trying to run them all on the same battery.
IMO, consolidation of devices and extra features that most people can do without are what's causing the energy crunch in small electronics.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
Or its the Power Consumption of the device that is the single limiting factor of portable devices.
Sales are reduced only when the item is declared dangerous on a TV "view_with_alarm" news segment.
you just pinpointed why these batteries will never reach market... because they last too long. There's no profit in something that doesn't break and doesn't need to be renewed.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
These offer long life at the expense of low power. They are good for pacemakers and things in inaccessible environments where the wattage requirements aren't high but the replacement cost is huge. They are not suitable for consumer electronics stuff.
A radioactive source with sufficient power to run a laptop would require significant cooling, especially when the laptop was shut off. For an idea of what it would be like, think of the RTG devices that we attach to space probes in the outer solar system. (Or that are scattered across the former Soviet Union.) Those things usually generate several hundred watts.
Now repeat after me: What is the objective of terrorism? To make people afraid. Do "dirty bombs" make people afraid? Yes. Therefore, they work just fine.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When I was growing up, all devices used one of four types of batteries. If you were going to take your portable music streaming device camping with you, you might go to one of roughly 100,000,000 battery retailers and buy some extras. This, with 1980s level technology!
Then, they decided to make a different, wonky-sized battery for every device. So the game boy, Palm, cell, and iPod all need different wall warts to charge their different batteries, and making these 'portable' devices portable on the road is a major PITA.
We should take a clue from the past and use standarized sized batteries. Whenever I can I buy devices that use standardized batteries, and I charge them, and whoa, it works. I don't have to pay for millions of chargers. If I need high performance batteries for my camera, I shell the $ for them, but if I'm going for a long bike trip, I put the good batteries in my bike light.
Apperantly Joe-sixpack-2005 is not smart enough to read the 'batteries included' label that Joe-sixpack-1980 had no problems with.
.. that's the old technology, which is at .1-.5 % efficient (that's right .001-.005)
Because of this inefficiency, there is lots and lots of waste heat, which causes the problems that you speak of.
If the nuclear battery mentioned on slashdot truly reaches its supposed 200 times efficiency, this is *80%* or thereabouts efficient, which means that there is a lot less material to radioactively decay.
Second of all, the batteries studied operate off of beta decay, which essentially means that they give off an electron. Electron == electricity, so the chances of needing lots of cooling equipment are probably not true.
So.. I haven't done the calcs yet, but nuclear batteries would probably be more feasible than you are thinking from an engineering standpoint.
On the other hand, tritium and strontium-90 are *damned expensive*, and would be so unless there was a circuit that connected supply (the nuclear power industry) to demand (the batteries) and even then, its doubtable that the nuclear power plants could produce enough strontium and tritium to keep everybody happy...
horos