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USB Batteries
An anonymous reader writes "Tired of paying for new batteries all the time? Tired of searching for the charger for your rechargeable batteries? Worry not, because these new AA batteries will recharge direct from your USB port! This is such a cool idea, that I cant believe that no one has done it before." At $24 each I would hate to lose or break them on a regular basis.
Let's break this down.
4 batteries - $6 at Walmart for off brand or $10 - $15 for 4 name brand rechargables.
Cheap AA/AAA USB Charger $8 from tiger direct.
OR
Better AA/AAA USB Charger $20 from tiger direct.
The cheapest route gives you 4 batteries, each with twice the mAH for $14 plus shipping. The most expensive route gives you the same thing for $30 plus shipping. Either way, buying a battery with only 1300 mAH nowadays is like buying a midsized car with a 50 hp engine.
Bottom line? For novelty reasons, these batteries look interesting and you do not need to carry an additional charger. But at around $16 US apiece they are expensive and WAY underpowered. Additionally, you need one USB slot for each. If you buy a regular USB charger and use standard rechargeable batteries, you can charge several (up to 4) with one USB slot and spend half the money.
Conclusion? It's a neat novelty backup backup. But it is way to expensive.
Funnypics
And not affiliated with the product in any way.
Thanks for another Slashvert.
The little "L" like symbol means pounds not dollars.
It's what those crazy Brits use as money.
erm, it said 12.99pounds for TWO-which then is similar to 12 dollars each.
I used to have 'D' cells that'd plug in to a wall outlet, too. Trouble is, a large portion of the volume is devoted to the connector and charging circuit. But if 50% capacity is enough, I suppose they'll work.
I thought this might be useful, then I looked at some of my toys that take AA. My old Canon A70 takes 4AA. I use NiMH. I have a charger that can charge 4 batteries at a time. Ummm ... I don't think I even HAVE 4 USB ports :) and even if I did, I don't think they'd all fit. (Because you know how they like to cram a bunch of USB ports together and if you plug in something larger than a regular cable, the slot next to it is wasted)
.. I'm back to "I can't think of anything useful for it" :)
So really, it's only useful for say, an MP3 player that takes a single AA battery. But then again, my brother's little samsung mp3 player has a built-in Li Ion battery and a USB plug built in that can flip up. And it's hardly bigger than a AA battery.
Hmmm
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
In most cases, if you have USB power you have an outlet. In rare cases where your out in the middle of no where with nothing but a notebook and a GPS unit running on AA batteries, and you need to keep the GPS charged so you can make it out there before dark, I guess these would be of use. Cant realy think of any other time.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Let's see - 5 hours to charge so you either leave a laptop on and run it's battery dead - wait - that little 3 prong hole in the wall - AC power - I can plug my laptop in there save its battery or I can plug in a real battery charger and fast charge my much cheaper, higher capacity AA/AAA's.
A battery charger is small, small, lightweight and can be has with dual voltage. Mine is 6 years old and weighs a few ounces - including cord and EU adapter.
If you really don't want to carry a charger you can buy a dozen high capacity rechargable AA's at the price of these - and simply carry them with you. (If you really would use that many you probably would carry a charger anyway).
This is an expensive answer to a question no one is asking.
Slashdot - we now spam the globe for you...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Unless the electronics are really well engineered (aka foolproof design) then a failure could result in a damaged motherboard, especially considering the amount of current these things are capable of drawing. Surface mount fuses aren't much fun to replace, especially in laptops. I'd wait a while to see if any horror stories surface before plugging that thing into my machines.
On a related note, the Motorola Razr cell phone's power connector is mini-USB, so it can charge off of your USB port as well.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
A USB 'phone charger is great for travelling abroad. I plug my laptop in in a hotel, and I can charge my 'phone and iPod from it without having to carry a load of mains adaptors around. I would probably fall right into the middle of the target market for these devices, and even I can't see a use for them. Who buys equipment which takes AA batteries these days? I can't remember the last thing I bought that didn't have a custom Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer battery.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In the last couple years they've dropped rechargeables to 1.2V which means normal batteries are delivering 25% more power if the amps stay the same. I don't want 'em.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.
Lame.
That sound you hear is the joke whooshing over your head. The Simpsons quote should've been a major tipoff.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A USB batter charger . This way you can use 2500mAh batteries rather then having half the capacity taken up by the usb port and charging circuit.
I just replaced all of my regularly used rechargeable batteries with 2500maH sets and I will never go back to lower rated batteries again. On my vacation last week I shot over 400 photos and about 4 minutes of video on my Canon S1 IS and I only recharged the batteries once.
You don't have to worry about charging on a USB port if your batteries don't die all of the time.
ÕÕ
So what Brittish companies can we ridicule with the £?
Obviously ££oyds of £ondon
Lets think... there's the £and Rover, although not really Brit owned now.
Virgin Air£ines?
Che£sea footba££ C£ub?
anything that has Eng£and in its name
How could anyone forget the Roya£ Fami£y?
GlaxoSmithK£ine is Brittish based and thats a good one, a drug company we know they on£y care about money
Uni£ever is also Brittish
any other suggustions
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There's more geek factor here than real usability. Anyone had their charger melted to slag because of leaky batteries? Yeah, me too. Personally, I wouldn't mind too much if a $10 charger got toasted, but not my $1xxx laptop. I can garentee that they won't be held responsible should anything get toasted with your lappy...besides, there has been enough troubles with the official laptop battery blowing up without throwing something like this into the mix...
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
in addition to having less capacity, and being very much more expensive, they recharge more slowly than regular rechargables do in a dedicated charger. If you're putting them into a USB port which is ultimately AC powered, well, why not just use a faster, cheaper, charger.
And if someone plans on charging off a notebook running under battery power, do they really intend (or are they even able) to run the notebook for the 5 hours needed to recharge these?
This makes no sense at all, and are certainly nothing to be "excited about." So much for "trusted reviews."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Hey look, this battery dies twice as fast, but if it's dead, you can recharge it on USB!"
"Uh, yeah, couldn't I just have used a regular battery that wouldn't be dead yet?"
You can have:
- an expensive, dead, 1300 mAh USB battery that you need to recharge on your laptop (good luck on your laptop battery not going dead first!)
- a cheap, half-full 2500 mAh regular rechargable battery that you don't need to recharge at all.
paintball
You are wrong. The usb port provides 500mA AT 5 VOLTS. If you convert that down to 1.5V with a buck converter, you could charge a 2500mAh battery in under 1.5 hours.
It's all about the chemistry, not some kind of voltage deflation. Zinc cells give 1.5V (alklines, etc). NiCd and NiMH gives 1.2V. Lead acid gives 2 and a bit V. You can't make a NiCd battery at 3V. A battery is a stack of cells, so it can only provide an integer multiple of the cell voltage (2.4 or 3.6V is as close as you'll get with NiCd).
I have a 15 minute quick charger (by Rayovac) and I would hate to go back to having to actually wait hours for my batteries to charge. This is a cool idea, but lets try and speed it up and then I'll be interested.
For the longevity of your batteries (ie, the reason you pay about 4x as much for rechargeables in the first place), you really should use an intelligent trickle-charger (around C/10) with an automatic pre-charging discharge. I seriously suspect the battery manufacturers (such as Rayovac) came up with the idea of a 15-minute charge just to drastically shorten the life of your rechargeables. It has to seriously hurt their profitability that we can now use a single set of batteries that will last for five to ten years if properly maintained.
It amazes some of my friends (who, like you, use a 4C flash charger) that I have 5 year old NiMH batteries that, after several hundred charge cycles, not only still work, but still hold over 90% of their stated capacity. Well, now you know the secret. Stop abusing your batteries, and just let them charge overnight.
Keep the flash charger in the car for emergencies, but unless you absolutely need a battery now, don't use it.
Now, throw in a couple-o-dozen megs of flash built in and you might actually have something. I could store the device drivers for my peripherals in the very same batteries that run them. No more hunting for driver discs. Oh, that and increase the mAh capacity.
I really wonder why charging of ALL sorts of gadgets which run on one lithium-ion cell isn't automatically done when you anyway connect that thing to the PC to transfer data?
The USB port has 5V and one lithium-ion cell has a maximum of 4.15 volts, (So there's enough voltage difference to properly charge the lithium cell).
A few gadgets already does get charged when they anyway are connected to the PC, why not ALL of them?
I would be happy to save the cost for the regular charger, and find it very practical to plug it into my PC to have it charged, and for those few who doesn't have a PC, or for whom it would not be practical to charge via the PC, a regular charger or a solar charger with a "USB"-plug, would be an obvious accessory.
(I really wonder how much extra money I have paid for all those chargers sitting around unused, from gadgets that broke or went out of use. Worst of all, all these chargers are still in working condition!)
Then we would also have gotten the bonus of a 5V charger plug being standarized, so that any one lithium cell-gadget can use any 5V charger, including any USB port, ending the trouble with the pileup of orphaned chargers.
Also, the regular plug-in of your whatever type of data collecting and/or processing gadget into your PC to get it charged, probably will be god for your (at the moment non-existing?) habits of taking backups of it before you loose it or break it - that is, if you also take regular backups of your hard drive...
End Of Utopic Dream
One stupid LED as a status? It's already USB! Why not also a little icon indicating charge status, how much power has left... Even maybe intelligent software to even tell how many seconds of gameplay I'll have my Sega GameGear! Ah.. USB. It reminds me when I saw the first USB speakers, I was amazed of how quicly computer technology has gone beyond prediction.. . Witnessing speakers crash! At least Windows 95 OSR2 somewhat tried to continue after a blue screen.
Actually, it would be cool if most devices could simply work with rechargable AAA batteries. Having different batteries for cameras, cellphones, portable game systems, mp3 players.. too much stupid cables everywhere. Maybe something more usable, like flat, square things, Lego-like. One of them to power a camera, maybe interconnect 5 to power a portable mp3-video player, or, interconnect 100 and a Dell laptop to celebrate the 4th of July!
Obviously, this thing doesn't meet any of the applicable specs, especially the specs that address power consumption when a device is not configured. I don't see a USB logo anywhere on their web site.
Use at your own risk.
What about making a little removable USB cap that fits over the rechargeable AA? Don't know how you'd hit the bottom electrode though.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Or, *gasp* a regular battery charger. It's cheaper.
This sounds like a cool invention, but I have to say that it does kinda seem like technology for technology's sake.
Sent from my computer.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
where an AC talks about a cool new product, I automatically assume said AC is a marketing rep from producer of product.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
From the article: "they could be set to deliver the same killer blow to the battery market that memory sticks did to floppy discs." Really? Lets see. floppy disk: 1.4MB, about 4"X5" in size typical thumbdrive: 256MB, about, well, about the size of a child's thumb. Conventional rechargeable AA: ~2000 mAH, standard AA size, can recharge in maybe an hour with decent charger. USB rechargeable AA: 1200 mAH, standard AA size, recharge in 5 hours. yeah, that's a killer blow all right...
At the rate things are going, cities will be powered not with nuclear power stations, but by a gigantic laptop, with the grid plugged into the USB port. Better watch out the battery doesn't explode, though.
... and then they built the supercollider.
For the longevity of your batteries (ie, the reason you pay about 4x as much for rechargeables in the first place), you really should use an intelligent trickle-charger (around C/10) with an automatic pre-charging discharge.
You're overlooking the fact that if the batteries survive those 4 cycles, you've broken even and everything after that is gravy. I've got one of the Ray-O-Vac 15 minute chargers as well. The batteries have paid for themselves and then some, with no signs of slowing down. And when they do crap out, another four pack is about $15 retail - roughly the same price as a four pack of Energizer's single-use lithium AA cells.
Let's face it, a 15 minute charger can bring a set of batteries back from the dead in less time than it takes to drive to the store and buy new single-use batteries. Telling anyone they should avoid this technology because it *may* reduce the cell's lifetime is being penny wise, pound foolish.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.