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Bluetooth Keyboards With a 10-Year Charge Promised
angry tapir writes "Broadcom is working on a Bluetooth chipset that will give wireless keyboards a battery life of up to 10 years. If they had a battery life of as long as 10 years, that Bluetooth-based accessories could potentially never need new batteries, the chip maker said. A set of two AA batteries would be enough to power a keyboard using the BCM20730 Bluetooth chip to connect with a computer for its entire lifetime, Broadcom said."
I'm not sure what kind of camera you use, but the rechargeable, proprietary battery that came with my Canon DSLR has worked well for years and gone through hundreds of charge / discharge cycles without any noticeable reduction in battery life. While not as cheap as AA batteries, I just looked up replacement cost and found that I could get a new battery for about $30 -- not that I have any need to at this point. And while the battery is proprietary to canon, it's used in a number of their DSLR cameras, so there's a good chance that if I replace my camera I'll be able to keep the old battery as a spare.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Why not put wires on the key board (perhaps even a USB connection), and the battery is not even needed. Wow.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Actually, as long as chips keep getting smaller and need less power, something like this is almost inevitable. However, at some point it will be possible to dispense with batteries altogether, and just build solar cells into the keyboard. If you have enough light to see it, then you will have enough light to run it. Someday, even your smartphone or tablet (or combined unit) will be built that way.
I'm not sure what kind of camera you use, but the rechargeable, proprietary battery that came with my Canon DSLR has worked well for years and gone through hundreds of charge / discharge cycles without any noticeable reduction in battery life. While not as cheap as AA batteries, I just looked up replacement cost and found that I could get a new battery for about $30 -- not that I have any need to at this point.
And while the battery is proprietary to canon, it's used in a number of their DSLR cameras, so there's a good chance that if I replace my camera I'll be able to keep the old battery as a spare.
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
Also some manufacturers are worse than others and have a new camera per camera or set of similar cameras. Others re-use the same battery.
What is needed is a set of standard sized Lithium batteries...There's no reason for the current mess other than planned obsolence and price gouging. Heck Sony has even started chipping their cameras the way printer manufacturers chip their cartridges to prevent 3rd party batteries from eating into their overpriced originals.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery.
Yes, but the batteries are smaller, denser, and last longer. What is the problem, exactly?
Several problems:
- Forget to charge your battery? You're out of luck! You won't be able to get a standard replacement alkaline battery for a couple of bucks at the corner store
- Looked after your camera for many years and want to sell it or show your children a vintage camera? You're out of luck! Your battery is too old to hold charge and they don't make batteries for that model camera any more
- Have a lot of different cameras, and want to share a couple of sets of batteries between them? You're out of luck. Each camera you own uses a different battery. You need at least one per camera
- You're a camera enthusiast and want to buy spare battteries? You'll have to decide which camera you need a spare battery for. You can't afford $30 x number of spares x cameras
I've seen a lot of silly justifications ranging from the technology keeps improving so why would you want to use the old camera to who owns lots of cameras. But I promise you for me and many others these things matter. We talk about recycling and reuse, have shopping bags too flimsy to hold our goods that we are now charged for, conserve water, and use less than optimal lighting solutions to conserve energy, but the moment a company stands to make a profit by making something throw away or selling you a whole bunch of junk when one item would suffice, well the environment goes out the window. It's moronic to be this wasteful.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yep. I call shenanigans. I doubt there's a commercially available AA battery that'll reliably keep its charge for 10 years, much less power something.
What impressed me so was that the keyboard had no on-off switch. For ten years, the keyboard has been sitting there waiting for me to press a key.
Maybe it acts like TV remotes, being on only when a key is pressed. That's still an amazing achievement, I agree.
I have a 12 year old bathroom scale still running off of the original lithium battery that was factory installed. I am amazed at how long it has lasted.
You've had a scale for 12 years without weighing yourself?