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New All-Solid Sulfur Based Battery Outperforms Lithium Ion
olsmeister writes "The new all-solid battery design uses solid sulfur and lithium, and outperforms existing lithium-ion batteries with four times the energy density. The battery can maintain a capacity of 1200 milliampere-hours per gram after 300 charge-discharge cycles. More work needs to be done, but one would think this new technology could have applications in renewable energy storage, electric cars, and consumer electronics."
I use a 30 amp-hour 12 volt battery when camping, it's about 20 pounds (for fans, lights, bug zapper, , phone charger, electric blanket, inverter for laptop, etc). I've saved a ton of money not having to purchase D batteries and I can expect 5-8 years of use (hundreds of duty cycles).
"1200 milliampere-hours" is 1.2 amp hours. A battery of this type would weight 25 grams, or less than an ounce. If it's at 12 volts, which per the article (I read it!!!) doesn't sound like the case. But I bet a comparable 12 volt version would weight just ounces rather than pounds.
Battery tech is a primary lagging technology in my opinion.
Best hopes for this technology.
BlameBillCosby.com
Off-topic, but can Lithium air be used for laptops/gadgets etc. too, or only for cars? No one ever seems to say.
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Lithium and Sulphur! Will these explode more or less violently than Li-ion batteries?
They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere, leaving us at around the same runtime as before.
"They"? Either the device is doing work four times more consuming, your device can stand by four times longer, or your device's battery is approximately four times lighter. Sure, retarded marketing drones are going to figure out a way to stuff four times the amount of adware onto a new laptop, but let's face it, they were going to do that regardless.
Assuming a 4 times increase in battery life at all scales and no size decrease, this would quadruple the range of electric cars - all for a simple battery tech switch. And the batteries are made partly from waste in another industry.
... whatever
I think we're probably long overdue for a decent energy solution for consumer electronics. Hydrogen fuel-cell batteries still seem to be some way off, and cold fusion is just a pipe-dream. So in the meantime, if someone can supply a battery with four times the energy density of Li-ion cells, then I say "bring it on".
This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
- How well do these batteries retain a charge? Li-Ion is quite good on that score; if I leave my cordless drill of the charger, it'll still be ready for use after a year.
- How well do these batteries deal with half-cycles (recharge when only half empty)? Is there a memory effect?
- What is the max rate of charge?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Don't get me wrong, I like the added features, but I hope nobody expects laptops that can be used for multiple days in a row without recharging (with sleep mode enabled between sessions of course) or next-gen smart phones that can go a week without recharging. They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere, leaving us at around the same runtime as before.
I'm much more interested in it for electric cars.
Four times the batter life in a cellphone? Meh - mine already lasts for days.
Four times the range of electric cars? World-changing technology.
No sig today...
Battery runtimes have improved enormously in the past five years; the bottom-end machine I bought then could barely break two hours, my new low-end laptop easily manages four. However that's more due to improvements in the computer hardware's power efficiency than the battery's capacity.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
No, sorry. I just pulled my phone off the charger.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
> They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere
Isn't that what you want? You're suggesting we should just stop looking for better power sources because it'll be 'used' anyway?
You can save power now, on smartphones for example, if you do stuff like underclock the cpu, turn brightness down, handle wifi/gps etc more intelligently.
As a new smartphone user (Galaxy S), I find my Android OS lasts around a week because I use it mostly only for phone calls/messages. You're right, bloat can sometimes fill the void, but not if you're relatively careful. See: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/476/what-can-i-do-to-increase-battery-life-on-my-android-device
(Just to also add, I thought I'd hate the touchscreen compared to tactile buttons, but using Swype, I'd NEVER go back to a 'normal' button phone again).
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With a higher energy density, and if the size and weight are low, it could help make electric motors a viable option for light general aviation aircraft. I'd love to see this work out.
Since it's using sulfur, hopefully this can also help lower the cost per hour as well as longer life.
Keep in mind that the 300 charge cycle the mention isn't the limit for the battery, it's talking about how well it still works after 300 cycles compared to lithium batteries. I'll be interested to hear what it's full life is as well.
If the battery capacity increases as well then its a double win. Power efficiency in chip design is beneficial for all sorts of reasons, not just battery life, so will continue to improve. Having increased battery life will impact the current devices. It should also make others more practical as a given capacity battery will take up less space.
I think the GGP is overly pessimistic.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
But of course, all she had was just a super capacitor. It probably does not scale easily to vehicle sizes and anyway it is not an electro-chemical reaction based "battery."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... that should be quite a bad smell.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Don't get me wrong, I like the added features, but I hope nobody expects laptops that can be used for multiple days in a row without recharging (with sleep mode enabled between sessions of course) or next-gen smart phones that can go a week without recharging. They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere, leaving us at around the same runtime as before.
If someone will finally make a netbook with an e-ink screen, we could get around to that kind of battery life. I know the refresh rates suck, but the equivalent of a Kindle Paperwhite with a full keyboard, a basic word processing app, and a battery that lasts for days on end would be a writer's dream.
what i really forsee is this would alow even smaller/lighter battery packs. with less space/weight devoted to power, devices can pack in other things, or simply be smaller lighter themselves.
course charging time is another factor. does this material have the same, more, or less time required for an equivalent charge? does it develop memory?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It's going to happen, yes, but I want to emphasise that it's not why these very palpable gains in battery life are being made at the moment.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Same idea as Wirth's Law:
Running the same stuff, we'd see battery life go up. But for the same reason my desktop doesn't really feel that much faster than the one I had 10 years ago, I tend to agree ... better batteries will just let us run what seems like the same stuff for the same amount of time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What kind of smartphone lasts days?
Maybe two days tops, if you barely use it on a brand new battery. Under heavy use most of them can be totally dead in under 4 hours.
Simple mobiles phones are all but extinct.
Hopefully this new sulfur based battery can also be a basis for the storage of energy from renewable energy sources, nice to see that things go on.
Will these explode more or less violently than Li-ion batteries?
More! And when it does explode and you've got a flaming smartphone in your pocket, it will both feel *and smell* like you're in hell!
By the way, I hereby claim the name "BeelzeBATT" (TM).
Why does everyone want devices to be even smaller and lighter? Have we gotten unable to lift the ones that we have?
If I could get a smartphone that weighed twice as much, with all that extra weight devoted solely to battery, I would.
You know, I wouldn't mind it if my laptop smelled like fire and brimstone when I was grading papers. It would kind of help get me in the mood.
USB chargers are cheap. Leave one at work, one in car and one at home. I wish the smart phones will have a dumb phone mode that automatically shuts off everything other than the phone function when the remaining capacity falls below 3% or so and becomes a dumb phone. May be there is an app for this. But with touch screens there are no buttons and it is impossible to shut down the most energy consuming part of the smart phone, the screen.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Laptops? Smartphones? I'm more interested in applications for ultra-low power consumption devices. The devices I'm installing at work currently run off batteries for around 3-4 years at a time. I'd love to see these increased. I wonder what the shelf life / self-discharge rate of this new battery would be.
How about a camera? My camera only takes around 2000 photos on a single charge of it's two batteries. That's fine normally but a bit of a pain for multi-day timelapse footage where I invariably bump the camera while swapping out the batteries.
I already do that.
The car one is only 500mA though so not very good.
I am often not in my car, or at work, or at home. I have looked into getting a portable battery to carry around as well. The phones are already thin enough. My Galaxy Nexus could double its thickness and still be comfortable to handle.
There's a tension between the advantages of bigger displays and more battery capacity, and the reality that smartphones are stepping into a niche in people's pockets normally occupied by a cellphone the size of a deck of cards. I certainly can't fit anything bigger than a 4-inch screen in my usual jeans pocket.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What about a nuclear battery? I knew a guy who had one of those for his pacemaker. They would last for years.
Sure, but it could be 4" screen and as thick as a deck of cards and still fit in your pockets. If not, stop wearing your wife's/girlfriend's jeans.
If you are only doing phone calls and text messages, you do not need a smartphone.
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That won't be a bad thing for smartphones (I say that once you can go maybe 18 hours of average use between charges, that's enough), laptops could use more power though and electric cars sure as shit won't be wasting any of it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It may finally be enough to overpower "range anxiety."
Or on the other hand, to make cars lighter and/or cheaper. I considered EV-swapping my sports car late last year but went with another ICE because of the expense and weight. I figured I only needed 30 miles range, but it still would have added about 500lbs to the car and the battery alone would have been over $10k.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
but when the sulfur is mined to make black dragons not much will be left for battery's.
You don't 'need' lots of things, but that doesn't mean they can't help. Have you ever used something like Swype? It's far superior to any button phone I've used. The much larger display you get (due to no wasted space for meatspace keys) is a real boon, and the touchscreen itself is obviously more intuitive than messing about with arrow keys etc. for navigation.
Yes, they're sometimes expensive if you don't shop around, but I almost guarantee 'button' phones will be the exception rather than the rule in a decade's time.
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1) What's the sustained and peak current delivery? 10C? 25C? 50C?
2) Do you have to balance multi-cell packs like you do with current LiPo?
3) Can you use existing charging methods?
4) How much do they cost?
That's what I thought until I bought a double size battery for my Galaxy S3, it was horrible. Ended up with the Samsung larger capacity one that is only slightly larger, it's the battery they should have put in it in the first place.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
except your statement doesn't reflect on reality.
a: batteries have increased in both runtime and capacity
and b: there's nothing wrong with expecting that trend to continue as it has. There are 8+ hour laptops now that don't involve carrying a brick with you - in fact, the only brick-carrying laptops now are the gaming laptops and that's the AC power brick they use.
Aside from that, your statement is completely wrong.
Except that has nothing to do with why we don't see it.
Much of that has to do with that it's not a manufacturer's top priority, and also that just because a research battery achieves this doesn't mean it's ready for prime time. They still have to manufacture it into the form factors they want and test those, etc.
try getting a new phone, and you will experience what you have from the post you replied to. Under nonstop use new phones get about 8 hours now, which is a drastic improvement over previous models (even if we have a long way to go).
As 140manda notes is correct, use a USB charger in the car (that relies on simple USB cables) and take the cable with you wherever, if you need to. Then keep AC adapters wherever you need them. done.
Simple mobiles phones are all but extinct.
Go to walmart's prepayed phone section. I have one of those dinky $15 virgin mobile phones and that thing lasts about four days with no charges. Awesome phone
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
>all for a simple battery tech switch
Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I have used GS2 with a double size battery it was fine. Had the whole device been one thickness that would have been better. I have also handled an iphone with a case that doubled its thickness rather than bulging out in one place, that was also acceptable.
Yeah and it is a terrible computing device.
I have not made a single call with my phone in the last two days. I have used it for all its other uses constantly.
With what you suggest I would be better served with a wristwatch and no phone at all.
Regardless of how well it works or how safe it is you're just not allowed to use the word 'nuclear' with the public. That word is now contaminated.
For you swype might be, for me it is totally useless. It does not even have a Crtl key. Arrow keys are something I must have, hard to use vim/shell without. Trying to touch the right spot to edit text is simply an exercise in futility. You have to touch and then move the marker around, arrows are way more precise.
It seems only hackers keyboard has the buttons I want. What Android really should have is a way to say I want this keyboard for that application. Instead of one setting for the whole OS.
It drives me crazy that battery capacity is quoted everywhere in milliamp-hours (mAh)! Why can't everyone work in joules, so that we needn't constantly convert for voltage?
In a decade's time?
Are you a time traveler from 1999?
Touchscreen have been the rule the last 4-5 years. I'm not sure I know anyone who's bought a button phone this decade.
---- Sig. gone.
Have a look on Amazon or eBay for an "extended battery". It's basically an oversized battery and usually comes with a new back plate for your phone's case, to make extra room for the larger battery.
I personally wouldn't buy one due to the extra bulk but it might be what you're after.
I agree very much with the spirit of your post, since I'm a programmer (though would never dream of using a smartphone for that). However, in principle, and like you imply, smartphones should be able to add those custom keys, whilst with a real meatspace keyboard, you're stuck with the buttons they've given you.
I also agree with you about touching the right spot to edit text - it is a bit tacky. Arrows would be nice here (of course those can be on the smartphone too - don't have to be meatspace keys necessarily).
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My wife's RAZR MAXXXXXXXX routinely goes all weekend without needing to be recharged and it's two years old. It used to do better when first bought. She's a pretty heavy talker and casual game player too.
"They"? Either the device is doing work four times more consuming, your device can stand by four times longer, ...
Just wait, till my pocket-warmer app comes out.
I don't follow these things well, but what I really mean is that it'll be very hard to buy anything but a smartphone (by that I mean a phone without a meatspace keyboard).
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Just wait, till my pocket-warmer app comes out.
Lemme guess, Bitcoin/SETI@Home full screen client with 3D accelerated visualization?
... whatever
Hackers keyboard really does it quite well.
I even modify perl scripts on it with no real problem. Very handy when I don't have a laptop with me and something needs to be fixed or changed quickly.
Oh *hell* yeah.
Of course what I *really* want is a full-sized (15"+) laptop with a transflective or color e-ink screen, so that I could sit outside wherever I like when working, rather than having to hide away somewhere that I can actually see my screen. It doesn't even need very good specs, your average $300 crap laptop is already overkill for almost everything except games. Just give me a tool that lets me spend the day hiking and working in the woods and I'm sold.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually I can already use my laptop "for multiple days in a row without recharging (with sleep mode enabled between sessions of course)". It still has a total battery life of ~6-8hrs but if I only use it an hour or two a day it lasts for days between charges).
Some people can't do that.
I would then have to carry a laptop around when on call. More likely just all the time.
I do not check my email when I am not on the clock.
When not on call I even turn it off or put it in airplane mode quite frequently. Having a smartphone means I don't have to go back to the car for my laptop when something breaks. The monitoring system sends text messages, that again I only have notification turned on for when I am on call.
I should clarify, the "very palpable gains" I'm referring to are in laptop battery life, not battery performance.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
For the electric car,
We will need 500 miles average per charge. (10 hour drive at 50Mph). That is about the normal tolerance a person can take driving on a long trip. Now if it can store more energy... How long will it take to recharge it. if you go over 8 hours (over night) you it may still not be viable as a good way to replace the Gasoline cars. That said it may be able to give a little extra push to Hybrid cars so they can use more electric and less gas, because their batteries can store more.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If anyone was making phones in that form factor I'd be all for it, but it's small and thin or large and thin. I can get a battery case at least.
(That thickness might still be pushing it.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Nokia was researching a power-sipping basic phone that could charge itself off the inductive power of the cellular radio transmitters themselves, and still keep up because the power usage was so low. (Their basic models already do about 30 days to a 1 Ah battery.) I think that project died though.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Uhhhh, no, that isn't what I want.
I'm sitting in front of a computer that is orders of magnitude faster than my first computer. I have orders of magnitude more memory. I have orders of magnitude more storage than any of my first six computers.
And the stupid thing is, a little bit of crapware, moronic animations, poorly crafted scripts, and all the other trash found on the internet, can make my machine crawl. How does all this power benefit me, exactly, if no-programing lackwits can just WASTE all that power trying to decipher what the hell their page is supposed to be?
Imagine a four engine jet aircraft with so much power you'll never need it. So, some moron passenger takes control of one of your engines, and uses it as an air brake, or finds ways to point it in random directions, then gives it a shot of power.
Find the better power sources, then let ME decide what the hell to do with that power. Don't just ramp up all the software in the world to waste the power!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Indeed. I think I've been saying for around a decade "There's nothing wrong with EV's that a battery that lasts twice as long for half the price wouldn't fix'. Assuming this battery is identical to LiIon in cost per pound, the 4X energy density would mean that you could get 'extended range' Model S range at less than the price of a baseline one.
As is, the extended range batteries add so much weight to the vehicle that it adversely affects kwh per 100 miles - the 60 kwh battery is 35 kWh/100m, the 85 drops that to 38.
If an additional 25 kwh of battery currently does that, what happens if you 'only' double the total capacity, cutting the size/weight by half?
I really, really hope this becomes reality. Because I'd like to get an EV or a hybrid without breaking the bank, and it's my opinion that this is the last push needed.
I don't read AC A human right
Yay, hydrogen based fuel cells and sulphur based batteries. If ever the 'twain meet - hydrogen sulfide... the future will smell like rotten eggs and fart!
;-p
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Count me in. Minimum 900 lines vertical resolution (so 1600*900 assuming 16:9).. smaller is fine by me as long as the resolution is there. I often try to code outside on my deck. Even with a table umbrella I need to crank the brightness to high and it's still really difficult to see. Plus with the brightness cranked up I'd better have an extension cord nearby.
Can't game on it? Perfect. Less distractions possible while I work (plus I have tons of other devices for gaming).
Only way I can see it happening in general is if Apple starts with something like a MBA with a transflective display then other companies will take notice and want a piece of that market too. In the past I could have seen Lenovo/IBM making an expensive thinkpad that fits the bill, but I don't really see it as something Lenovo in its current state would venture off into.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Ok, so where is Ctrl?
I also need Esc and ~ and `.
While I can see a few niche cashes for extended use, laptop batteries have been getting longer and longer battery life over the past 10-15 years. Before that, 2 hours was considered a "typical" battery life (real usage: 1.5 hrs normally). These days, laptops that get 4+ hours aren't unusual at all, even 6+ real use hours.
Though, given the average person, a battery that lasts longer than 24 hours Is pointless - short of extended computing periods mobile with no breaks and such. After all, people need sleep, and sleep is generally a great time to put your devices on charge so they're ready to go when you wake up in the morning.
I've never understood the desire for week long battery life - for a smartphone, 2 days is generally reasonable (for the times you do accidentally forget to plug it in before bed). Even for a laptop more than 20-odd hours isn't generally as useful anymore.
Perhaps for a laptop the most useful thing would be to have a way to dock the adapter with the laptop - most are used near sources of power - it's just generally people don't want to haul piles of accessories at the same time. If the AC adapter came along, most needs for battery life vanish.
Even if this is a real breakthrough (not one of those "breakthroughs" in battery technology we hear about every other week), there is the problem: power density.They don't mention what it is, but given that the voltage is half of lithium - we can deduce that it sucks.
So at very least, that creates complications for electric car's design (like a need for a super-capacitor or such), plus charging time would suck too.
So, you're saying that we now have a battery that's got 1/50th of the energy density of an equivalent volume of petroleum.
Progress. Of a sort. I guess.
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500 miles average? Holy crap, what kind of commute do you make every day? Seriously, though, I've been driving since 1978 and have never owned a vehicle that could go more than 430 miles on a tank of gas. Very few people drive more than 50 miles in a day, your charge would keep even them going for two weeks.
I don't recall driving more than 200 miles at a stretch in the last decade (and then complained incessantly to my boss about having to do it for a week). If I were in the market for an electric vehicle I'd make sure it had a 100 mile range, and then use a gasoline vehicle for trips longer than that. I really don't understand why plugging the thing in at the end of the day is such an insurmountable burden.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
So you're basically saying that if a large segment of the market wants extended battery life, nobody is going to chase after that market?
Or are you saying that only a small minority of people want extended battery life?
I want both. I want a low power laptop with an extended battery life to use for surfing, email, etc, that only needs to be plugged in once I week. I also want a honking blisters-on-your-lap power-horse that causes the lights to dim when I plug it in to use for development and gaming. More efficient battery designs will help make both of these possible.
I'm certain there is a market for longer life low-power laptops. One of the things I absolutely love about my eBook is that I rarely need to remember to charge it. Once a month or so I put new books on it, leave it plugged in overnight, and that does it. I refuse to use a tablet for eBooks for that reason alone.
Hmmm...just run it as a hybrid with a diesel modified to run on french fry grease.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Considering the amount of sulfur that is being generated by oil production these days (http://folc.ca/sulphur_storage/waste_sulphur.htm) this could be a very good thing. ...but of course, ultimately, the sulfur needs to go somewhere.
I charge twice a week or so.
nokia 808. I use it mostly for web browsing and phone stuff... of course it will run out of battery in few hours if in constant use with screen on. really battery isn't much of an issue.. sometimes it goes pretty low and I need to refrain from using it but that's because I don't need to charge it every night so I might leave home with it at 1/4th charge and still have enough to do all the "phone" stuff and fifteen minutes of browsing ok.
but yeah, it's enough. quadrupling the range of a car is a much bigger thing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
People who care about creating rather than simply consuming?
You can have my blackberry when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
[...]there is the problem: power density.They don't mention what it is, but given that the voltage is half of lithium - we can deduce that it sucks.
They actually do, and they calculate it's four times that of Lithium-Ion.
Ok so we have nickel cadmium (NiCd), nickel metal hydride (NiMH), lithium ion (Li-ion), and lithium ion polymer (Li-poly) batteries, so this would make Sulfur Lithium (SLi) batteries. Actually that's a pretty cool name.
I don't use the car very often, in town, I prefer the bicycle. So it's basicly once a week for the weekend shopping. But if I really need the car, then it's going to be long distance. My parents live 400 mls from my home, my brother lives 660 mls away. Currently, they are out of reach for a one-day-trip on an all-electric car, I would have to stay overnight and recharge the car to get there.
This means that I would have to buy two cars, one for the short trips, and one for the long trips, which makes no sense. And an electric car just for the short trips and each time a rental car for the long ones is quite expensive to maintain. So it's still be better to buy a long distance going car, thus a gas engine, and use it also on short trips.
With an electric car with four times the current range, this changes. I could actually get an all-electric car and use it for both short and long distance.
Well 480 miles is fairly close to the 500 mile mark.
But if you figure it is going to take hours to recharge. You will need a larger capacity than a gasoline. Which can be filled up in a few minutes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Without volts, amp-hours is completely meaningless. If I have a process that can create a battery that stores 1.2Ah/g at 0.3V and I'm trying to beat a process that stores 0.3Ah/g at 1.2V then I've done nothing useful. Both store 360mWh/g (1296mWh/joules). In fact, if you look at phys.org you'll find that the fourfold increase is not in Ah/g, but in J/g. It actually has an eightfold increase in Ah/g but the voltage drops by half. So the article is right, but does a really bad job of explaining why.
Well, no, they tell us in TFA that it's four times the energy density than a Li-Ion battery. We don't use the Li-Ion's native voltage (about 3.8v nominal for most of them) to power electric cars, either. The battery is made up of multiple cells connected in series (or series parallel for a big pack) such that the resulting battery voltage is what you need for your application.
What the article doesn't mention is what the 'C' rating for these batteries would be. Current lithium-ion technologies these days had very good C ratings, but early ones did not. The early batteries couldn't discharge at more than about 1C (so a 1 amp hour battery could only deliver a current of 1 amp without damage) but current lithium-polymer batteries often have C ratings >30. I have a Li-Poly battery for my RC gear that's about the size of two cigarette packs that can output enough current to easily start a car. Can Li-S batteries be built to have high C ratings for both charge and discharge? If not then they are only really useful in portable devices.
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First-world problems.
EVs are only going to be a novelty so long as they're only viable if you own two cars.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Gas is oxidized. A totally different chemical process. No comparison. When they get working AIR batteries figured out then you are getting closer; but it is still different because 1 is a BATTERY and the other is just a controlled explosion.
If you are going to be that way, why hasn't petroleum progressed? They have done shit to make it perform better. There is way more energy density in nitroglycerin... or nuclear fuel rods... Why don't we have personal reactors like they talked about in the 40s? Must be a conspiracy to get us to buy more oil... ;-)
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>cutting the size/weight/and cost by half?
FTFY, assuming cost/pound stayed the same of course.
Now *that* would seriously kick-start the EV market. And start opening up the low end as well if you stuck with current ranges at 1/4 the cost, which are actually quite adequate for lots of people. Not to mention the effect it'd have on more city-friendly transportation like electric scooters, bikes, etc. which are currently right on the edge of widespread feasibility.
Of course that also brings up another factor - size. That's another significant factor in practical EV range, and they don't actually mention that in the article. If these batteries are considerably less dense than current tech (which micro-engineered materials makes a distinct possibility) then their kWh/liter capacity might not be as impressive as you would hope. Now you *could* make the car larger, but that carries a significant social cost anywhere that traffic congestion is an issue. There are ways to counteract that though, personally as gas taxes cease to be relevant I'd love to see them replaced with a milage tax applied to all vehicles, scaling nonlinearly with vehicle size and weight to reflect the specific vehicles impact on congestion (=new construction) and road maintenance costs (road damage increases super-linearly with vehicle weight)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
480 miles is an outlier. Most gasoline-powered vehicles only go about 300 miles.
That said, in the absence of fast charging, even a 500-mile range is a long way from being able to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The critical questions are:
If the answer to the first question is 12 hours, you need a 720-mile range, because you're not going to be able to charge it during the day. And if the answer to the second question is that after ten years, it is down to 60% of its usable life, then to achieve a 720-mile range at ten years, you would need a 1200 mile range when the vehicle is new. Add at least a 15% safety margin, and you conclude that we need somewhere approaching a 1400–1500-mile range before purely electric vehicles can fully replace gasoline-powered vehicles.
What this ignores, of course, is the potential for convertible vehicles. An electric vehicle with a trailer hitch can be trivially converted into a hybrid vehicle by adding a gasoline engine with a tank on a small, wheeled pod. The pod could connect to the car's electrical system, monitor the battery level, and charge up the batteries when needed. As far as the vehicle design is concerned, the only required changes would be a couple of additional power lines to a connector near the trailer hitch and a standard communication protocol for querying the battery level.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
A car is kept for convenience of transportation. If you're work commute is all you have a car for and it is short, take a bike or bus or start a van pool and don't bother with owning a car. This is my only issue with EVs right now. It would have to be a secondary car dedicated to driving back and forth to work. I would not be able to take it to my cabin, camping, las vegas, or any of the other thing I would like to do that would push the range to it's very max or beyond. The cost of a dedicated comuter would have to be very low, like under $10k USD. Otherwise I'll get a multipurpose car/truck/suv so I can do something other than drive back and forth to work.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Heck, let's push for 1080p, then we can share the screen with standard-resolution outdoor TVs and drive the price down - go ahead and tell me there's wouldn't be huge demand for such a thing among the barbecue-loving sports fan demographic. Plus then we could proceed to re-purpose the TVs as additional monitors.
I've got to insist on the size though, even a 12" screen is painfully cramped to program on at any resolution - either you can only see a few lines at a time, or you have to hunch over to see the tiny text clearly, with your eyes and posture paying the price. Maybe in protrait mode, but doesn't seem like anyone has yet really worked out how to do that gracefully with a laptop. Plus it needs to be big enough for a full-sized keyboard anyway. I can live without a numeric keypad if I have to, but those netbook keyboards are *way* too small for real work unless you have dainty childlike hands (though damn would I have loved one of those as a kid).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>all for a simple battery tech switch
Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.
So...what you're saying is, once a whole bunch of stuff has been done, and Tesla has approved a new type of battery, someone could take their Model S to the shop and simply have their battery tech switched, right? Sounds pretty simple from the consumer point of view - no more difficult than changing to winter tires.
Really, for the end consumer, this is no different than the switch from NiMH to Li-Ion in laptops. If you can't do it for your current one, you can certainly get it for your next one. If the chargers are made even half-decently, they can probably be upgraded, too. All those huge hurdles that are passed first are invisible to the end user.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
It already exists on iOS - it's called 'Maps'
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So a smartphone has been redefined to mean a touchscreen-only phone? Is your smartphone experience limited to iPhone? Rather than redefine a word, why not say "what I really mean is that it'll be very hard to buy anything but a touchscreen-only phone"
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Four times the batter life in a cellphone?
No, but maybe they could make the cellphone battery lighter and thinner, or make the phone more powerful, or make powerful phones cheaper.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Do you have a Windows phone? If so, you may also need Alt and Del.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Yes. As with anything it's very simple once all the work has been done.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You gotta get rid of your 3GS IPhone.
I use my phone as a tool and I get 2 days of life with the battery. That's about 2 hours of talk time, two dozen emails, a dozen texts and map usage as well as reading the news. And all that on what I would call a heavy OS (Windows Mobile 8).
If you use the phone for gaming I understand why you only get 4 hours.
Just wait, till my pocket-warmer app comes out.
Lemme guess, Bitcoin/SETI@Home full screen client with 3D accelerated visualization?
I was thinking of something even less useful. Something like the flashlight app but for heat generation:
You click on the "hand-warmer" icon and put the phone in your pocket. The app will run something like cpuburn (without giving credit of course) till the CPU hits 60C (adjustable in the premium version), then keep the phone at that temperature till the battery is dead, or till you take it out of the pocket and remember to shut it off (or once you enter a building with wifi in the premium version).
Four times the range of electric cars? World-changing technology.
Do we know for a fact that this new battery technology can be deep cycled, in addition to withstanding prolonged high current draw applications like in electric cars, boats, and planes? If so then yes it would be revolutionary, provided it doesn't cost four times more then the current technologies.
4x the density would come in handy for powering stealth drones, the military should be very interested in this...
Oh sure, now that I have finished replacing all of my Ryobi power tools with the new Lithion-ION set because the old tools cant use the new batteries, they come out with another new battery tech to force me to buy all new power tools again...
some of us have equipment taking up space that leaves little room for full pockets.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
you missed the point. one reason devices are the size they are is to fit everything in. theres very little unused space. if you could devote less space to the battery, that space can be used for other things. it can also be applied outside the realm of phones and tablets, such as wearable computers or the "wristwatchphoneputer".or it could simply make existing devices smaller. look at most smart phones.
myself, i find a 6 inch long brick, no matter how thin, uncomfortable in a pair of pants (cant use a holster due to my work envirnment; snag hazard). about the only way it can sit comfortably in the pocket of a pair of jeans is if the pocket is so deep it goes halfway down my thigh. its sillyness. why i like my primitive lil gophone thingy (nearly indestructable samsung blackberry clone, $20 from target that i popped my sim card into). its only about 1.5x3 in in size. compare that to most android devices which are at least half a foot long and wider than my phone is tall. two biggest reason i still dont have a smartphone: lack of need, and size.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Either the device is doing work four times more consuming, your device can stand by four times longer, or your device's battery is approximately four times lighter. Sure, retarded marketing drones are going to figure out a way to stuff four times the amount of adware onto a new laptop, but let's face it, they were going to do that regardless.
I predict they will follow Apple's lead and use the new battery technology to make devices unnecessarily thinner with no additional run time.
Yeah and it is a terrible computing device.
I have not made a single call with my phone in the last two days. I have used it for all its other uses constantly.
With what you suggest I would be better served with a wristwatch and no phone at all.
this post illustrates so eloquently the faulty thought processes you use.
you complain that a simple phone makes a shitty computer....no kidding huh?
and then say you never call anyone...and even you admit you really dont need a phone...
so im not really seeing the problem here in the devices. as usual....TPLBTKATC
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
my lil samsung net5 (i think....theyre up to net 10 now) prepaid lasts ~6 or 7 days on a charge. the best part was all had to do was take the simcard out of my old dead phone, and pop it in. then i sold the $25 prepaid sim that came with the phone on craigslist for $25. so my net cost was like 5$ plus the sales tax.
AT&T wanted me to pay for a replacement, or else use the "once a year upgrade"....along with the associated costs of a forced migration and upgrade...all in all i figure it worked out pretty good.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
not only didnt RTFA....you didnt even RTFS.
its right there in the summary dude...."outperforms existing lithium-ion batteries with four times the energy density."
it packs in 8x the milliamp hours (or wheverter it was) of li-ion, but has abotu half the output voltage size for size. the result: 4x the power density.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Now explain to me why all that work, which the typical user figures has been done by fairies or elves anyway, has any relevance to said user when he goes to get his battery changed? All he is going to care about is how much will it cost, how long will it take, and how much better will it be.
We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "simple" hammer or wheel isn't simple any more. There is serious research in both of those. And yet, I can still take a cash equivalent of one to three hours of my time and buy this device which literally has thousands of hours of research applied to it. It really is quite simple. Just like the tech switch between two different battery technologies.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Thank you - well said. And to add nothing of value, may I point out that the article is about a team of researchers who literally has done the work.
... whatever
You can always add one via bluetooth: http://www.amazon.com/Mini-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Smartphones-iPhone/dp/B00512Z28W
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Actually this is possible. Most of the battery smarts are integrated into the battery pack itself and the car is designed so that the battery pack can be replaced in a few minutes. The fact that the battery pack itself is made up of one of the most standard battery sizes makes it much easier for Tesla to change batteries once they're qualified.
Of course there's more to batteries than just capacity. Tesla has to worry about longevity as well as how quickly it can charge and discharge as well as safety.
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No, the question should be: How far **DO** you realistically drive in a day? The parent has a rather exceptional use-case, normal people wouldn't be driving 20 hours round trip to visit their parents every weekend.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Why own the second car if you're only going to do the exceptional drive once a month or so? You can rent a perfectly good vehicle that frequently for less than just the depreciation cost of a new second car.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
And you haven't bothered to reread what YOU wrote. Second line: "energy density", last line: "power density". These are different things you know... Man up and apologize.
Let me be clear, I'm not trivializing their work, and I truly appreciate what they and others like them have done - I wouldn't call myself a typical user. But one of the most amazing things to me is when something new is made so well that either people just change their habits because the new way is that much simpler or the new thing just replaces the old thing without any real thought having to be given to it at all.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
But what about volume? Weight is good for cars, planes and large things. But for consumer devices volume is more important.
They're also half the voltage, which means you need twice the number of cells, which means twice the amount of battery management to balance each cell - that bit increases cost and complexity and isn't good for the car industry, which like having many hundreds of volts to power their motors to keep the current draw down. The Tesla roadster has a 375V battery.
wikipedia says c/5 optimal up to 2c. If we assume c for acceleration a 60kwh battery pack would kick out 80hp. 2c would give 160. Not terrible.... but a paralell super capacitor would likely solve high battery drain and increase acceleration. super caps can kick out a few thousand c so you would only need a small one.
I carry the JetBoil because it's the safest, lightest, most reliable food option. And I'm considering UV light water purifiers over hiking in a lot more water. Why do I camp?
To enjoy the sights & sounds nature & avoid crowds. Why am I reducing even further? So I can bring my toddlers out there to enjoy the same thing.
Feeling hungry, painful experiences aren't something I schedule for: it's not survival training.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Some of us need our phones to communicate with females in addition to work functions.
By that measure how exactly is a battery replacement any different than a complicated system overhaul? It's all done by magic pixies behind the screen at the mechanic shop for most people. When replacing the single most expensive component of an EV I kind of doubt mechanic-hours is a big part of the expense.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First, the most likely mass initial deployment, once approved, will be in new cars. The net mechanic hours will be nil, but I expect the cost will still increase, at least initially. Like most people, besides mechanics, I don't care how many hours it takes, I care how much it's going to cost. The two aren't completely related.
Second, if someone decides to upgrade their car with the new battery, I expect the old one will get you some credit. Again, the question is how much will it help?
Third, the mechanic hours isn't the big deal, the big deal in an aftermarket upgrade is, "How long will I be without my toy?" Again, how much the mechanic gets paid, which will certainly be a only fraction of the overall cost, but the inconvenience of waiting for your toy (or your primary means of transportation) will be a factor.
And the difference between a major overhaul and a simple drop-in replacement is similar to the difference between buying a great new home and renovating your home while you live in it. One has a certain amount of pain and an immediate result (for some definitions of immediate). The other can take a loooong time, inconveniences you while it's happening, and invariably has hiccups along the way. Likewise, the new home may as well have been built by magic pixies, too.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
So would this be more or less energy dense as a storage medium than graphene ultracapacitors?
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/03/12/a-breakthrough-in-energy-storage-graphene-micro-supercapacitors/
What's the memory like? How many charge cycles are they good for?
Or should I just start working on building my portable micro thorium salt reactor?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Good point. I haven't done any serious work on anything smaller than a 15" in.. I don't know how long. I was just sending some email on my old macbook 13" and I couldn't imagine typing code on the thing anymore (though I did when I was younger). Different strokes for different folks though. I worked with a guy that would code on a 10" netbook in visual studio. I could see doing it for a short time in VIM or similar, but a full blown IDE? One of my buddies swears his MBA 13" is the best thing since sliced bread, but he spends most of his time in emacs. Another MBA lover uses Sublime 2 mainly. I'd like to see one of them try to be productive in xcode on those things.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
FTFY, assuming cost/pound stayed the same of course.
Of course, that assumption was in my first paragraph in the first post: "Assuming this battery is identical to LiIon in cost per pound".
And start opening up the low end as well if you stuck with current ranges at 1/4 the cost
It should be a bit less than 1/4 the cost to maintain current ranges with this theoretical new battery - dropping 3/4 of the battery weight will tend to increase efficiency, resulting in a touch more range. Of course, this would be more noticeable the longer ranged the original vehicle is, in the sense that more battery weight cut = easier to notice efficiency gain. A 60 mile leaf will notice the lost weight less than a 240 mile model S; battery being already proportionally less in the leaf.
On volume - while it matters, I think it matters far less than weight. You can gain a LOT of volume by expanding the 'engine' area. Heck, make the vehicle a touch higher, with a 'platform' of batteries on the bottom. You could make the vehicle very hard to flip that way.
On road costs - you're right about gasoline taxes, but I think you'd probably end up doing one of the mileage schemes(preferably odometer based, not spy-capable GPS), or charging a set fee up front when the vehicle is purchased. A F-350 type truck is going to do less damage to the roads if the owner only hauls it out every other weekend(or so) to go camping or for some emergency than somebody that uses most of an 85 kwh Model S's charge every day.
Your mentioning the size DID make me think of a few different potential issues though - relative power capacity(how FAST can these batteries discharge their energy?), charge capacity(how fast can you charge them?), and charge efficiency(what percentage is lost in the charging cycle?). LiIon is relatively extremely good at all three - you can charge and discharge them quite quickly for their size, and they're over 90% efficient. If, along with half the voltage they also have half the amp capacity for their size, you might only see them in long range EV's - with early hybrids a lot of research went into increasing current capacity, which isn't necessary for EV's and 'strong hybrids' that can go significant distances on battery power alone, but is an issue when you're only using the battery as an evener.
If you can't pull enough power for decent performance with a low range battery, you'll have to increase the size to get it, along with increasing the range.
I don't read AC A human right
Due to various factors I ended up with a motorola atrix. I kill the thing regularly in under 4 hours(I'm a heavy user, I'll fully admit), and I don't even get to enjoy 'thin' because I'm tough on the things so I have it in an otterbox. It's over half an inch thick overall.
I'd rather trade some of the armor for a thicker, larger base battery along with integrating some amount of the armor directly into the phone.
There's plenty of people out there, it's just that even though I do a lot of research, I always seem to get ambused by something. When I bought my truck, for example, it was TPMS. I normally run two sets of rims - winter and summer tires. Rims aren't that much if you're buying cheap ones, and when the tire shop wants $50 to change out the tires...
I don't read AC A human right
It's mainly our expectations that change.
What we considered unbelievable fast 10 or 20 years ago seems like a turtle with arthritis today.
I remember booting up my brothers tricked out Amiga 1200 (68030, 120MB hd, 8MB? ram) a few years ago, it completely shattered my memories of how fast and awesome everything was on the Amiga (and my memories of how awesome and fast everything was came from my floppy-booted A500 - I don't want to try to boot that one up again)
---- Sig. gone.
Currently, they are out of reach for a one-day-trip on an all-electric car, I would have to stay overnight and recharge the car to get there.
Okay, your brother is 660 miles away. That's about how far my parents were away from me before I moved to Alaska and they moved to Florida(previously Colorado/North Dakota and Nebraska, I move a lot). 660 miles in a day is a long, hard drive, at least for me.
Still, most EV's are capable of charging much faster than 'overnight' at specialized charging stations, such as Tesla's "Superchargers". They're advertised as being about to provide 3 hours of driving with 20 minutes of charging@120kW
Let's say you have a Tesla Model S with the 85kwh battery. 265 miles of range, .32 kwh per mile. You average 65 mph, and start at 4 am.
Right off the bat, you have 4 hours of battery life. To be safe, you stop at 7am for a spot of breakfast after hooking up to a local supercharger, 200 miles in. At 120kW, it should be able to fill a completely empty battery in 43 minutes, and you're not at empty. Last 10% can take a bit more, but you have plenty of time. You're back on the road at 8 am, go for another 200 miles and stop for lunch sometime around 11. 400 miles in, you eat at a sit down place(you need to take regular breaks when driving long distances), again hooking up to a charger. By 12 you're on the road again, drive until 3 pm when you take a 20 minute break(600 miles), charging your vehicle up 125 miles, going from 65 miles left to 190 just for safety, as you don't want to be rolling into your brother's with the battery warning you it's going dry. You're still to his place in time for dinner.
I don't read AC A human right
Handling peak is not a problem if you augment with a smaller battery designed to supply the peak power and/or use a supercapacitor. There is no reason that the entire battery system must be the same battery type. I know Tesla has patents covering mixing metal-air batteries with other technologies to supplament the power during peak usage and for regeneration.
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By "nuclear battery" I presume you mean a radioisotope thermal generator.
There are a few issues with those.
1: they provide power at a predetermined gradually reducing rate whether you use it or not. Fine for something like a pacemaker where power draw is likely relatively constant and tolerable for something like a spacecraft where the need for long duration would probablly justify combining a RTG with more conventional recharable batteries. Probablly not so good for a laptop or smartphone.
2: the material is expensive to produce and expensive to safely dispose of.
3: all the regulatory issues surrounding nuclear.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Just because the power density proves to be weak, these batteries will not be automatically excluded from EV applications.
If the practical energy density is 4 times of the current, it will be worth it to combine them with supercaps or smaller packs of high-power-density battery types.
Acceleration and regen will be handled by the supercap while average power-requirements satisfied by the sulfur battery. Naturally, the sulfur battery must be able to provide at least the average power needed but that may be solved by over-sizing the packs to an extent (providing more range than it would be strictly necessary).
Ye gods, what a horrible thought. I've mostly used xcode on a 40" screen and it *still* felt camped and cluttered.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, but most people will, statistically speaking, need to do an emergency trip at least once in their lives to pick up their kid who broke his leg at camp, to be there for a parent's final moments, or simply because they decided at the last minute to spend their three-day weekend in Florida. It isn't an everyday event, but it also isn't always an event you can plan for ahead of time, which means that a lot of people won't be willing to give up their gasoline-powered cars for all-electric vehicles—because they know that such situations do occur once in a while and that when such a situation arises, they won't want to be driving all around town trying to find a rental car company (or worse, a car dealer) to rent them a car on an emergency basis so that they can make that emergency trip.
This is what makes the electric car problematic. However, if all the car companies agreed on a standard connection scheme for external engine pods, the problem goes away. Each family would have one engine that once a year, they would put a quarter gallon of gasoline into, start up, and run until it is out of fuel. Such a scheme eliminates the biggest roadblock to electric car adoption—the impracticality of providing a battery that can handle those unusual long-distance trips.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"I really, really hope this becomes reality. Because I'd like to get an EV or a hybrid without breaking the bank, and it's my opinion that this is the last push needed." As long as Chevron doesn't buy the patent and refuses to allow auto makers to use it for EV or hybrids......
The problem with this:
1. It's potentially so huge that they wouldn't be able to afford it
2. The patent only lasts so long, then it's open for everyone.
I don't read AC A human right
Chevron is so huge they can afford almost anything. They other issue: True, the patent only lasts so long, as a patent holder I understand that. The term of a patent is 17 years, in this day and age that's a very long time, long enough for technology to be prevented from evolving better ideas and hardware....
keyword: 'Almost'. The technology would be so huge as to be very, very expensive to lock up in that fashion, given the potential for huge profits from open release. In addition, at this point there's a real possibility of a political backlash that would force the technology out anyways, such as China simply repudiating the patent.
I don't read AC A human right
Has anyone considered interim solutions, such as an optional small generator trailer for extended trips? That way you could have your short range electric car 90+ percent of the time, then adapt it for long-range on the rare occasions you need it. Actually owning one wouldn't be possible for city dwellers of ordinary means since they wouldn't have garages or driveways to keep them in, but there's no reason they couldn't be relatively cheap rentals. Pull up to a stand of them at a filling station, swipe your credit card to unlock it, hitch it to your car and plug in power/control cables.
I'm pretty sure that the poster does get that. They also understand that many interactive applications that would have once responded essentially instantly in real-time can now crawl inexplicably due to how many layers they're sitting on.
As for not running or installing it... People often don't actually get that choice any more.
The guys who really know about battery life are the electric RC model airplane flyers because they regularly use batteries from full charge to exhaustion in one flight of a few minutes duration. They are using lithium polymer now and, depending on the motot/propeller combination are getting 5 to 10 minutes of flight from a fully charged battery.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
If you have root and want to invest a couple of bucks, you can get Tasker and its plugin, Secure Settings, and can make a very simple profile that automatically switches to the desired keyboard for the app you are currently using (and then back to the default one after you close the app, if you want). One of the many, many useful things you can do with Tasker. Alternatively, you might be able to do the same for free with Llama, but I haven't tried it and I don't know if Secure Settings works with it. But Tasker is way more powerful anyway.
> Find the better power sources, then let ME decide what the hell to do with that
> power.
Well, yeah, there's this:
http://source.android.com/
You could start with cyanogenmod, see what they're up to.
Egg-zactly! The question is - why is it so hard for so many people to understand something so simple?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br