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Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and larger, higher resolution displays. However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn't kept up. There are a few major battery suppliers but Sony is currently an underdog, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors — Samsung (SDI), Panasonic and LG Chem — each command around 20 percent of the market. In an effort to change that, Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony's batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times. The company is now working to ensure that the new battery chemistry is safe enough for commercial use.
Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away.
Actually it's 40 years - and it's been 40 years away for the past 60 years or so. However batteries are a bit different in that there are regular claims of working prototypes with capacities 2-10 times the current limit and/or recharge rates similarly improved yet none ever seem to make it into a commercial product and yet the capabilities of Li-ion are slowly improving. What I would love to know is where all these ideas fail (as so many clearly have). Is that they cost too much to make, aren't safe in everyday environments or that the improvements claimed are woefully optimistic? or is if that by the time they would come to market Li-ion has improved itself to the point where there is not much difference in capability?
At least a battery made with sulfur can be extinguished with something other than a Class D fire extinguisher, unlike lithium.
Lithium fires are the sort of bad news where best practice might be "throw the burning laptop through the window, and then work on putting out the secondary fires."
Kid-proof tablet..
It doesn't matter if you can make a battery with very high energy density but with a very short lifespan.
And sulfur-lithium cells have had a history of short lifetimes. It will be interesting to see if Sony has beaten that - or at least gotten them to last longer than equivalently priced lithium cells of more conventional design.
In general, I'm skeptical of claims of massive improvement in batteries. As with new solar systems, if every single in-lab claimed battery improvement all were genuine and implementable we'd have solves all the world's energy problems years ago.
On the other hand, commercially available, UL-approved (so they don't void your fire insurance), solar panels are now cheap enough (WITHOUT subsidies) to beat grid power on price/performance on sunny sites in the temperate zone. The control and conversion electronics has participated in the general Moore's Law style semiconductor technology improvement curve (and will also benefit from economy-of-scale as deployments continue to ramp up). The third piece of the off-gridding puzzle is storage...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The reason why consumers "prefer" bigger phones is not because people want a change of clothing with bigger pockets... but the faster CPUs and such require more area to deal with heat.
Of course, I've been told by someone in the industry that nobody would give up CPU and RAM for a smaller phone, but it would be nice to have a phone about the size of an iPhone 4.
In general, it seems phone form factor choices have went from candybars, flip-phones, sliders, keyboards, clamshells... to the typical all-glass touch screen smartphone that fundamentally looks the same. across all models. Is this better? Not really.
Then, there are capabilities built in. Phones are powerful enough that one can build in an entire desktop OS. The Motorola Atrix and Atrix2 are examples of this. It would be nice, with the USB 3.1/USB 3 standard to be able to plug a keyboard, mouse, and monitor into a cellphone, and use it as a desktop. If one creates a dedicated network GPU server that allows devices to send graphics commands, and gets back streaming video (think OnLive for the LAN), then the device wouldn't need to have much in the way of video, and a phone could drive a standard monitor. This essentially allows one device to perform multiple roles, similar to how Microsoft's Surface Pro can work as a tablet, as well as function as a full desktop computer.
Right now, smartphones seem to be stagnating. We have faster CPUs and payment methods, maybe even touchscreens that register pressure on them... but those are evolution, "0.1" or "0.0.1" style improvements. Having the ability to use the phone as a desktop via USB-C, or even as a document repository, similar to Intel's personal server concept, would be a real "1.0" advance. Especially if BlueTooth could be used with a hard drive to get respectable transfer rates, at least USB 2.0, if not greater for short distances. Barring that, there are companies saying they could get 1GB/sec from infrared, so maybe update the IrDA protocol and have that as an alternative to wireless.
Lots of ways phones can be improved on, but there are no players interested in doing anything to affect the status quo right now.