Research Promises Drastically Increased LiOn Capacity

Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.

On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law [wikipedia.org]. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.

Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/a__joKjnZPo/research-promises-drastically-increased-lion-capacity

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