Android devices have been rapidly advancing over the last few years and continue to do so with new technologies that seem to be popping up overnight. Processing power, graphics quality and security feature have all found their place on many mobile devices, health sensors and waterproofing are also newer innovations that are fast becoming commercially available at reasonable budgets.
These improvements are welcomed by all and they do tend to provide a lot of practical features to our phones. However there is still one area in which there hasn’t been a lot of focus but definitely deserves the attention. The limitations created by current generation batteries is often a great concern to users. Many device reviews have a separate heading in which they test the endurance of a devices battery and it becomes a big deciding point for many users.
Manufacturers and developers have both realised this needs some attention and so we see that battery saver apps are a dime a dozen on the Play Store. They all have similar feature which include turning off unnecessary features when not in use and providing statistics on which apps are your biggest consumers, but at the end of the day none of them really have a truly significant impact on your battery life.
So it’s probably a good idea for someone to go out there and rethink the battery, that’s exactly what StoreDot has done. While it is still in early development the project does have a working prototype and a well-planned future that promises to deliver a commercial product by approximately 2016.
The batteries work using StoreDot’s organic nanobot technology, which they have developed and are using in several other design projects as well. According to StoreDot they have used their resources to create a Multi-Function Electrode, MFE. One side acts like a super capacitor which allows very fast charging, while the other is like a lithium electrode that provides a slow and stable discharge. The electrolyte is also modified with their nanobots allowing for the multi-function electrode to be more effective. StoreDot claim the battery has similar self-discharge to current Li-on batteries, but there are some difficulties they have to overcome.
As you can see in the video below StoreDot’s battery does not look like something you really want to have at the moment due to its rather big size. They have confirmed that they are working on the size of the battery and the charger as well which is roughly the size of a laptop charger and are confident that the size of both components will shrink to more reasonable size by the time their commercial release arrives. Their goal is for users to be able to just pop the battery in to their existing phones without much modification to the device. The demo below shows a Galaxy S4 with the StoreDot battery equipped, the battery is much bigger than a standard S4 battery, but the capacity of StoreDot’s battery is also smaller than the Samsung counterpart. StoreDot will also be working on increasing the capacity while maintaining the efficiency.
Check out the video below to see StoreDot demonstrate their battery’s charging time, the device used is a Samsung Galaxy S4.
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