Why Battery Life Maybe Measured In Weeks!
Battery life is a major hurdle for phone companies like Apple or Samsung to overcome because as functionality and features for the phone go up, the battery life goes down. But there are solutions for this, a teenager who studied at Harvard University came up with a nano-tech battery, the new e-ink phone called the Yotaphone which has an e-ink display like the Amazon paperwhite and a wireless charger that can go 30ft away and still charge through walls and clothes.
The Teenager
The teengager is called Eesha Khare, for a contest she made the ‘supercapacitor energy storage device’ which is made of carbon fibre and metal oxides. The battery can charge at a faster rate than before and can hold battery life for longer. This battery won her The Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award last year. She has not just abandoned it after the contest, she has been developing it and trying to make it charge up in under a minute. Though, she has not sold the device to a manufacturer she has said that Google has approached her recently.
The Yotaphone
The Yotaphone is a dual screen phone but with an e-ink display like Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite but with a bright and colourful display. The idea of the phone is that you use the e-ink screen to check your notifications, read and reply to messages and only to use the main (with colour) screen to watch video, play with apps and so on. It’s a smart idea but the aesthetics of the phone has been thrown out the window.
Wireless Charging
One of the biggest new developments in battery technology is wireless charging, but not the ones that has you sticking your phone on a pad all day. Ossia Inc.’s new project Cota is the future of wireless charging. It can charge multiple mobile devices wirelessly over a distance of 30ft, through clothes, walls and doors. This means that you can setup the stations in your house and work and your phone will always be charging. The device is still not perfect and most of the energy is lost between the station and your phone. The station has a 1 watt limit, which is just enough to charge a phone. Whilst research continues we just have to wait till we don’t need cables anymore.
As usual, feel free to share you thoughts below.
Which of these ideas do you like the best?