101–110 of 112 posts
Seriously, device thickness is for 2016 like camera megapixels was for 2006, it's totally unnecessary to keep pushing it and it hurts usability, yet, it looks good in the numbers you show the consumer, so companies keep doing it.
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American government funded research that turns into a business creating jobs in America sounds like a reasonable outcome to me. After China stole solar, we need some other industry with growth potential. Edit: Do the down voters care to comment? Anti-nationalism, anti-capitalism, or what?
The issue is publicly founded research aleviate the burden of the investment from the private sector, while selling the right to the new technology to a sole private entity. The whole thing could, unless the government blocked it, be sold to a private chinese company down the line.
It wouldn't be the first battery company out of MIT to go that route. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123_Systems
If our trade policies assume a free market then we open the door to these situations. There's no free trade treaty to blame when China out maneuvers more developed countries like this. Perhaps the solution is to become more mercantilist instead of worshiping free markets.
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You mean like the Moto Z and the Z force? Z has a 2600mAh battery and is thinner. Z force has a 3500mAh battery for a 1.8mm addition of thickness. Motorola has done this before with the Droid Maxx.
Yeah, I'd love to have something like that for every phone. They aren't completely the same, but they are close enough for me. I don't think I've seen any other phone with a choice like that, though.
Is it the case that the research was publicly-funded, but the profits are now being privatized?
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Yeah, I'd love to have something like that for every phone. They aren't completely the same, but they are close enough for me. I don't think I've seen any other phone with a choice like that, though.
You can get extended battery packs for most phones with a removable battery. I had a Galaxy S2 a few years back that would last 4-5 days of moderate use on a charge with one of them, though it made the phone about 1.5cm thicker.
A) I don't want to buy something to upgrade my phone. I'd rather it come like that in the first place.
B) Everyone says "nobody wants a bigger battery", but if everyone just buys them after the fact, how do the manufacturers know? Sounds like they are just passing the buck
C) Many phones don't have a removable battery, or it voids warranties to do so.
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> I don't think swappable battery stations would be useful, since batteries are damaged by deep-discharging them, and swap-stations would end up with too many damaged batteries that way. That depends - just design a tamper evident battery that contains enough electronics so that when you swap it you pay for not just the power to recharge it, but also the damage you did by using it. So long as the fees are upfront and…
Could work, though I think it would add operational complexity ("hey, I paid to swap in good batteries, but these barely held a charge!"). I wonder if it's possible to have a battery go into a low-current mode when it gets down to $n percent charge ("Warning: time to recharge or swap! You have $x Amp-hours left! Going into econ mode."), then disconnect itself completely when down to $m (where $m < $n, and going lower…
That is part of the business model: the batteries know how much charge they can take, so when one no longer has full capacity you sell it for less. Someone needs to work out what the price levels are so that people don't feel cheated, that is tricky math, but I think we know enough about battery life cycle (over different usage) to come up with something. It will probably be a multi-level thing, a "new battery" will be slightly more than a "slightly used" one, and have a longer safe range before they charge you abuse fees. A "new battery" that is never abused will after so many uses without abuse degrade to "slightly used", the users of it as "new" will pay for the normal wear and tear. If you are not trading in every time the battery needs charging you just pay a small monthly rental fee - if you never abuse your battery when it wears out you can trade in a "no longer usable battery" for a "new one" for just the normal trade in fee. If you abuse the battery you just pay for the actual costs that your abuse did to the battery.
It could work, the real trick isn't the technology (that is a simple computer watching the recharge and discharge rates). Even the business model isn't that complex (though the math is tricky). the hard part is convincing everyone to use your standard form factor for batteries. If every different car has a different battery in some way this will not work. It is only when you have one (or a few) models of battery that everyone has that this can work. There are only 3 grades of gasoline at the gas pump - if your engine would be fine on 60 octane gasoline (like my antique tractor) you just have pay for the more expensive 87 octane anyway. If your engine needs 100 octane (some race cars) - too bad you have to buy your own drum. The same way you need to ensure there is a one size fits all battery. (if you want more having two is an option)
Is it the case that the research was publicly-funded, but the profits are now being privatized?
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Note that having a compressed energy ready for rapid release is exactly equal to handling an explosive in your laptop :) There are a lot of experimental batteries that have like 5x capacity of the current Li-ion ones, but melt and explode when heated or crushed, which makes them effectively useless. This is one of the hardest problems in high-capacity batteries - to avoid "rapid unscheduled heat dissipation" and the…
> Note that having a compressed energy ready for rapid release is exactly equal to handling an explosive in your laptop :) Animals can store a lot of energy, but they don't tend to explode with that energy when damaged. Are there techniques that could be learned from cells that could be used to make safer electrical batteries?
Is it the case that the research was publicly-funded, but the profits are now being privatized?
The reason things are set up this way is that the government is great at funding long-term research, whereas industry is pretty terrible at it, for the most part. But then when it comes to making an invention actually useful to people and producing it at a reasonable price, the government is awful and industry is amazing.