“The next breakthrough smartphone, or maybe the one after that, might not have a traditional battery as its sole source of power,” Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton report for The New York Times. “Instead, it could pull energy from the air or power itself through television, cellular or Wi-Fi signals.”
“Although computer chips have doubled in speed every few years, and digital displays have become significantly brighter and sharper, battery technology is largely stuck in the 20th century,” Chen and Bilton report. “Device makers have relied on incremental improvements to battery power, now usually supplied by a decades-old lithium-ion concoction, in combination with more energy-efficient chips and screens.”
“Engineers at Apple even tried for many years to build a smarter battery by adding solar charging to iPhones and iPods, a former Apple executive said. And they have continued to experiment with solar charging, two people who work at the company said,” Chen and Bilton report. “For its wristwatch, Apple has been testing a method to charge the battery wirelessly with magnetic induction, according to a person briefed on the product.”
“Another experiment at Apple has involved charging the battery through movement, a method that is already used in many modern watches,” Chen and Bilton report. “A person’s arm swinging could operate a tiny charging station that generates and pushes power to the device while walking, according to a patent filed by Apple in 2009”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz,” “Dan K.,” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]