[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Rather than continue to guess, I went and googled up the Science Daily article that the original post was clumsily summarizing.

The article says: "The new battery will be able to endure more than 10,000 charging cycles -- 20 times more than the current 500 cycles of today's batteries."

Great research there, Papa. No claim there of any other virtues than tolerance of high charge rates and the ability to operate after 10,000 charging cycles. Only that it will be easy to make and, inferentially, similar in cost to the conventional Lithium battery as we know it.

But since 10,000 charging cycles is, for many applications, effectively infinite - most devices with such a battery would either fail for other reasons or become completely obsolete before the 10,000th cycle - the value proposition is excellent for such a battery if indeed it isn’t dramatically more expensive to make.

The only downside I see to the adoption of this is that certain people who love to complain about the non-replacibility of batteries in Apple’s products will have to find some other hobby horse to ride.

[GeronL]

If it charges 20x faster, that is the thing that deserves the attention

[morphing libertarian]

I don’t know when battery technology will surpass the gas engine, but itt will happen.

I just made a flippant comment to those who come on every thread about electric cars and wail and gnash their teeth.

Let’s build some nukes.

[Paul R.]

Well... I use rechargeable batteries a LOT, and the early failure rates are dismal indeed. If the researchers are claiming 10,000 charge cycles, what we’ll probably get in “real” production is 1500, on average. That is, 1500 charge cycles if the contacts don’t corrode first, etc. This is a welcome improvement, but no miracle.

The charge rates are still limited by charger capacity.