Difference Between Nickel Cadmium, Nickel Metal Hydride and Lithium Ion Laptop Batteries

Nickel Cadmium (Ni-Cd)

Nickel Cadmium (Ni-Cd) batteries were the standard technology for many years, but today they are old technology and new laptops don't use them anymore. They are heavy and very prone to the "memory effect". When recharging a NiCd battery that has not been fully discharged, it "remembers" the old charge and continues there the next time you use it. The memory effect is caused by crystallization of the battery's substances and can permanently reduce your battery's lifetime, even make it useless. To avoid it, you should completely discharge the battery and then fully recharge it again at least once every few weeks. As this battery contains cadmium, a toxic material, it should always be recycled or disposed of properly.

Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH)

Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) batteries are the cadmium-free replacement for NiCad. They are less affected by the memory effect than NiCd and thus require less maintenance and conditioning. However, they have problems at very high or low room temperatures which might actually cause them to catch fire. And even though they use less hazardous materials (i.e., they do not contain heavy metals), they cannot be fully recycled (yet). Another main difference between NiCad and NiMH is that NiMH battery offers higher energy density than NiCads. In other words, the capacity of a NiMH is approximately twice the capacity of its NiCad counterpart. What this means for you is increased run-time from the battery with no additional bulk or weight.

Lithium Ion (Li-ion)

Lithium Ion (Li-ion) are the new standard for portable power. Li-ion batteries produce the same energy as NiMH but weighs approximately 20%-35% less. They do not suffer significantly from the memory effect unlike their NiMH and Ni-Cd counterparts. Also, their substances are less hazardous. Because lithium ignites very easily, they require special handling. 

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Game Boy Celebrates 25 Years of Fun Times!

Happy birthday GameBoy (aka Game Boy)!

Game designer ,Gunpei Yokoi, came up with the Game Boy on April 28, 1980 after watching a businessman playing with an LCD calculator. He also is credited with inventing the D-pad.

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What is a Feature Phone, a Basic Cellphone and a High-End Smartphone?

This LG full QWERTY device is one of many Feature Phone's sold through Verizon Wireless.

A feature phone is a mobile phone which is priced at the mid-range in a wireless provider's hardware lineup. It is intended for customers who want a moderately priced and multipurpose phone without the expense of a high-end smartphone. A feature phone has additional functions over and above a basic mobile phone which is only capable of voice calling and text messaging. Due to the quick progression in capabilities, current mid-range devices in a carrier's lineup today may be more advanced than previous high-end devices just a few years ago.

Difference Between a Smartphone and a Feature Phone.

While a feature phone is a low-end device and smartphone a high-end one, there is no standard way of distinguishing them. Smartphone and feature phone are not mutually exclusive categories. A complication in distinguishing between smartphones and feature phones is that over time the capabilities of new models of feature phones can increase to exceed those of phones that had been promoted as smartphones in the past. Because technology changes rapidly, what was a smartphone ten years ago may be considered only a feature phone today. For example, today's feature phones typically also serve as a personal digital assistant (PDA) and portable media player and have capabilities such as cameras, touchscreen, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi, and mobile broadband access.

Back in 2009, a significant difference between smartphones and feature phones is that the advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) on smartphones for running third-party applications can allow those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than is typical with feature phones. In comparison, feature phones more commonly run on proprietary firmware, with third-party software support through platforms such as Java ME or BREW.

The most popular Basic Cellphone manufacturer is Nokia. Pictured is the Nokia 1661 for sale at T-Mobile.

It should be noted, though, that many of these proprietary software platforms, such as S60 (Nokia, Samsung and LG), UIQ (Sony Ericsson and Motorola) and MOAP(S) (Japanese only such as Fujitsu, Sharp etc.), which were based on Symbian, were gradually phased out in 2009-11. During that period the manufacturers shifted their lineups, usually the high-end handsets first then followed by the mid-range and low-end offerings, to advanced APIs such as Android and Windows Phone. 

As of 2010-present, while advanced APIs appear on smartphones first, they are gradually moving to feature phones; for instance as of 2012 smartphones (especially flagship phones) are often the first to run the latest OS version (i.e. the HTC One X which ships with Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, while the midrange HTC Desire C has Android 2.3 Gingerbread). Often OS is no longer a distinguishing factor, such as the Nokia Lumia 900 smartphone and Lumia 710 feature phone, both of which run Windows Phone 7.5, however the Lumia 900 has among other things a better camera and a larger screen. 

Another example is the HTC One X and HTC One S, the flagship and upper-middle offerings of HTC's One series lineup, and the HTC One V; all three ship with Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, however the One X and One S have dual-core processors which allows them to run future Android updates whereas the One V is a single-core which will be unlikely to enjoy an OS update. The only advanced smartphone OS that has never appeared on a feature phone so far is Apple iOS, as all of the company's handset releases using iOS (the iPhone) have always commanded smartphone (premium) pricing, and as Apple has not licensed iOS out to other handset manufacturers.

The most popular High-End Smartphone, the Apple iPhone5.

The price difference between a smartphone and feature phone remains one of the widely used attributes to distinguish the two devices. As of March 2012, the big three Canadian cellular service providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus) offer the choice of purchasing smartphone upfront for $450–650 CAD on "no term" (month-by-month), or by signing 3-year voice and data contract to waive most of the handset purchase cost (there are no waivers for a voice-only plan). The no term price for a feature phone, by contrast, is typically half or even less than that of a smartphone (topping out at $300 CAD), and this cost can be waived with a 3-year voice-only plan. Below feature phones are basic mobile phones or "dumb phones" which are intended for pay-as-you-go customers and often retail for $0. Smartphones, while improving their features and capabilities, however, have always maintained their price advantage over feature phones.

Pricing structure is still a grey area, for instance at Rogers Wireless, the Sony Xperia ion was originally released with smartphone pricing in June 2012, however poor sales led to that device being demoted to feature phone pricing by December 2012 of that year. By contrast, the iPhone 4 8 GB which debuted in mid-2010 is still sold as a smartphone by Rogers as of December 2012 (which reflects Apple's success in keeping the price of its phones constant).

Scientific Breakthrough - Engineers Create A Battery Made Of Wood

Wood fibers are coated with carbon nano-tubes and then packed into small disks of metal. The sodium ions moving around in the wood fibers create an electric current.

The battery is being developed at the at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Dr. Lianbing Hu heads the group that developed a new battery made with wood at the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland in College Park. Heather Rousseau/NPR

I really wasn't sure what a wood battery would look like. I knew you could make a and wires, so I figured maybe they were doing something similar with a block of wood.

Wrong. The "wood" is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nano-tubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

Now, wood is comparatively cheap. So is sodium. , head of the battery project, says he's hoping the new batteries can be scaled up so they'll be useful for storing the vast amounts of energy generated by solar arrays or wind farms.

"I think this wood-based storage can play a very important role as a low-cost solution," he says.

Nick Weadock just graduated from the University of Maryland and helped design the new battery. Heather Rousseau/NPR

Right now the battery is just a prototype. Hu and his colleagues will need to tweak the materials before they have something commercially viable.

There was something else interesting about the new battery: One of the authors on the describing it in Nano Letters was an undergraduate. What's up with that? How does a young college student wind up co-authoring a paper in a major scientific journal?

Hu says Nicholas Weadock was an engineering major who expressed an interest in working in the lab. "In the very beginning he was helping students, my Ph.D. students actually, correct some English grammar," says Hu. A lot of Dr. Hu's doctoral students are from outside the U.S. "During the process ... he asked a lot of interesting, very insightful questions, not only about the language, but about the science behind it."

Weadock says he had originally wanted to work on wind power, but became interested in energy storage technology and wanted to show Hu that he could be a contributor to the lab.

"I came to the group meetings, I made suggestions, and I was ambitious enough to show him that I can do my own project," he says.

Weadock is off to the California Institute of Technology in the fall for graduate school, where he plans to continue work on energy storage. Hu says the positive experience with Weadock has convinced him to recruit more undergraduates to his lab.

by Joe Palca, npr.org 

Electric Vehicles More Polluting than Gas/Diesel Cars

Nissan Leaf. All electric vehicle at charging station.

Electric vehicle buyers have a new reason to feel conflicted about their forward-thinking purchases, thanks to a recent study which suggests EVs are potentially more polluting than their gas-powered counterparts.

According to The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the environmental ramifications of EVs from well to wheel are significant. The study took into account all factors along the lifecycle of an electric vehicle, from the toxic battery ingredients like nickel and copper to the energy sources which power the grids that ultimately charge the cars' batteries. "The global warming potential from electric vehicle production is about twice that of conventional vehicles," one part of the study concludes, indicating that energy developed from lignite, coal, or heavy oil combustion makes it "counterproductive to promote electric vehicles."

One part of the finding suggests that EVs driven in Europe have an environmental advantage over other global communities. "Electric vehicles powered by the present European electricity mix offer a 10 percent to 24 percent decrease in their global warming potential relative to conventional diesel or petrol vehicles," the study says. Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche echoed that sentiment. "According to our results, a battery electric vehicle, with electricity produced by the power generation mix we currently have in Europe, compares favorably in the magnitude of 10 percent or so with diesel," he told the BBC.

Sources: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (click for abstract), BBC; thanks to Shahdad Kelishadi for the tip!

by Basem Wasef | popular mechanics

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Interesting Article About Sandy Exposing The Need For Electricity Storage Technology

Because of some previous plans, I had already planned to be offline most of this week. Which is really kind of lucky considering that I don't have any power, Internet, phone, mobile phone and questionable water at my home in Midland Park, New Jersey (way, way north near the New York border).

Thank you to those who have sent messages inquiring about my status - my family and friends managed to pull through relatively unscathed. We are very very fortunate. I even managed to get out of New Jersey for a trip to Denver, by driving four hours down to Baltimore to the airport there a few days after my original flight was supposed to depart. I felt very guilty about leaving, but my husband sent me packing so I could recharge my emotional batteries with a little singing therapy. That's a story for another day and another blog.

The first thing I did when I arrived was start looking at the news and the photos that you're all seeing - of the water-logged Jersey Shore, of Moonachie (where the levee broke at the hit of the storm and flooded much of the town), of sewage-flooded Hoboken, where I am hoping my friends have been evacuated, and of places like Breezy Point, Queens, where all those homes burned. Many of us in haven't see those reports yet. Maybe that's a good thing.

We all pretty much all expected to be without power ... for a few days. What we didn't expect was all the side effects of this particular storm. One that is turning out to be particularly challenging for people like my husband is the enormous demand for gasoline that has people lined up at all the pumps that are open. Many gas stations still are not because you need electricity for the pumps, obviously.

There are generators and chainsaws eating up that gasoline at an enormous rate. And it's not that easy to get more. Which makes it hard for my husband to keep clearing trees off people's houses. It's a vicious cycle.

The ripple effect is mind-boggling. It's one big reason that cell phones have been really compromised in the region - you need it to power the towers and the substations that haven't been damaged or flooded. But with the power not expected to be on for maybe two weeks more (if we're lucky), should you conserve that gasoline for phones or for things like pumping water to houses or to run generators to keep refrigerators and furnaces running as the weather turns colder?

I got to thinking about all this on the plane yesterday, because I actually had a hard copy of a press release about energy storage that I was considering for a post. I printed a bunch of them on Monday, just in case.

It leapt to the top of my pile when I started thinking about all the batteries that are being eaten up in New Jersey.

Right now, the market for energy storage is pretty nascent, but a new report from Pike Research anticipates that it will grow to $30 billion annually by 2022 - spurred by advances in pumped storage, compressed air energy and advanced batteries. The total capacity of energy storage systems worldwide by that time would be about 56,000 megawatts, according to the report.

"One of the key challenges for energy storage will be to deliver cost-effective solutions for these grid stability issues," said Pike Research analyst Anissa Dehamna. "Market structures still must catch up with the market to acknowledge the value of energy storage to grid operators and power consumers. At the same time, the industry must solve issues around business models and the supply chain in order to successfully scale up and fully commercialize these emerging technologies."

I've written previously about the role that energy storage is playing in new on-site generation systems using renewable technology such as solar and wind. Places like California are increasingly requiring storage as part of project proposals. In places like New Jersey, where the sun is finally shining, this could be incredibly useful. You could, in theory, distribute storage throughout neighborhoods so in the event of a major storm, people would still be able to function for a while. And the water companies could keep pumping water, which is probably the most major concern for my area right now.

In my mind there is much to be gained by investing in energy storage regardless of whether or not it is tied to the grid.

It is pretty obvious that the load we place on an antiquated grid is heavier than it can manage, and it is only going to get worse.

Right now, our current back-up plan is to run generators that cough up plenty of pollutants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is giving New Jersey a break on its clean air rules in order to cope with the storm's aftermath, but isn't it time that we started thinking about better alternatives?

This particular Jersey girl is sending waves of love back to her home state, where so many lives have been altered. How many more lessons like this do we need to start reconsidering some of our vital infrastructure?

Article recommended by Bill Gates

By Heather Clancy for GreenTech Pastures

New Battery Can Charge 120 Times Faster

The Chevy Volt

A group of Korean scientists, working at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), have developed a fast-charge lithium-ion battery that can be recharged 30 to 120 times faster than conventional li-ion batteries. The team believes it can build a battery pack for electric vehicles that can be fully charged in less than a minute.

One of the main issues with rechargeable batteries is that they take longer to recharge as their physical volume grows. When you recharge a battery, it charges from the outside in — so the larger the battery, the longer it takes. You can somewhat avoid this by breaking larger batteries into smaller individual cells, but that technique only gets you so far.

The Korean method takes the cathode material — standard lithium manganese oxide (LMO) in this case — and soaks it in a solution containing graphite. Then, by carbonizing the graphite-soaked LMO, the graphite turns into a dense network of conductive traces that run throughout the cathode. This new cathode is then packaged normally, with an electrolyte and graphite anode, to create the fast-charging li-ion battery. Other factors, such as the battery’s energy density and cycle life seem to remain unchanged.

These networks of carbonized graphite effectively act like blood vessels, allowing every part of the battery to recharge at the same time — thus speeding up recharge by 30 to 120 times.

Now, for all intents and purposes, this is a standard lithium-ion battery that could be used in smartphones and laptops — but the network of conductive traces does increase the overall size of the battery, so it’s probably better suited for use in electric vehicles (EVs). Obviously, an EV that can be recharged in under a minute is pretty crazy — though it still only brings them in-line with their gas-guzzling cousins. Being able to charge quickly is convenient, but it doesn't get around the fact that li-ion battery packs are incredibly expensive — and the Korean carbonized LMO battery certainly won’t be cheap.

I could see fast-charge batteries as being a nice option for smartphone and laptop users, though: You could have a normal battery and a fast-charge battery, and switch in whichever one makes most sense for your daily routine. Fast-charge batteries could be convenient in wireless mice and keyboards, and other gizmos, too.

Other Great Reads

• Save Big on Laptop and Phone Batteries
• Complete Guide: The Different Battery Types and Technologies
• Top 5 Laptop Battery Myths

Edited by Limewit Tech Blog
Written by Sebastian Anthony
Photos courtesy of UNIST

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Why do laptop batteries lose power over time?

Over time, laptop batteries degrade and lose their ability to hold a full charge. This occurrence is quite normal to all rechargeable laptop and netbook batteries. Today, laptop batteries are designed with modern materials that hold their charge much longer than in previous years. Even so, the average life of a laptop battery varies from 1.5 – 3 years.

The number one reason why laptop batteries lose power over time is due to its declining capacity. Simply put, the amount of charge a battery can hold will gradually decrease due to usage and aging.

The second reason is low quality battery components. Not all batteries are made the same and when you combine this with the declining capacity your batteries life can be cut by as much as 30%. It is very important to choose a battery that is composed of quality materials and backed by a minimum 1 warranty to ensure longevity.

You may have noticed that your battery lasts less and less as the years go by. If your battery, when fully charged, lasts under 2 hours, then it’s time to replace.

So remember, choosing a high quality battery will ensure that you get your money’s worth and will keep your laptop portable.

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