Double the Battery Life!

Now here is something to get excited about. For as much as I love mobile phones, I'm still frequently annoyed by the (lack of) battery life of mobile phone batteries.

We have dozens of phones at our office that we use to test mobile games and other applications and it feels like we are constantly charging the damn things. To make matters worse, all the chargers are different and inevitably, the one phone you need to show a demo is out of batteries. Argh.

So, needless to say, I was very excited to hear at CES that Angstrom Power recently completed trials of a fuel cell system that effectively doubled talk time and the overall battery life in mobile phones.

The trial involved a Motorola SLVR L7 and a fuel system that fit inside the phone without modification. The Micro Hydrogen platform uses a new fuel cell architecture, micro-fluidics and a refillable hydrogen storage tank to provide power. Angstrom believes the technology could be built into phones as early as 2010.

Stuart Robinson, Director of Handset Component Technologies at Strategy Analytics Ltd, had this to say about the results:

"Our research shows that insufficient battery run time ranks as one of the leading considerations in the adoption of handheld devices with rich multimedia functionality. Development of Lithium batteries is too slow to meet the growing energy demands of cellular handsets. Angstrom's achievement, the world's first successful integration of micro fuel cell technology into a standard mobile handset, demonstrates the potential of micro fuel cells to provide a better solution for demanding mobile energy applications."

The addressable market for Angstrom's technology is estimated to exceed a billion units annually by 2010.

I had never heard of Angstrom before. Founded in 2001, and based in Vancouver, BC, Angstrom Power raised $18 million of private equity financing led by VantagePoint Venture Partners in late 2006. There are certainly other firms competing in this space, with one local Seattle company, that I had heard of, Neah Power Systems, looking to crack the same code.

Let's hope these guys get this figured out quickly. I'm often at a loss trying to explain to some non-techie why it's possible for people to deliver TV to mobile phones but they can't figure out how to improve the battery life.