The charger that boosts battery in seconds

A Samsung smartphone has just been recharged from being nearly out-of-juice to full capacity in less time than it takes to boil a kettle.

The Israeli start-up behind the demo, Storedot, has shown off a similar feat before.
But a previous demo posted online eight months ago involved a battery many times thicker than the handset itself as well as an outsized charger – making the tech impractical for real-world use.
This time round the phone involved is no bigger than normal, and the charging dock is pretty slim-line as well.
There’s a couple of trade-offs involved, but being able to recharge devices about 100 times faster than at present has the potential to revolutionise the way we use mobile phones, tablets, laptops and wearable tech. Storedot’s ambitions, however, are even larger.
He adds that phone-makers from the US, South Korea, China and Japan have already begun talks to either license or buy exclusive rights to the tech, and that he has 17 meetings at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with “all the major” players.
But Mr Myersdorf also acknowledges that there is still more work to be done before his tech is ready for consumers.
Storedot has a 2017 goal of matching the energy density – the amount of energy stored per kilogram – of its own batteries and the lithium-ion ones commonly found in existing handsets.
The firm’s prototypes currently deliver about a third of that rate, meaning the normal-sized handset used in the demo only held 900mAh of juice, and would have to be recharged several times a day were it deployed now albeit only taking two minutes to do so each time.
The company also showed off a 2,000mAh battery, which took three minutes to recharge, but the phone that housed it had been made 5mm (0.2in) thicker than normal to accommodate its girth.
By the 2017 deadline, Storedot also aims to halve its current charging times.
Source: BBC