BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — As ever, NTT DoCoMo has some weird new tech to show off at the Mobile World Congress. This year, it’s a cellphone battery that charges fully in just ten minutes. and if you’re really in a hurry, you can get enough juice to last a couple of hours in just a minute.
I asked the NTT guy how they manage to do it without the phone catching fire. He told me the secret is in the battery, which uses lithium titanium oxide instead of hopelessly old-fashioned lithium ion.
This allows the battery to be force fed a huge five to six amps at a time, which makes look like a competitive hot dog eater compared to the anorexic battery in your phone, which picks over and nibbles just 0.5 amps before pushing the rest to the side of its plate and reaching for another cigarette.
As ever with NTT DoCoMo’s crazy new inventions, there’s no telling when or even if this tech will make it into our phones. The mix of materials inside sure sounds expensive. And charging your phone via USB will be a thing of the past.
