Coming Soon To The iPhone 7s, 0% To 100% Battery Charging In Under A Minute?

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battery
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Photo: Apple

Sick of waiting for your iPhone to finish charging? By 2017, your iPhone could completely charge from 0% to 100% in just 5 minutes, in a portable, consumer-friendly package that will make long charging times a thing of the past.

An Israeli startup called StoreDot has demonstrated new technology at Microsoft’s Think Next Conference that showed how, using standard smartphone batteries, they can speed up charging a smartphone to full to under a minute.

If you know how batteries work, this is a tricky problem. Basically, batteries are like filling up a water balloon: at first, you can really just blast the water in there, because there’s plenty of empty space, but the closer to full you get, you have to trickle water in to prevent the whole thing from just blowing up on you. This is why batteries take longer in the last 20% to charge than the first 80%.

StoreDot’s essentially saying that they’ve figured out a way to blast energy faster into the balloon, and not slow down when they need to trickle up the top. That’s a bold claim, and even more impressive, StoreDot says the technology would use the same batteries as existing smartphones, and the chargers would only cost twice as much (and since they’re inexpensive, at least on smartphones, that means basically nothing).

Sadly, right now, the prototype is about the size of a laptop charger, and the technology probably won’t be ready for primetime until 2016. Could Apple snatch them up before them? It wouldn’t be the first time Apple has bought an Israeli tech company, after all.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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