Can ZPower solve users’ demand for longer Battery Life?

August 22nd, 2008

Last week the market analysis company Canalys published a report about the trends of the smart phone market in Europe. Amongst other things the report stated that 38% of phones shipped in Europe had GPS and 58% had Wi-Fi. There were quite a few other interesting discoveries in their research release, but one of the main concerns were that owners were not making full use of their phones for fear of draining their battery and not be able to make calls.

As our phones have been blessed with more ‘high end’ features’, which drain the battery life faster and the fact that we like to use these features a lot, it is no wonder that we are in need of some improvements in this area. You might say that the battery technology has not been able to keep up with new and more demanding features, and of course the change of user pattern - After all, we are still using the same Lithium Ion technology that came out in the 1991 in Sony’s laptops. Obviously there have been a lot of improvements since then, but the technology remains the same and the question is, if this technology has now become as good as it possibly can be.

Recently, the company ZPower has introduced a new line of rechargeable silver-zinc batteries, which they claim can offer 40% more runtime in portable devices. Yesterday ZPower’s chief executive was interviewed on CNET (Click here to see the full interview)  where he told a little bit about the new battery technology that ZPower plans to bring out sometime next year. The technology has been around for years, but has primarilly been used in military applications, and now ZPower has brought it down to the size where it is possible to use it in portable devices like mobile phones. 

Environmentalists will be happy to know that ZPower batteries have no heavy metals or toxic chemicals and that as much as 95% of the primary elements in these batteries can be recycled and reused - And to encourage people to do so ZPower will be offering financial incentives. Apart from the obvious benefits for the environment this will also help ZPower to make up for the high prices in silver making this an economically viable project. 

If you are a barablu user (of course you are!) then let me just remind you that we have done a lot of work to minimize the amount of battery that barablu consumes - In fact the actual application hardly takes up any battery at all, but since many users connect via Wi-Fi, the battery can be affected - This is also why we have come up with the Auto-roaming feature - So you can seamlessly switch between 3G and Wi-Fi, and this way make sure that you won’t drain your battery more than absolutely necessary.

Written by
michael thomsen

Filed under: Technology
Tags: 3g, Auto-roaming, barablu, battery life, battery technology, canalys, GPS, silver-zinc, smart phone, Wi-Fi, ZPower