StoreDot demonstrates its 30-second smartphone charger

by Mark Tyson on 8 April 2014, 10:58

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How long does it take you to charge up your smartphone? These essentials of our modern lives often seem to run out of juice at the most inopportune moments and even if we get the chance to top up the battery at a work desk or café it might not be enough. With so many manufacturers making handsets with non-removable battery packs we are left to carry around battery packs such as the FUEL+ 9000, if we have planned ahead. Wouldn't it be great if when we managed to get access to a power supply it took less than a minute to top up to 100 per cent?

The Wall Street Journal reports that an Israeli start-up called StoreDot Ltd has developed an extremely fast smartphone charger. The company revealed its prototype charger, which for now works only with the Samsung Galaxy S4, in a video published at the start of this week. In the video you can see the S4's battery level go from an in-the-red 25 per cent to a tip-top 100 per cent in about half a minute. That's fast. If you have you ever watched your phone battery charging icon to see if you can detect progress it was a waste of time until this device was invented.

It's not just the charger that's different; StoreDot uses a custom battery too.

What is the technology behind StoreDot's prototype? The team at the company are from the nanotechnology department at Tel Aviv University and they apply this knowledge and related cutting edge science to speed charging times. In particular StoreDot has developed "biological semiconductors, made from naturally occurring organic compounds called peptides, or short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins," to provide this battery charging speed boost – using its own battery design.

StoreDot plans to make batteries/chargers for other smartphones and release the devices in late 2016. CNN reports that the battery prototypes are about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but the team is also working to reduce this burden on portability. Also a key question arises about whether the StoreDot made battery stamina is equivalent to the supplied standard Li-Ion battery from the smartphone manufacturer.



HEXUS Forums :: 15 Comments

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Sounds good, I'll be avoiding it though because of it's Israeli links.
Nice, but it all looks a bit lab/experiment quality - 2016 seems quite ambitious and as said no mention of stamina, recharge cycles, power requirements etc.

Just thinking about the average smartphone battery taking maybe 2 hours to recharge off a 1.5A 5V charger - so about 7.5W, to do that in 1/240th of the time (30s) is going to need hefty incoming power, something like 1800W, surely that's going to need rather beefier connectors and cables than the current micro USB can handle…
I highly doubt the battery has anywhere near the capacity of the original. As some quick numbers the S4 has a 2.6Ah battery. Which at 3.7v is 9.62Wh

so 75% of this charge is ~7.2Wh

To charge this amount in 30 seconds would require a … 865Wh power supply assuming 100% efficiency!

Got to wonder what voltage they were charging at / to but at the standard 5v that would be 173A
Even at 12v it would be 72A

What's more likely is that it's a higher voltage but low capacity battery and the samsung kernal has standard battery calibration so the voltage change required for the phone to report it's charged is nothing for the battery.
I'm probably showing ignorance, but surely ramming that much charge into a battery isn't going to do it's longevity any good at all? Plus given the relative difference in heating between a “slow” and “fast” phone charger I would have thought that the phone itself would get nice and toasty.
DemonHighwayman
Sounds good, I'll be avoiding it though because of it's Israeli links.
Political stance, or worried that it'll be bugged?
crossy
I'm probably showing ignorance, but surely ramming that much charge into a battery isn't going to do it's longevity any good at all? Plus given the relative difference in heating between a “slow” and “fast” phone charger I would have thought that the phone itself would get nice and toasty.

Political stance, or worried that it'll be bugged?
Both! but mostly political.
I have to agree about pushing that much power so fast to the battery, it must have some kind of damaging effect to the cells.