At CES, progress comes a step at a time

Breaking the battery barrier
Batteries remain a weak link. While most are now recyclable, many can’t be reused. And because newer devices demand so much energy that they can irretrievably wear out a battery after only a few hundred charging cycles, the need for longer battery life is as much an environmental concern as it is a key to consumer satisfaction.

“The market is in demand for more and more energy,” said James Prueitt, vice president of engineering for MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc., which is working on making fuel cell technology small enough to work in tiny devices like cell phones.

As devices suck more power from standard lithium-ion batteries to fuel more internal components — think of wi-fi and Bluetooth radios — “the number one complaint is the battery dies by midafternoon,” Prueitt said.

Energizer Battery Co. is promoting what it touts as a legitimate breakthrough with a zinc-air cell called Prismatic, which it says promises much longer battery life and greater design flexibility for makers of small devices. Instead of generating electricity by the chemical reaction of two substances packed internally, such as lithium and cobalt oxide or lithium and iron phosphate, zinc-air cells draw one of their main components — oxygen — from the air.

The technology, which packs significantly more energy density into a battery with little known environmental impact — isn’t new; it’s been used in hearing aids for decades. But researchers have struggled to make the form fit energy-intensive consumer electronic devices.

Energizer claims to have solved that problem, which would represent “one of the holy grails of the industry,” said Ross Dueber, president of ZPower Corp., which is promoting a rival zinc-silver battery technology.

But zinc-air cells still face a big hurdle: They’re not rechargeable, at least not without physically replacing the spent zinc in the battery. As a result, “I don’t see it anywhere in the short term,” said Dueber, who said zinc-silver cells were a better bet because they could be recharged.

Manufacturers of consumer devices say they’re desperate for something to give customers a full day’s use from battery-driven products.

“We’re in a crisis” when it comes to consumer devices, said Jerry Hallmark, manager of mobile-device energy systems for Motorola Inc. “We have to make the devices more efficient,” he said, as much to protect the environment as to serve consumers.

Still plenty for the tech-heads
All that green talk isn’t to say CES is short on the shiny new machines that traditionally draw tens of thousands of gawkers:

• OLED-A, a trade group of companies developing super-high-definition Organic LED television screens, showed off a prototype of a foldable active-matrix OLED display, or AMOLED, created by Samsung. “Foldable” means just that: You can close it up on itself like a book.
• Fujitsu Consumer Products Inc. promoted its recently announced Lifebook N7010, a laptop with two screens. The second screen pops up from the top of the main screen to provide iPhone-like multi-touch functionality.
• After miniature projectors for mobile devices small enough to fit in your pocket emerged last year, Samsung came to CES aiming to up the ante. The company’s MBP200 Pico Projector adds a media player. Users can project their video directly from the 2.2-inch-wide box to a screen as large as 50 inches, Samsung says.
• Sony Corp. also showed that it had managed to squeeze a Web browser into a camera. The Cyber-Shot 3G can go online through wi-fi.
• The Secure Digital Association announced specifications for the next generation of SD cards, providing for up to 2 terabytes of storage on the same SD interface millions of consumers already use — enough to store 100 high-definition movies. Hours after the association made its announcement, Sony and SanDisk Corp. had a reply: Their rival MemoryStick will also reach 2TB.

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