December 19, 2007 at 10:40 pm · Authored by Ricky · Filed under Research

The biggest downside to all these latest fancy handsets is that there is limited space for power. Typically the mobiles with the most killer feature set offer the worst battery life. After all, there’s more on the phone to drain that battery. Researchers have spent years trying to come up with a new battery technology to power our portable little friends, with no real progress being made.

Until now. Researchers at Stanford have come up with a way to make existing lithium-ion (check your phone, it’s likely using one) batteries last up to 10 times longer. The trick is in silicon nanowires. You can read the whole article here, but basically, the difference is that currently we use carbon nanowires, which fracture, and Cui, the lead researcher, is using silicon nanowires, which don’t fracture.

If brought to market, this would be a really phenomenal battery breakthrough. Just imagine if cellphone standby times were measured in weeks, not days.