Coming Soon: 10-Minute Battery Charges

New battery technology from Toshiba will allow a notebook battery to hit 90 percent of full charge within 10 minutes, and is on the brink of becoming reality.

Perhaps you heard last year that rechargeable battery tech was about to get turned on its head by Toshiba’s SCiB (Super-charge ion battery) tech. Another year has passed, and I’m still waiting hours for my laptop battery to charge as I remain tethered to the wall, but this year, Toshiba says SCiB is almost for real.

At the Toshiba booth at CES, reps showed off a laptop running a functional SCiB battery which could be charged to 90 percent of full within only 10 minutes. But won’t lifetime suffer from all that fast-charging? Toshiba says the lifetime of the battery will actually significantly improve, meaning three-year old laptops will no longer turn into plugged-in-only devices as their batteries fade to nothing.

Though Toshiba made no promises for when this technology would begin showing up in consumer batteries, a company representative assured me they’re “on the roadmap,” meaning a definite release date has been secretly pegged by Toshiba already. I’ll make a guess that late 2009 wouldn’t be unreasonable. If the price is right, sign me up!