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!
