Treo Extended Battery Power: The Next Generation
Considering the extensive daily use that Treonauts make of their smartphone it should not be surprising that a Treo extended battery has been among the top 3 bestselling Treo accessories for your Treo for over 8 months now.
During this time I have learned that advances in battery technology are generally very slow and that new even longer lasting batteries are still a few years out. However, innovation does not necessarily need to come at the power level as a company called Moixa Energy has demonstrated with the release of their USBCell AA NiMH 1300mAh battery – the world’s first USB-rechargeable AA (battery pictured below).
The AA USBCell flips open at the top of the battery to reveal a USB tip which can be plugged into any free USB port on your PC, a powered USB hub and even some approved NiMH mains chargers. The battery reaches a very reasonable 90% charge after 5 hours of USB charging and an LED light indicates when it’s fully charged.
More importantly Moixa Energy is already working on developing similar USB-rechargeable batteries for other devices such as our Treo with the option to either plug a spare battery directly into your USB port to recharge (below left) or to leave your Treo on while plugging the battery (below right).
Assuming that USBCell were able to produce a standard 1800mAh or high capacity 2400mAh battery for the Treo (which I’m sure they will) I will be among the first to buy one to save me from having to carry my portable battery charger when I travel.
Treonauts are always looking for powerful innovation…
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Comments
Perfect. Lets me chuck my battery charger and just have two batteries, which I have now anyway.
Thats another 200g of my existing Treo 'kit' that I carry around with me.
But the Treo's usb cable already gets a trickle charge without the power adapter plugged in. The red light doesn't light up, and the charge icon on the screen won't appear, but if you leave it connected overnight (to a powered usb port), it'll recharge the battery.
Connecting the battery directly probably won't be much faster.
What would be really nice is if this had a 'female' USB connector so once it's charged it could be plugged directly into any Treo to recharge it. Or does someone already make male to female USB adaptors?
What if I don't want to travel with my laptop? That's part of the reason for having a treo. I hope they also provide a non-USB, phone-independent charging option. And even at that, it would need to have higher capacity, lighter weight, and/or better fit than the Seidio for me to switch.
It'll be a long time before they can create batteries with built in chargers that are comparable in storage to current batteries. The charging electronics take up too much space.
With the AA, they have a 1300mAh NiMH battery. You can get a 4500mAh NiMH battery. This implies that over 2/3 of the space is taken up by the charging electronics. Since a Treo battery is larger, and the electronics stay the same size, we might be able to get a treo battery that had 1/2 the life of an extended battery, or 1200mAh.
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