Batterylife's Activator

Batteries are becoming the limiting factor in the world portable gadgets. Battery technology may have matured over the years, but it hasn\'t made the leaps and bounds seen in the computer market - in fact the useful energy density of a battery has barely changed. We\'re promised fuel cells in the near future, but before they arrive we can only hope for some miracle scientific breakthrough or buy Batterylife\'s Activator, a patch to stick on your battery which might increase its capacity by 30%...


Backtracking to the last sentence, Batterylife\'s claim is diluted as soon as you look at the details a little more closely. \'Lithium ion cells deteriorate when fragments of the electrodes start to break off...these fragments hinder the normal flow of ions making a higher resistance path\' and therefore reducing the performance of your battery. They claim their product helps to move these fragments out of the flow hence improving your battery\'s life. We\'ve come some way from a product that will improve the performance of your battery to a product, which will help regain some of the performance your battery has lost since it was new. Even so, it still sounds good.



We\'re going to test the Activator on a laptop whose battery is somewhere between 6-12 months old, to see if it does any good and draw some conclusions about what we find, if that\'s what you came to read then skip ahead to page three. Before we get there we\'re going to analyse Batterylife\'s claims about how their product works, there\'s some physics involved, be warned!