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Comment by sazpaz | Hacker News Reader

We've been following Moore's Law for decades now. What's really stopping us from a real mobile and internet-of-things revolution is a breakthrough in charge storage devices. I wonder how long until one of the many "new discoveries on X material to create new battery" can be practically feasible and marketable.

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Moore's law actually helps battery powered devices too. As the switching elements get smaller they consume less power. The problem really is that we've at the same time increased our demands on the devices to the point where the gains were undone.

5 years ago cell phones had a longer battery life than smart phones do today.

This is why I love my Nokia 100.

I don't want or need a smartphone, that's what my computer - or on the go, my laptop - is for.

I want a reliable phone that will get me out of emergencies and sticky situations.

A smartphone that runs out of battery in a few measly hours, overheats, and has terrible design flaws simply does not do the job I want it to do.

Admittedly I had a very bad experience with an early model of HTC Desire, so I'm more untrusting of the things than most.

Smart phones have gotten pretty good about scaling power usage. When your not actively using them they can hold their charge for a long time (even while they are still listening for incoming calls). The only time you run into short battery life is when you are actually them to do intensive stuff. On the rare case where some background app is eating your battery life, you can even feel your phone get hot and know you should reboot it (or close the offending app).

If you read any green tech blogs, there seems to be a constant stream of battery breakthroughs in the lab. But why do they not materialize in commercial batteries? Li-ion has been stuck at about the same level for more than ten years.

I was trying to find some meta research on what fails with the commercialization of these technologies. There's probably hundreds of breakthroughs per year, or at least that's the impression you get. You'd think at least some of them could be scaled up in a relatively straightforward way. Or maybe it's just press release hype and the research hasn't been going anywhere for fifteen years...

I've always so defer the exact same thing. I always thought it would make an interesting blog; someone who just goes through the "breakthroughs" of five years ago and actually contacts the researchers and writes up what went wrong.

Who's with me?

If you write the blog I'll read it. Does that help?

It could require a lot more effort as there's no glamorous press releases to just copy paste - you'd have to contact people who might not be so willing to advertise their failures, and there might be rules preventing them from saying much.

But oh how it would be interesting! Just aggregate some blogs with a five year delay so there should have been ample time to have developed something.

Or just even write a few longer investigative pieces on why technology X failed to materialize despite immense promises.

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