I read an interesting news story on PC Pro’s website today about a battery defect that has caused some iPod Nanos (sold between September 2005 and September 2006 in Japan) overheating and burning. Looking at the dates, this would be the original first generation Nano. Don’t worry it’s not all of them, in fact it only appears to be a small number of units that have had a problem.

It did get me thinking however, Li-ion (Lithium ion) batteries are everywhere, they’re in our phones, our laptops, our camera, mp3 players... literally everywhere. These kind of incidents are not unheard of, a couple of years ago there was a spate of laptops that went up in flames. It turned out that these cases with laptops all shared Sony batteries which were from a particular batch that were found to have a manufacturing defect. I won’t blame Sony though, as any company is capable of releasing something that has a manufacturing defect. Instead I’m more interested in Li-ion batteries from a technological point of view.

Follow up:

Mobile technology has been developing fast for a long time, products are getting smaller, faster and lighter. However the technology that powers them does not seem to have advanced quite as fast. If you look at mobile phones and the 3G network, when 3G phones first hit the market their battery life was significantly inferior to GPRS based phones. As time has gone on, battery capacity has increased, but so has the power efficiency of 3G chipsets. This quest for greater performance per Watt and lower power consumption is instrumental in providing longer battery life (ecological arguments not withstanding).

When you think about it though, we have been using Li-ion batteries for years now and seemingly we are no nearer to moving on to the next battery technology. There have been some stories of research into new micro hydrogen powered cells, but these are a long way off being on the market. Li-ion batteries remain volatile, and while the manufacturing processes will be a lot more advanced now than it was 5 years ago, the concept is still the same.

So here we are in 2008, Intel are talking about their new i7 chips, nVidia and ATi are competing to release ever more powerful graphics cards, but the humble battery seems to be forgotten about. Seeing refinements rather than reinvention, yet despite a few incidents, the Li-ion battery remains tried and true. Maybe that is why the technology is here to stay.