More battery thoughts

I got some positive feedback on my last phlog entry on Mastodon. Thanks! I

wanted to follow up with a few quick thoughts:

After re-reading the entry today, I was wondering if I was exaggerating the

extent to which this situation was a recent development (I was thinking in

particular of cordless home telephones, which were ubiquitous before mobile

phones displaced landlines, and I'm pretty sure always had device-specific NiCad

batteries). But I decided, that, no, things really were better in the past.

Give me a pack of fresh AAs now and I could enjoy full mobile use of:

• The first mp3 player I ever owned, an iRiver with 256MB of storage which ran

off a single AA battery! I bought it circa 2004.

• The Panasonic Discman I used to carry around before I bought the above iRiver.

I probably acquired this around 2000ish.

• The Gameboy I played as a kid in the early 90s.
• The Walkman I used as a kid in the early 90s.
• The pocket transistor radios that my parents used before I was born.

We're talking easily over 30 years of mainstream portable entertainment

technology. Of course many of these devices have become obsolete now for

non-battery related reasons, but those reasons evolved very gradually over

timespans much longer than the service life of a typical lithium ion battery.

I suspect that getting satisfying mobile use out of a first generation iPod is

nowhere near as appealing a proposition, even though mp3s are still a long way

away from joining CDs and casette tapes. Heck, I have one of those nice Sandisk

Clip mp3 players that probably is something like five years old, and it won't

play for even a whole hour.

So while my lamentations really were justified, I was a bit remiss in not

pointing out that there are some positive developments in battery space. There

• are* conveniently sized and shaped cylidrical rechargable lithium batteries

which are kind of like next gen AAs, like the 18650. They have been around for

many years, but have been oddly unsuccessful at penetrating people's awareness.

As far as I know they are mostly used in flashlights and e-cigarettes, in both

cases particularly for products aimed at enthusiasts/tinkerers. Probably not an

appealing choice for a mobile phone, but I do feel like it could be more widely

used than it is thus far.