4 ms·

The major leap happened, and it is Li-Ion technology. It improved by magnitudes on any important metric over previous battery technology.

• WhitneyLand 12y ago
  Are you sure about that? I don't recall my battery life increasing by "magnitudes" when li-ion became widespread.
  • afterburner 12y ago
    I'm guessing Li-ion batteries were always the battery tech used in smartphones, so it might have been harder to notice. I know once I put some Li-ion AA batteries in an old camera I realized I may never need to replace those batteries again.
  • digikata 12y ago
    That's because product designers used the improved performance to reduce package volume and weight.
  • johansch 12y ago
    See this graph of energy density over time: http://electronicdesign.com/site-files/electronicdesign.com/files/archive/electronicdesign.com/content/content/74000/74000-fig4.gif http://electronicdesign.com/site-files/electronicdesign.com/... from http://electronicdesign.com/power/here-comes-electric-propulsion http://electronicdesign.com/power/here-comes-electric-propul...
    • te 12y ago
      Where does Li-ion plateau on that chart? The two preceding technologies (NiMH, NiCd) also "doubled every ten years" until they didn't.
      • lacker 12y ago
        The plateau seems to happen once a technology is no longer the winner, and research moves on to the next.
  • aidenn0 12y ago
    You clearly never used a NiCd camcorder.