Sony says non-exploding lithium polymer laptop batteries coming soon
You can bet Sony's got tons of engineers working on the problem of how to keep their laptop batteries from exploding. In a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Sony Electronics president Stan Glasgow mentioned that laptop manufacturers are likely to switch from lithium ion batteries to lithium polymer sometime in the near future. The advantage of lithium polymer apparently is that the lithium is contained in gel packs, which can be squeezed into random spaces (instead of being cramped into compact cells), and thus apparently doesn't have the propensity to, um, explode. That being said, it appears that Apple has already struck its foot in the lithium polymer camp, given that it's keeping MacBook and MacBook Pros juiced up with these newer batteries (pictured), which were not subject to recalls. Of course, there's always zinc and fuel cell batteries, which still toil away in research labs across the globe -- it doesn't really make much difference to us which one wins out, so long as we can somehow realize that dream of untethered beach-blogging for 12 hours straight.
[Via Slashdot]
