Will Nano Technology extend the lives of our beloved technology?

Over dinner tonight the discussion turned to batteries. Yes, I know what you are thinking....not the most exciting dinner conversation, but it actually got into quite a conversation.

We were actually talking about Pleo (see yesterday's posting) and I was telling everyone that it has about a 1 hour battery life and starts to get sleepy when the battery starts to run down.

Two of us at the dinner table love gadgets....I mean we absolutely love new techi gadgets and that , unfortunately, involves charging and batteries. Whenever I pack I have cables and battery chargers and extra external chargers to charge all my gear in case batteries die. Now I have found some clever little travel tools that will reduce the amount of cables you need to carry as you can just "switch the plug ends." I was given as a gift an Electronics USB Cell phone/PDA/iPOD/Charger Kit by Tumi and it is great! It really reduces the amount of cables you have to carry and when traveling overseas you only need the one adapter as it switches to all international power plugs.

I also never leave home without my Tunejuice by Griffin Technology. It is a great little battery extender for any of the iPods (except the little shuffle). Just pop in 4 AAA batteries and if your iPod starts to die you just plug it into the bottom of the iPod. Griffin Technology reports that "TuneJuice will provide up to 14 hours of additional audio play, or 2 more hours of video viewing." I can't verify the length of time as my Tunejuice has not run down yet while in use. I think the longest I have used it is 5 continuous hours and it was still going strong.

So my point is, as much as we love our technology and gadgets we do have a charging/battery issue. I just read an article from ScienceDaily that reports this problem may be solved very shortly. A report that researchers from Stanford University have "found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices." (read further)

Research into this technology has been going on for sometime, but it seems the team at Stanford has cut through and solved any of the previous problems. These new batteries "produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours."

Exciting stuff! No reports yet when consumers might see this available on the market, but you can bet it might be around the corner.