If you are a laptop owner, you know how frustrating it is to run out of battery when you’re nowhere near an electrical socket. No matter how long your battery life is, it’s certainly never enough. Other issues involving batteries have been known to include overheating, igniting and even exploding. Also, even if your laptop’s battery last for 5 or 6 hours, with the Wireless adapter turned on while you’re watching a movie and browsing the Internet, you can stop smiling smugly – in about two years or so, your battery will lose most of its maximum capacity, and your computer will die on you while you’re in the middle of a “Lost” episode.  

However, efforts are being made in this delicate area of technology, to ensure that laptop users worldwide can enjoy their computers to the fullest, without dragging a cord around with them. In 2005, researcher Christina Lampe-Onnerud founded Boston-Power Inc., a company that aims to develop lithium ion batteries that can keep their maximum capacity for three years, without losing a minute.

Of course, the implications of such a discovery and, consequently, of such production, distribution and use are not only important when it comes to the laptop users’ comfort, but are vital to the environment. With batteries acting like new for such a long period of time, fewer batteries will be wasted, and replacements won’t be as necessary as before – or at least, not as often.

One company that has shown interest in Boston-Power Inc.’s novel idea is the world’s largest manufacturer of computers, namely HP. The company has announced that users may purchase batteries from Boston-Power Inc.’s Sonata line as an upgrade for some of HP’s computers, as soon as 2009.