World

Israeli device charges phone in 30 seconds

April 9, 2014 14:58
A still from the company's video demonstration (Photo: StoreDot)

ByCharlotte Oliver, Charlotte Oliver

1 min read

Waning battery life is a modern-day annoyance every phone user knows all too well.

But Israeli startup StoreDot claims to have found the answer to our problems by developing a device that can charge a smartphone in under 30 seconds.

The company displayed a prototype for the device, which includes a separate phone-sized battery pack and charger, at Microsoft’s Think Next conference in Tel Aviv.

Using a Samsung S4 smartphone, they demonstrated how the bio-organic battery uses nano-crystals made of chains of peptide molecules to charge a phone in 26 seconds – with technology first developed 10 years ago at the research department for Alzheimers at Tel Aviv University.

StoreDot’s founder Dr Doron Mysersdorf said the company hoped to “integrate a battery into a smartphone within a year and have a commercially ready device in three years.”

He added: “Batteries are just one of the industries we can disrupt with this new material. It is new physics, new chemistry, a new approach to devices.”

According to the startup, the same technology could be used to charge larger devices in the future, including laptops and tablets.