Sony Making Smartphone Batteries With 40 Percent More Capacity.

While the industry struggles to make any major advancements to the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries, Sony may have found a different combination to substantially increase energy density. According to a media report, the Japanese conglomerate is working on two battery combinations to replace lithium-ion batteries.

Sony is working on lithium-sulphur and magnesium-sulphur batteries that offer a 40 percent gain in density by volume, reportsJapanese newspaper Nikkei. The company is currently aiming to make these batteries commercially available in 2020. The report added that smartphones will be the first to benefit from the new advancement.

The lithium-ion batteries, which have been commercially produced for more than two decades now, has almost reached the threshold limit for energy density. This has left smartphone manufacturers and others with no other choice than to accommodate a larger battery to stuff more energy into a device.

The challenge is that it has proven difficult to make a battery that could maintain its charge capacity through hundreds of recharges. The process of testing these technologies takes a long time as well. So, has Sony cracked the puzzle? Not really, it appears.

The report added that Sony is yet to solve the technical challenges and that the lithium-sulphur batteries are still prone to heat generation or ignition. This is not the first time a company has claimed to have found a better battery solution. But over the years, we haven't really seen any of these advancements make it to the finished product. In June,Samsung unveiled technology that could double lithium-ion battery capacity. But we haven't heard anything about it since. If Sony manages to overcome all the challenges, the industry at large would benefit from the advancements.

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...

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