USB Batteries

An anonymous reader writes "Tired of paying for new batteries all the time? Tired of searching for the charger for your rechargeable batteries? Worry not, because these new AA batteries will recharge direct from your USB port! This is such a cool idea, that I cant believe that no one has done it before." At $24 each I would hate to lose or break them on a regular basis.

Not so fast...

[crazyjeremy (857410)]

Not so fast fellow /.ers. This new product may not be all it's cracked up to be for their price... Unless you have lots of extra ports on your computer and your electronics do not need strong batteries.

USBCELL batteries have a capacity of 1300mAH which is in line with most NiCd and NiMH batteries though some do go all the way up to 2500mAH. It takes five hours to charge a completely flat battery and an LED on the side will light up to indicate charging, flash for 10 minutes after charging is complete as an alert and switch off after that.

Uhm... First of all, using USB for this is generally a bad idea. But if you do want to charge batteries via USB: 1300 mAH is NOT in line with most NiCd and NiMH batteries selling these days. The standard for 4 off brand NIMH batteries from Walmart right now is $6 for 2000 mAH to 2500 mAH (depending on if they've restocked recently as the Generic Brand has upped their standard capacity for AA's).
Let's break this down.

4 batteries - $6 at Walmart for off brand or $10 - $15 for 4 name brand rechargables.
Cheap AA/AAA USB Charger $8 from tiger direct. [tigerdirect.com]
OR
Better AA/AAA USB Charger $20 from tiger direct. [tigerdirect.com]

The cheapest route gives you 4 batteries, each with twice the mAH for $14 plus shipping. The most expensive route gives you the same thing for $30 plus shipping. Either way, buying a battery with only 1300 mAH nowadays is like buying a midsized car with a 50 hp engine.

Bottom line? For novelty reasons, these batteries look interesting and you do not need to carry an additional charger. But at around $16 US apiece they are expensive and WAY underpowered. Additionally, you need one USB slot for each. If you buy a regular USB charger and use standard rechargeable batteries, you can charge several (up to 4) with one USB slot and spend half the money.

Conclusion? It's a neat novelty backup backup. But it is way to expensive.

Re:Not so fast...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, for AA it's pointless. But what if you could charge a laptop battery with it? With two of them you could charge the main battery and the spare and never run dry!

"In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!"

Re:You can't charge laptop batteries via USB.

[ncc74656 (45571)]

Well sure, for AA it's pointless. But what if you could charge a laptop battery with it? With two of them you could charge the main battery and the spare and never run dry!

Do you understand the power and current it takes to charge a laptop battery?

That sound you hear is the joke whooshing over your head. The Simpsons quote should've been a major tipoff.

Re:Not so fast...

[Pharmboy (216950)]

Until somebody comes out with a standard DC power connector, the answer to your question is "yes".

Ha! I can show you two dozen different standard DC power connectors here in my desk drawer...

"An anonymous reader writes..."

[by Anonymous Coward]

And not affiliated with the product in any way.

Thanks for another Slashvert.

More like $22 each

[hudsonhawk (148194)]

The little "L" like symbol means pounds not dollars.

It's what those crazy Brits use as money.

Re:More like $22 each

[gutnor (872759)]

Micro£oft

that pretty much summarise my renting experience in London.

Not really new...

[Rorschach1 (174480)]

I used to have 'D' cells that'd plug in to a wall outlet, too. Trouble is, a large portion of the volume is devoted to the connector and charging circuit. But if 50% capacity is enough, I suppose they'll work.

not as useful as first thought

[Frag-A-Muffin (5490)]

I thought this might be useful, then I looked at some of my toys that take AA. My old Canon A70 takes 4AA. I use NiMH. I have a charger that can charge 4 batteries at a time. Ummm ... I don't think I even HAVE 4 USB ports :) and even if I did, I don't think they'd all fit. (Because you know how they like to cram a bunch of USB ports together and if you plug in something larger than a regular cable, the slot next to it is wasted)

So really, it's only useful for say, an MP3 player that takes a single AA battery. But then again, my brother's little samsung mp3 player has a built-in Li Ion battery and a USB plug built in that can flip up. And it's hardly bigger than a AA battery.

Hmmm .. I'm back to "I can't think of anything useful for it" :)

Um.... why?

[Kenja (541830)]

In most cases, if you have USB power you have an outlet. In rare cases where your out in the middle of no where with nothing but a notebook and a GPS unit running on AA batteries, and you need to keep the GPS charged so you can make it out there before dark, I guess these would be of use. Cant realy think of any other time.

Nope, still not of any use...

[raehl (609729)]

"Hey look, this battery dies twice as fast, but if it's dead, you can recharge it on USB!"
"Uh, yeah, couldn't I just have used a regular battery that wouldn't be dead yet?"

You can have:

- an expensive, dead, 1300 mAh USB battery that you need to recharge on your laptop (good luck on your laptop battery not going dead first!)

- a cheap, half-full 2500 mAh regular rechargable battery that you don't need to recharge at all.

A bit risky

[Dan East (318230)]

Unless the electronics are really well engineered (aka foolproof design) then a failure could result in a damaged motherboard, especially considering the amount of current these things are capable of drawing. Surface mount fuses aren't much fun to replace, especially in laptops. I'd wait a while to see if any horror stories surface before plugging that thing into my machines.

On a related note, the Motorola Razr cell phone's power connector is mini-USB, so it can charge off of your USB port as well.

Dan East

Y'know what would be more useful

[AC-x (735297)]

A USB batter charger [mrgadget.com.au]. This way you can use 2500mAh batteries rather then having half the capacity taken up by the usb port and charging circuit.

1300 maH?

[duplicate-nickname (87112)]

I just replaced all of my regularly used rechargeable batteries with 2500maH sets and I will never go back to lower rated batteries again. On my vacation last week I shot over 400 photos and about 4 minutes of video on my Canon S1 IS and I only recharged the batteries once.

You don't have to worry about charging on a USB port if your batteries don't die all of the time.

Cool idea, but no thanks...

[Chabil Ha' (875116)]

There's more geek factor here than real usability. Anyone had their charger melted to slag because of leaky batteries? Yeah, me too. Personally, I wouldn't mind too much if a $10 charger got toasted, but not my $1xxx laptop. I can garentee that they won't be held responsible should anything get toasted with your lappy...besides, there has been enough troubles with the official laptop battery blowing up without throwing something like this into the mix...

What if they integrated storage too?

[mr_zorg (259994)]

Now, throw in a couple-o-dozen megs of flash built in and you might actually have something. I could store the device drivers for my peripherals in the very same batteries that run them. No more hunting for driver discs. Oh, that and increase the mAh capacity.

USB-powered cities

[dangitman (862676)]

At the rate things are going, cities will be powered not with nuclear power stations, but by a gigantic laptop, with the grid plugged into the USB port. Better watch out the battery doesn't explode, though.

Re:$12? Where is this from?

[blitz77 (518316)]

erm, it said 12.99pounds for TWO-which then is similar to 12 dollars each.

Re:The answer to a question nobody asked

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

A USB 'phone charger is great for travelling abroad. I plug my laptop in in a hotel, and I can charge my 'phone and iPod from it without having to carry a load of mains adaptors around. I would probably fall right into the middle of the target market for these devices, and even I can't see a use for them. Who buys equipment which takes AA batteries these days? I can't remember the last thing I bought that didn't have a custom Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer battery.

Re: CmdrTaco

[dch24 (904899)]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.

Lame.

Yep...and...

[msauve (701917)]

in addition to having less capacity, and being very much more expensive, they recharge more slowly than regular rechargables do in a dedicated charger. If you're putting them into a USB port which is ultimately AC powered, well, why not just use a faster, cheaper, charger.

And if someone plans on charging off a notebook running under battery power, do they really intend (or are they even able) to run the notebook for the 5 hours needed to recharge these?

This makes no sense at all, and are certainly nothing to be "excited about." So much for "trusted reviews."

Re:Yep...and...

[snarkh (118018)]

Very simple -- if you are travelling, you can recharge them from your notebook when it is plugged in. You don't have to carry an extra charger with you.

Re:Not all AAs are created equal

[Wordplay (54438)]

I suspect this has more to do with labelling than actual capacity. Rechargeables have been putting out a 1.2v for years now. They are around 1.25V just after charge, and it's possible they were claimed as such by some manufacturer or the other. I've never seen a 1.5V NiCad or NiMH.

Anyway, alkalines are only 1.5V out of the box. When they're "dead", they're at around 0.6V, and it's a fairly linear decline over time. In fact, electronics made to run on alkalines are generally fine down to around 0.9V or so, since the decline is expected.

NiMHs and NiCads are ~1.2V after a charge, and stay there until just before they die, when they nosedive. This is why cameras recommend non-alkaline batteries--the flash actually requires that the voltage is somewhere around the maximum; alkaline batteries drop voltage so quickly that the flash only works a relatively small number of times.

It's about the chemistry

[backwardMechanic (959818)]

It's all about the chemistry, not some kind of voltage deflation. Zinc cells give 1.5V (alklines, etc). NiCd and NiMH gives 1.2V. Lead acid gives 2 and a bit V. You can't make a NiCd battery at 3V. A battery is a stack of cells, so it can only provide an integer multiple of the cell voltage (2.4 or 3.6V is as close as you'll get with NiCd).

Re:Combine this with 15min quick charge

[pla (258480)]

I have a 15 minute quick charger (by Rayovac) and I would hate to go back to having to actually wait hours for my batteries to charge. This is a cool idea, but lets try and speed it up and then I'll be interested.

For the longevity of your batteries (ie, the reason you pay about 4x as much for rechargeables in the first place), you really should use an intelligent trickle-charger (around C/10) with an automatic pre-charging discharge. I seriously suspect the battery manufacturers (such as Rayovac) came up with the idea of a 15-minute charge just to drastically shorten the life of your rechargeables. It has to seriously hurt their profitability that we can now use a single set of batteries that will last for five to ten years if properly maintained.

It amazes some of my friends (who, like you, use a 4C flash charger) that I have 5 year old NiMH batteries that, after several hundred charge cycles, not only still work, but still hold over 90% of their stated capacity. Well, now you know the secret. Stop abusing your batteries, and just let them charge overnight.

Keep the flash charger in the car for emergencies, but unless you absolutely need a battery now, don't use it.