Lithium batteries best for demanding mobile phone market, firm says
By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- EDN, May 16, 2007
As cellular phones increase consumer demand for better battery power, analysts say that the traditional market for batteries is changing fast—and lithium batteries are poised to come out on top, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics, an "energy gap" between cellular handset requirements and battery limitations determines what and how new services can be introduced in the mobile market—and that what the firm called an "insatiable" wireless communication industry has created a currently hard-to-fulfill energy demand.
The firm predicts that because of this widening gap, worldwide battery market demand will be slow in the coming years, growing at a rate of about 4.7 percent per year until 2010.
"With a slow, eight percent improvement in battery performance each year the cell phone industry faces a problem," Stuart Robinson, the firm's director of handset component technologies, said in a statement.
Among battery alternatives including solar, kinetic, and fuel cell technologies, Strategy Analytics said that the short term solution to fight the energy gap is the adoption of lithium batteries. While the firm said that small fuel cells, which have recently gotten a funding boost from the U.S. government, may offer good long term prospects, they are still a few years away from commercialization on a large scale.
"The cellular industry is desperately seeking for solutions to reduce the energy gap," Mehar Zulfikar, an analyst with Strategy Analytics' handset component technologies segment, said in a statement. "In the short-term, this is likely to come from lithium sulphur or silver zinc rechargeable batteries."
