The media are douche. Awesome new smartphone battery coming soon edition.

If I had a nicke for every time someone wrote about BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH FOR MOBILE DEVICES, I'd be a fucking rich man. Not frickin sharks with laser beam and a master control at the head of my conference table with buttons that send my disloyal or incompetent minions to their peril rich, but at least gangsta droppin the benjamins on the bitches rich.

Ni-Cad and Li-Ion battery technology, commonly found in our portable/mobile gadgets/smartphones, are bound by the current known laws of both physics and chemistry. There is *no legitimate* known effective alternative (whereby effective I mean available, affordable, as good and as safe).

None.

Anyone tells you otherwise, they are either lying, not smart, or trying to drum up money for the BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH VENTURE!

If there is something out there, it is either not known, and thus sure as shit aint gonna show up in the pages of PC World, or is known by a tiny select few, such as Larry Page and Tim Cook.

And neither of them are going to share that information while they launch a bidding war for their smartphone battery salvation.

"Journalists" won't stop trying, of course. Even if they're just parroting some press release:

Although iPhone 4S battery drain was a real problem, it also brought up the need for a smartphone battery breakthrough--something so significant that you'll never have to worry about getting through the day on a single charge, even if the battery's not behaving properly.

The good news is that a true breakthrough is on the way, and promises week-long battery life and 15-minute recharge times. The bad news is that this technology is still three to five years away from the market.

Researchers at Northwestern University worked with the same lithium-ion batteries found in today's smartphones. But by layering clusters of silicon in between the graphene sheets that make up one side of the battery--known as the anode--the researchers were able to pack in a lot more lithium.

Scientists have already tried using silicon as a replacement for carbon-based graphene sheets but, in previous approaches, it expanded and contracted too dramatically, causing fragmentation that reduced capacity. Apparently the sandwiching of silicon between graphene solves that problem.

Wake me up in 3-5 years.