The yellow super-battery... revolutions never smelled so fishy

Vie Engadget I read this interesting piece of news. For those of you who are too lazy to hit the link, let me summarize it for you:

A Chinese company is offering a windows-mobile-LIKE smatphone, nothing new. What is new is that they state a stand by battery life of one year (!) or 3-5 days of calling (!!), what is even more astounding is that the device does not seem to feature any cutting-edge power saving workarounds. In a very chinese and very straightforward approach, the problem is solved brute force with a 16.800 mAh battery (!!!), and for mere 145$ (!!!!). Ah, no, the pun about the chinese "yellow" battery is not a pun at all, it IS yellow.


Now this news might be true or might be an hoax: let's do some maths. My BL-5B Nokia battery has 820 mAh and powes a nothing-but-calls-and-sms phone for a week stand by, 10 days tops.

820 mAh : 10 days = 16.800 mAh : x days

x= (16.800 x 10)/820 = 204,88

Two conclusions appear evident:

a) either this smatphone is far more energy efficent than my dumbphone (a Nokia 6021), or their claims are worng (or I am an ass and I made the wrong calculations, of course)

b) 205 days of stand-by are still a heck of a lot! (or I am an ass and I made the wrong calculations)

Now the problem is another one. They can manufacture that monster battery and sell it together with a cheap smatphone for under 150$, while top notch devices which cost almost ten times more offer a mere fraction of that battery life (two weeks tops). Let us put aside all the quality issues and all the bells and whistles that top-brand devices have, I have no doubt that there would be a market for a device with so much juice. If I decide to spend a grand in a super-phone, would I not add up to 150 $ more (which is the cost of the entire chinese phone) in order to get all that battery life? Are all the other manufacturers just dumb?
Maybe... but I still would like to know how likely the yellow super battery is to catch fire, explode, damage the device or just plain fail to live up the expectations... because if it is safe consider me already tinkering and soldering to fit one on every device I have!

Battery life is one of the biggest showstoppers of modern consumer electronics, always producing more elaborate, functional, convergent and power thirsty toys. It is nice to see some improvement, even if they violate some phisics law or merely common sense.
Personally I am waiting for this other project, which seems more elegant and less toxic... albeit it is the nanoscale implementation of an even more brute-force approach.

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