If you have a smartphone, you probably know the horrible feeling of packing up to leave the house, only to realize it is about to die.
Such a situation leaves you in a pickle. Do you risk being late for a couple minutes of precious, precious charge? Or do you resign yourself to an afternoon without email, Instagram and Candy Crush?
Enter StoreDot, an Israeli tech startup that hopes to make this exact conundrum a thing of the past. The company claims to have created a new battery pack that can fully charge your phone in a mere 30 seconds. Yes, even if you’re at 0 percent.
The pack, which premiered Monday at a Microsoft Think Next event in Tel Aviv, relies on microscopic magnets called “nanodots” to enable its game-changing charger. As you can see in the above video, the prototype attaches to a phone that is then juiced up in half a minute.
Sadly, you shouldn’t expect your own 30-second charger anytime soon. The battery pack is still in the prototype stage, and a company spokesperson says mass production won’t commence until 2016, according to TechCrunch.
In the meantime, StoreDot will face two major challenges: Figuring how to shrink the technology so that it can fit in existing smartphone designs, and how to get the cost down. As of now, it will come out to twice the price of the average phone charger, according to The Wall Street Journal.
But having raised $6.25 million to date, StoreDot is confident that “nanodots” represent a big opportunity for the future — and not just in terms of charging phones. According to the company’s website, Bioorganic Nanodots could potentially revolutionize TV displays, digital storage, batteries and bio-medical technology.
