14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's quest to make ultrabooks cheaper made it decide to promote a new type of battery, but the effects will turn out to be much more widespread than that.
Intel has been doing its best to persuade ultrabooks builders that prismatic lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are the best available for ultrabooks.
Objectively speaking, Chipzilla is right. The prismatic LIBs are 25-30% cheaper than normal LIBs but similar in power capacity. They are also 5% lighter so, really, they can only bring advantages to the laptops that use them.
The only problem is that prismatic batteries aren't actually designed to be removable, but this is mostly a side-effect of not being standardized yet. It is only a matter of time before prismatic LIBs are just as easy to add and replace as common ones.
A report from Digitimes says that the battery adoption is going a bit further than that.
With Panasonic, Samsung and LG on board, there is more than enough driving force behind the batteries for them to be adopted by all types of notebooks, not just ultrabooks.
Ultrabooks and tablet PCs boast customized LIBs small enough to work but impossible to take out of the devices, as we said.
Meanwhile, the 18650 cylindrical batteries in traditional notebooks are too large, but a merger of the two designs will solve all the problems.
All in all, the alleged general consensus is that prismatic LIBs will start gaining ground soon, evolve quickly throughout 2013 and become the third-largest notebook battery standard soon after.
For the common man, this piece of news will lead to cheaper notebooks, or maybe laptops priced at the same levels of today but with thinner and lighter profiles, maybe even an extra feature or two. Acer and ASUS may very well be among the first to ship prismatic LIB-powered models.