A new battery for the power-hungry

Just what we need -- new batteries. The kind we currently use aren't nearly good enough. They're heavy, bulky, and always going dead on us at inconvenient moments. Yet we need more of them each year, to power a growing inventory of portable gadgets. The machines keep getting cheaper, more seductive, and more power-hungry. Meanwhile, it seems the batteries hardly ever improve.

So when engineers at Japan's Matsushita conglomerate build a pair of AA batteries strong enough to drive an electric car, you're bound to pay attention. Anybody with a houseful of flashlights, portable radios, and digital cameras would love to get his hands on batteries like those. Well, now you can. They're called Panasonic Oxyride batteries, and they've just been offered for sale in stores across the United States.

The battery-powered car is not included; it was a marketing gimmick, of course. The little thing weighed just 40 pounds and couldn't quite reach two miles per hour. But it hauled a 100-pound spokesmodel for a half hour. That's fairly impressive for a couple of flashlight batteries. Too bad the Oxyride wasn't nearly as impressive when I applied it to the rather more practical task of running a digital camera. Still, your mileage may vary.

Brian Kimberlin, head of Panasonic's US consumer battery business, insists that the Oxyride will transform the battery business. Matsushita has just 2 percent of the world disposable battery market, but if Oxyride is a hit, the company might begin to challenge the dominance of the Duracell battery brand, produced by Boston's Gillette Co.

''I think this technology is going to challenge the overall market in general," said Kimberlin. ''Alkaline batteries have been on the market for 40 years, and there's been no new technological change in batteries since then, until now."

Kimberlin has a point. Batteries haven't improved nearly as fast as the electronic devices they power. For all of their ferocious complexity, microchips can be upgraded with relative ease. As chip wizard Gordon Moore explained, you just squeeze more transistors onto each chip. Which the chip makers have done, and so effectively that today's PCs are more powerful than most of us need.

There's never been a battery too powerful, because we always need more electricity. Batteries are packets of chemicals that produce electricity, but only so much and for only so long. Since they were invented about 200 years ago, people have toiled to find chemical combinations that would deliver more power for longer periods. These clever people have made lots of progress, but not nearly enough.

''The battery that you're getting in your laptop today is about 20 percent more powerful than the battery you were getting three or four years ago," said Donald Sadoway, professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a specialist in battery design. So why do our laptops peter out of power midway through a coast-to-coast flight? Because the laptops keep getting faster processors and bigger color display screens, not to mention those DVD drives that traveling workers love. It takes a lot of juice to spin a movie disk for two hours.

''All of these new enhancements in computer performance are requiring greater performance from the batteries," said Sadoway. ''It's almost like an arms race."

Still, new products like the Oxyride show that the battery makers are keeping up the struggle. But with what success? I did a little unscientific research, using a little Olympus two-megapixel digital camera. It was Oxyride vs. the rival Duracell Ultra battery in a clash of electrochemical titans.

The Oxyrides stumbled at the first hurdle. Kimberlin said the Panasonic battery's higher power output would mean the flash units on digital cameras would recycle faster, permitting less idle time between shots. But on this camera, the Oxyrides and Ultras had the same shot-to-shot cycle time of eight seconds.

Next came the hard part -- shooting digital pictures till the batteries died. That took awhile -- most of a day, in fact. And the time was pretty evenly divided between the two battery brands. The Oxyrides went first, and by the time the batteries gave up the ghost they'd managed to shoot 552 pictures, nearly all of them using the flash. But the Duracell Ultras held on even longer -- 603 shots, again with flash used in nearly all of them. Indeed, there was still a wee bit of power left in the Ultras before my shutter finger went on strike.

These results don't bode well for Panasonic's plan to conquer the battery market, but they hardly amount to a final judgment. Each digital device consumes electrons in its own way, so the test might have a very different outcome with your favorite gadget. Given that Oxyrides will sell for about $5 for a four-pack, roughly the same price as Duracell Ultras, digital electronics buffs can afford to run their own tests.

For his part, Sadoway sticks to standard Duracells when shopping for disposable batteries. He's tried the Ultras and seen no benefit. And while he concedes that the Oxyrides may offer some improvement, Sadoway is holding out for something truly revolutionary. ''I'm doing stuff in the lab because I want a quantum leap in performance," he said.

Indeed, Sadoway may already have found it. He claims to have developed a battery technology with three times the energy capacity of the lithium-ion batteries used in today's laptops. Trouble is, it's tough to build his new batteries on an industrial scale, and so far he hasn't found a battery maker interested in taking up the challenge.

Perhaps he's been talking to the wrong people. Matsushita obviously has ambitions for its battery business, and I suspect it will take more than their new Oxyrides to fulfill them.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.