Actually, there have been. Leaving aside the constant improvements in batteries that are ongoing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Modern_batt...

There have also been breakthroughs in the last five years to allow for massively faster charging:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_polymer_battery#Tec...

We've been spoiled by Moore's Law in technology. In comparison, all the "battery breakthroughs" of the past decade are pretty feeble. If someone could double or triple the energy density of a battery, that would be a breakthrough.

Unfortunately, there's another discipline where energy density is important: explosives. The critical difference is in how quickly the energy is released, and as Li-Ion batteries show it isn't always as controllable as we'd like.

I'm running a thinkpad with an 8 hour (theoretical) maximum battery life. Actually it's like 5 or 6. But the model from a year or two years before that would have only gotten 1-2 hours battery life.

So improvements are being made and we're seeing them. It's just slow going.

A lo of that improvement must also be from chips consuming less and more RAM resulting in no need for paging.

That's what really separates consumer electronics from cars: processing data requires (from a theoretical physics standpoint) a minuscule amount of energy, and there's a lot of room for improvement even with current technology.

Moving heavy things up hills or through air at high speeds requires a respectable amount of energy, and current technology is already within an order of magnitude or so to the theoretical peak efficiency.

They invented NiMh batteries that hold their charge for a while; now I can actually use them in game controllers and flashlights and such without needing freshly charged ones every time I've left 'em in the closet for a few weeks.

Not a density breakthrough, but a UX breakthrough for sure.

The IBM videos about this project are much more careful than the breathless article from extremetech.

To add weight to your skepticism the article states, "Eventually (in another 10 years or so), li-ion batteries could be replaced with li-air batteries." !0 years is a long time-frame.

10 years is not a long time frame for something like a new battery technology... it's surprisingly short, in fact.

Exactly. 10 years is way past the Technological Event Horizon, which is about 2 years.

Which means that unlike, for example, memristors, lithium air batteries most likely won't happen, and if they do happen, their happening will be a consequence of other research.

(Which is an argument why most research should be fundamental and open-ended, i.e. not directed towards specific outcomes.)

If you follow Intel's R&D they have consistently gotten projects from 10-15 years out to come online on time.

The lord will return any day now! Pray with me brother!

It's fair to be skeptical of all these announcements but I can't help but think that batteries have gotten better over the last 15 years. Whether these improvements were "breakthroughs" or not is a matter of interpretation.

Batteries have become vastly better over the last 15 years. It's just that this stuff ends up as gradual progress, not sudden jumps, so you don't notice it unless you're looking for it.

There have been quite a few battery breakthroughs at the lab level, especially in the past 3 or 4 years. That is massively different from scaling up manufacture and bringing to market.

Also, I suspect that investors in this sector are hedging their bets and waiting for a clear winner to emerge before spending the big money.