4. Still More False Claims From The Vendor

What of the vendor's claim that the product doesn't have to deliver as promised because it is still in development? It turns out that this is a bald-faced lie. Scarcely a week had elapsed since our phone call with PR manager Michael Schmid, when on February 2, 2005 we received a press release that claimed delivery of the new miracle foil would occur in the following week.

This, despite our negative test results. What can one make of a company like Batterylife AG, that seeks not only to fool prospective customers with precisely targeted falsehoods, but that also repeatedly presents them as truths?

Second Trial Results: Things Stay As They Are

Naturally, we couldn't resist the impulse to test the "efficacy" of Batterylife Activator foil on a different notebook PC. We chose a two-year-old IBM Thinkpad A30p with a battery of the same vintage. Once again, we set the brightness of the TFT display to maximum, and used Prime95 (V2.38) to keep its CPU continuously at work.

This time, we took the battery through 7 charge/discharge cycles before installing the Batterylife Activator foil, which we again applied as directed in the product instructions.

The ThinkPad A30p battery with activator foil installed

Then we followed up with fourteen additional charge/discharge cycles. As in the previous round of tests, we conducted our measurements in a climate-controlled office with the temperature maintained at a constant 70°F. As before, we also charged the battery all night long between tests, to be absolutely sure it was fully charged. Before taking measurements we verified the charge with the BatteryMon 2.0 tool from Passmark, and used the same tool to capture charge level data over time for each set of test measurements.

The results of this multi-week test are just as bad as in our first set of measurements. This foil appears to do nothing more than provide a bit of extra insulation for the battery. At any rate, we could find no proof that installing this product actually extends battery life.

One might wonder how the measurements of battery life compare between our first and second set of tests, especially with respect to the measurements taken before the activator foil was installed. It seems that one can observe a regeneration effect in older, apparently half-dead rechargeable batters. This effect lets one infer an increase in battery life by itself, especially when it's fully and thoroughly discharged immediately afterward. After being deeply discharged, a lithium-ion battery often shows an increase in capacity, and hence also, battery life - this is one reason why the best battery chargers often begin their charge-up cycles with a deep-discharge operation at the first step in the process.

But we couldn't prove any resulting increase in battery life as a result of using the activator foil. The capacity of the battery after the first charge/discharge cycle with foils installed measured 23.38 Wh, but only measured 22.31 Wh after the ninth such cycle.

Whether it's on the first or...

...the ninth charge/discharge cycle, the measurements don't validate the vendor's claims - battery capacity does not increase