6. Summary Of Findings

In judging the value of Batterylife Activator, we don't want to go as far as another, well-known battery manufacturer did in its test reports. Those reports not only say that the activator foil doesn't work, they actually categorize the foil (or perhaps more accurately, decal) as an outright hoax.

Maybe the Batterylife Activator does do something. But in our own testing with two different notebooks, we were unable to verify any kind of improvement in battery life for older lithium-ion batteries. We therefore strongly advise against investing in the Batterylife Activator, be it either $52 for the notebook version, or $15 for the mobile phone version. A colorful decal is arguably just as good, and certainly much cheaper to acquire and apply to your batteries.

Who knows? Perhaps Batterlife AG will introduce a brand-new innovation called "Extra Mileage" in the not-too-distant future. Stick it on your gas tank, and the traveling distance between fill-ups in your car is sure to improve noticeably! ;-)

But seriously, it's really astonishing how blatantly some sales pitches simply seek to separate consumers from their hard-earned cash, without offering much if anything in return.

We'd also like to find a polite way to silence all the various publications and institutions that showed themselves willing to back these highly questionable product claims by performing or verifying tests and measurements that can neither be documented nor reproduced. This may be a fruitful breeding ground and a playground for the mysterious product test outfits that Batterylife AG has spawned, but it's clearly doing nobody else any good.

If you're unlucky enough to belong to the group of individuals who've had negative experiences with products like Batterylife Activator, please register your experiences and complaints with us through an e-mail to ripped-off@tomshardware.com .