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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pallisard who wrote (18380)	2/19/2000 2:56:00 PM
From: Rich Wolf	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 27311

Pallisard, a good place to check for other manufacturer's product announcements is in Dennis Roth's archive, which can be found at: ourworld.compuserve.com If you scroll down to an article from last October about Sharp's initial announcement about a laptop designed around a large-format gel-based cell, and go to that article (in MacWeek), you will find the following text: <<The second feature is a lithium-polymer battery that Sharp invented in cooperation with Hitachi Maxell. The polymeric electrolyte can be manufactured in any shape; in this case, it comprises a thin sheet that fits behind the LCD. Four sheets of the lithium-polymer batteries are built in the Mebius Note PJ, providing a battery life of 5 hours, or 7.5 hours with the addition of an external battery.>> Since then, Sharp has shown this laptop at an expo in Japan. I don't have the link handy, but there is also a photo of the cells in this same demo model in the Nomura Research Institute report from Oct. 99, and they appear to be 4"x5"x(3-4mm or so?). They had four of them laid flat, in an 8x10 format, and the demo showed two configurations: either under the base or behind the display screen. A few weeks ago, a yahoo poster contacted Sharp and was told the product would not be available for some months yet (not known if this was in volume quantities, either). If Sharp is offering the cells in a separate base battery before the laptop model is available, this may indicate an unwillingness to commit to production of the laptop at this time, and/or a desire to have more 'beta testing' of the product out in the marketplace. (See how difficult it is to penetrate this market, even when the technology is developed 'in-house'?) In short, we simply do not know enough about the true performance (energy density and cycling), or consistency of the Hitachi-Maxell product. (The NRI report indicated many of these as issues for the industry.) If anyone can get their hands on one of these Sharp laptops, they ought to let the Valence scientists 'deconstruct' it. They'd be able to answer all these questions (if they haven't already). Hope this helps. Glad you're feeling better, too! Regards, Rich PS It was great meeting and re-meeting everyone there, and thanks to all for the generosity exhibited at every turn. Also thanks to the folks at Valence for all the great progress they've made, and their willingness to answer almost all the questions we asked, heh!