A new battery technology described by PDP at CES 2016 seems a bit hard to believe, but the company says it has a working prototype … although they were not showing it. The pitch is intriguing though: The technology is supposed to be able to provide eight hours of play for your Xbox One controller with only a 60-second charge time.
“We’ve developed a technology to charge your controller in a new way, it’s not using a battery pack,” Christopher Dingle, director of product development at PDP, told Polygon. “In the past it has been about either your dry cell battery chemistries or your lithium ion or lithium polymers, but we’ve developed a new type of power pack.”
Few specific details were given about how the pack works. “It’s a physical reaction rather than a chemical reaction,” Dingle explained. “It’s a new type of power pack chemistry.”
Don’t expect to be able to buy one anytime soon; PDP is aiming for pre-orders to begin near the end of 2016, and a single battery with the charging base will cost around around $99. For now, they’re non-working prototypes for the Xbox One, apparently a PlayStation 4 model is in the works.