Well, obviously Toshiba's claims are pretty extreme, and I don't think anyone would be using these batteries in a consumer electronics device at those specs. In a car is a totally different story. There's the other side of this equation that they also didn't talk about, which is the discharge rate. Generally a battery's charge and discharge rates are similar; if this thing can be charged at 28.8 amps then that should mean the cell can also discharge at up to 28.8 amps, and if so that's really amazing, and very important.
Currently lead-acid batteries are used in cars not only because they're the cheapest technology (ok, that may be the deciding factor, true) but also because they have the greatest discharge rate / lowest internal resistance. It takes hundreds of amps to start an engine, and lead-acid batteries can handle that. In an electric car, it takes thousands of watts to spin the motor and move the vehicle. Lead-acid batteries can be safely discharged at currents several times greater than their amp-hour capacity rating. Nickel and Lithium batteries generally can only be charged/discharged at currents up to their amp-hour rating. E.g., a 12V 5 amp-hour lead-acid battery can be discharged at 50 amps for a short period of time, no sweat. But a 3.6V 600mAH LiIon battery should not be discharged at greater than 600mA. Some recent designs tolerate maybe a 2x drain, so 1200mA. One consequence of this is that you need really fat Li or Ni battery packs to power an electric car, to get a total amp-hour rating in the hundreds, to sustain the heavy current demands of the car. And of course you also need to stack these fat packs pretty deep to get the voltages needed for an electric car. The end result is that you wind up with a huge battery array, with a total energy storage more than the car really needs (the tZero can drive over 300 miles on a single charge) just to provide the current capacity that it requires. Now personally, I wouldn't mind an electric car with a range of 300 miles on one charge, but generally I don't drive more than 100 miles in one day, and the car can fully recharge overnight anyway, so to me that's 3x too much capacity. (But then again, I do take the occasional long car trip. Hard to say...)
As for notebook or cellphone use... I'd be willing to stretch that out by a factor of 10. Compared to hours right now, getting to 80% charge in 10 minutes would be nice, and quite a huge improvement, without the ridiculous currents of a 1 minute charge.
I still wonder about it though. Right now I have a laptop that takes a 19V power supply, rated for 3.42 amps, or 65 watts. On idle the laptop consumes around 16W, so presumably the power supply can charge the thing 4 times faster than it uses up power. I think that's pretty good; assuming typical efficiency that means the thing charges in around 75 minutes. So to bring it down to a 10 minute charge would mean cranking it up to 25.65 amps. That's still some serious overkill. Anything over 10 amps is questionable, over 20 amps is really out of the question for a consumer device.
I guess one way around this would be to build packs with even more cells in series and less in parallel, to up the voltage and reduce the charge current needed to deliver the same amount of power. Then the notebook itself would need a really efficient DC-DC converter to suck out the power at the specific voltage and current that it requires.
So if we boosted the max charge current to around 10 amps, that would bring the 75 minute charge time down to 25 minutes. And if we reorganized the pack to have double the voltage and half the amp-hours, it would charge in 12.5 minutes. Close enough, I think, and definitely worthwhile.
For a cellphone, a 10 minute charge would only need 2.8 amps, which I think is already pretty reasonable.
maybe they can throw that into a laptop
