Hooded Claw,
I think that more than a grain of salt is in order; Wired’s reviewer seems to have made an extrapolation based the battery manufacturer’s claims. They will typically pull a battery from a production run and, fairly quickly, cycle it through 500 charge-discharge cycles, and then test the battery. This has nothing to do with the battery life in terms of
months, only
charge cycles. Best guess: If you treat it nice, it will last a long time--HYMMV.
For anybody who's interested, Sony has a pretty good
manual on Lithium-Ion-Poly batteries.
Kent Walters