Or most other Smart phones. I am on the impression that they try to avoid batteries that have very long life cycles. but these batteries are supposedly cheaper and packs more energy than what they have. My wife's current iPhone has degraded capacity to just about 50%, and it is less than one year of use!

Probably not anytime soon. A123 cells I've seen have very large capacities (2000mah) meaning the cell itself is quite large. This would cause the phone to be much larger as well, like 50% larger if not more.