Hasta La Gadget!

Electric vehicles are pretty great since you don’t need to hit the gas station and drop $50-$60 on a tank of gas every week (depending on how much you drive, of course), but charging times for electric vehicles are the trade-off to not paying for gas. For some EVs, it take all night to completely charge a dead car battery, but Tesla is aiming for much faster times than that.

Tesla CTO JB Straubel says that the company is attempting to cut down on recharging times for its cars down to “5 to 10 minutes,” which is almost unprecedented. Currently, Tesla’s Supercharger stations can charge a Tesla Model S battery halfway in only 30 minutes, but the company says that’s still too long.

Basically, Tesla wants to cut the time down so that it’s not any longer than the amount of time it usually takes to pump a full tank of gas in a traditional gas-guzzler. However, the challenge is optimizing the charger’s power of delivering juice to the battery fast enough without overheating the battery and frying it.

Of course, though, Straubel notes that it could be awhile before Supercharger stations can charge a Tesla Model S battery in as little as five minutes, but it seems the method is very much possible, and Tesla is looking for a way to make it happen. Of course, there’s also the super-quick battery swapping technique.

The battery swap only takes a couple of minutes, and Tesla is looking into that if drivers don’t want to wait for their battery to recharge. However, if the company can get charging times down to under 10 minutes, it will most likely completely change how we look at electric vehicles and could change the minds of many EV naysayers.

SOURCE: MIT Technology Review

Tesla targets 5-minute Supercharger recharges for Model S is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Winter is coming and you’d better be prepared. The delectably sweet fruits and vegetables in season right now will be shriveled husks rotting in your crisper drawer by the time the snows come. That is, unless you preserve or pickle them. Here’s how to put the fruits of your home garden’s labors into delicious stasis.

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Today an invitation to a special Google event has been sent to the press promising a breakfast with Android head Sundar Pichai. Though this Googler is in charge of Chrome as a web browser and as an operating system as well, it’s far more likely that this July 24th event will center on Android itself, especially considering the several appearances of Android’s next-generation features in teasers for the Motorola-made smartphone Moto X.

Google does own Motorola now, and the time between here and the release of the Moto X grows short, but it is more likely that Google would create a side-event like this to prepare the world for the software side of things before the smartphone is unveiled in full. Motorola’s hero phone will carry Google’s next edition of Android right out of the box, so to speak, but it’s just as important for the company to identify the software’s features for the rest of the Android-toting device universe.

Now that Google works with the Nexus 4, HTC One Google Play edition, and Samsung Galaxy S 4 Google Play edition, this event will likely show software advances on this three-device range. They’ve also got two tablets with Nexus branding as well, of course.

Recent rumblings about a reboot for the Google Nexus 7 are also a part of the list of possibilities for this event. If a new version of Android is in the mix, what better way to usher it in than with another new device?

Stay tuned – SlashGear will be eating hearty while we report the whole events’ dealings on July 24th. The event starts a 9AM PST and we’ll ready to roll, Open Mics ready!

Google event set for July 24th, Android update incoming is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

BitTorrent’s personal cloud service, Sync, just moved into beta today. And now, it even has its own Android app. If you need some online space the NSA can’t get at, go check it out. It’s free!

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The specter of a cheaper iPhone has haunted analyst and fanboy dreams for months. Years, in some cases. But making the healthy assumption that Apple does release a less expensive iPhone in the next few months, it’s worth taking a second to remember that "cheaper" doesn’t necessarily mean "cheap." Especially when you’re talking about Apple.

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