Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so executives at Panasonic probably aren’t in any big hurry to get ahead in the long, long wait for a Model S, but a $30 million gift could probably get ’em just that. Panny has this week sunk quite a few bills into Tesla by way of a common stock purchase, and while the two have expressed fondness for each other before, this kind of investment doesn’t happen without a serious tie-up being in the works. Of course, Panasonic just so happens to be the planet’s leading battery cell manufacturer, and as of now, it’s being called Tesla’s “preferred lithium-ion battery cell supplier for its battery packs.” So yeah, you know where to look first when things start overheating, melting or spontaneously erupting in flames.

Continue reading Panasonic sinks $30 million into Tesla, begs for an earlier Model S build

Panasonic sinks $30 million into Tesla, begs for an earlier Model S build originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We sometimes sneer at cellphones equipped with Adobe’s Flash browser plug-in: On tiny, energy-efficient mobile processors, the plug-in spikes CPU-usage, causing a big drain on battery life and often making the poor host browser so stuttery and unresponsive that it is rendered useless. But what of full-sized computers? They can handle it, right?

Maybe not. Much has been made of Apple’s decision to ship the new MacBook Airs without the Adobe plug-in, and in future all Macs will be made this way. In tests run by Wired.com’s sister site, Ars Technica, it turns out that having Flash installed can cut the notebooks’ battery life by one third. That’s right. Simply by not having a browser plug-in installed, the 11-inch MacBook Air gets two extra hours of battery life. Ars:

Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.

Anecdotal reports of the new Airs say that they run cooler and quieter than other Mac notebooks, unless they are using Flash. YouTube videos and Flash ads are pretty much the only things that cause the machines to heat up, and for their usually silent fans to spin up.

What to do? Well, there are lots of great Flash-blocking plug-ins for browsers, but these are rather heavy-handed. The sites you visit still think you have Flash, and serve ads and video only for them to be suppressed. If you uninstall Flash completely, though, the site will often have a fallback, serving static ads and — in many cases — plain HTML5 video. The content creators get their ad impressions, you get less blinking crap and better battery life, and the world gets the hint that maybe Flash isn’t as ubiquitous as it used to be.

The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11″ MacBook Air [Ars via Steven Frank]

See Also:

• Hands-On With Apple's New MacBook Airs
• Why Apple Saddled the MacBook Air With Weak CPUs
• Chinese MacBook Air Knockoffs Actually Look Awesome
• Video: Flash Running on the iPad
• Adobe CEO, Ex-Adobe Engineers Weigh In on Jobs' Flash Attack …
• Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1 for Android

An e-mail from Sanho Corporation CEO Daniel Chin announced this morning that HyperMac, the embattled external battery company sued by Apple in September, would be rebranding itself as “HyperJuice” as part of that ongoing legal wrangling with Apple. At issue are the MagSafe connectors used in its HyperMac external battery packs for the Mac and the dock connectors used for the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

The company also used the opportunity as a reminder that they would stop selling their HyperMac external battery packs with MagSafe connectivity to MacBooks and MacBook Pros entirely at midnight tonight, November1st. HyperJuice will still continue to sell the battery packs alone, just without the Apple-specified power-connector that will hook up to your Apple laptop’s MagSafe charging port. Whether the company will survive at all in the long run or smooth over relations with Apple remains to be seen, but if you’re looking for a HyperMac external battery pack for your Macbook or Macbook Pro, tonight’s your last chance to get one.

116 miles in an electric vehicle? No problem. But you’ll quite literally be pushing your new Nissan Leaf another 250 miles to achieve what’s being hailed as a world record in Germany. Little Lekker Mobil, a four-seat Audi A2 refitted with an experimental electric powerplant as part of a government sponsored project with Germany’s lekker Energie and DBM Energy, just completed a 372-mile (600-km) stretch of road between Munich and Berlin on a single charge, a journey that lasted around seven hours. Even with the heater running, the modified A2 with fully usable trunk arrived with spare electricity in the “tank.” The battery uses DBM Energy’s KOLIBRI AlphaPolymer Technology said to be 97 percent efficient and chargeable from virtually any socket — plug it into a high voltage DC source and it can be fully charged in just six minutes according to the car’s driver and battery inventor, Mirko Hannemann. While Hannemann wouldn’t be pinned down on pricing for the battery, the 27 year old did say that it would be more powerful and cheaper than conventional lithium ion batteries. He even went so far as to suggest that his company was ready to begin mass production of the batteries now — presumably aided by the large sacks of money he’ll be handed after pulling off the record breaking stunt.

DBM Energy’s electric Audi A2 completes record setting 372 mile drive on a single charge originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last month Apple filed suit against HyperMac and their parent company, Sanho, accusing them of parent infringement over the HyperMac line of external laptop batteries – and more importantly – the Apple MagSafe connectors that the external batteries use to charge the Mac or MacBook Pro that the HyperMac battery is connected to. Today, according to an e-mail from Sanho Corporation CEO Daniel Chin, Sanho and HyperMac will stop selling the HyperMac batteries with the MagSafe connectors on November 2nd, 2010 while they negotiate with Apple.

HyperMac states you’ll still be able to buy the external batteries after that date, but without the MagSafe connector, they won’t be able to charge your device over anything but USB, unless you already have a connector cable. Only time will tell whether the lawsuit blows over and HyperMac is able to sell the external battery packs again, but in the interim, this is the last opportunity to pick one up before they’re gone for good in their current form.