Hasta La Gadget!

You’ll excuse us for poking a bit of fun at the IEEE, but after it took seven years to finalize a wireless standard that didn’t change for most of that time, we have to wonder how long a new battery rulebook is going to take. IEEE Std 1725 is the current set of commonly agreed rules, in effect since 2006, but apparently “the cellular industry has grown tremendously since then” and our needs as consumers have changed. No kidding, 1GHz processors and 1080p video recording can kind of do that. The Cell Phone Battery Working Group (a real entity!) will hold its first meeting on the topic in February, and the final outcome will lay out up-to-date rules on the requisite quality, reliability, construction, and discharge characteristics of modern cellphone batteries. Let’s hope “smartphones that last more than a day” figures somewhere on that list.

IEEE begins work on new cellphone battery standard, we circle 2029 for ratification originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Capstone’s CMT-380 has proven that turbines, batteries and an unconditional love for Ma Earth actually can get along within the confines of an automobile, and now it looks as if the same type of technology will be touching a lot more lives in and around New York City. DesignLine, a New Zealand-based company with an “experimental turbine hybrid” of the same name, is currently being used in three buses in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and unlike petrol-powered alternatives, these are said to be as “quiet as a tomb.” They’re also environmentally friendly, omitting internal combustion altogether and relying on spinning turbines to recharge a Li-ion battery that powers the wheels. If the trial goes over well, 87 more of the $559,000 buses could be ushered into operation, and you’ll know one’s coming due to the shocking absence of creaking, sputtering and black haze rounding the bend to your stop.

[Thanks, Yossi]

DesignLine turbine hybrid buses take off in NYC, could multiply soon originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was only a couple of months ago that MIT was wooing us with the energy-preserving properties of carbon nanotubes, and in a classic act of oneupmanship Stanford has now come out and demonstrated paper batteries, which work thanks to a carbon nanotube and silver nanowire “ink.” We’ve seen this idea before, but the ability to just douse a sheet of paper in the proper magical goo and make a battery out of it is as new as it is mindblowing. Battery weight can, as a result, be reduced by 20 percent, and the fast energy discharge of this technology lends itself to utilization in electric vehicles. The video after the break should enlighten and thrill you in equal measures.

Continue reading Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries

Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We gadget nerds have to endure unspeakable atrocities in order to slake that early adoption jones: first-run gear shipped DOA, buggy pre-release software, and months of waiting after a product leaks only to be greeted by a jacked-up price premium at launch. So we feel your pain, original Kindle owners, after Amazon announced a major firmware update that brings native PDF support to the 6-inch Kindle 2 and DX readers with the promise of a staggering 85% increase in battery life to all Kindle 2 devices — if you haven’t already received it OTA, the 2.3 software update is now available for download and installation via USB tethering. At least owners of “some earlier versions of Kindle” (quote from the press release) will receive native PDF support whenever the 1st generation firmware update (currently at version 1.2) is released. It’s worth noting that Amazon’s PDF reader lacks a zoom function which makes many PDFs entirely unreadable on the device. Good thing Amazon’s store is chock full of easily zoomable books in a proprietary format then, huh?

Kindle 2.3 software update available, generation 1 owners need not apply originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The venerable 2001 classic of an OS, Windows XP, strikes again. The scribes over at Laptop have put together a rather damning battery life comparison between old greybeard and the fresh Windows 7, which finds that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life with the upgraded software. In the case of the ASUS 1008HA, that deficit was a meaty 57 minutes, or 16.7%. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Adding these data to an earlier comparison with Snow Leopard, where Windows 7 was again markedly worse than its competitor, leads us to the conclusion that perhaps Microsoft’s 7th heaven hasn’t quite been optimized for the mobile mavens out there… yet.

Read – Stick with XP? Windows 7 Battery Life Worse on Netbooks
Read – Windows 7 + netbooks = lower battery life?
Read – Netbook Battery Tests: Windows XP vs Windows 7

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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