Details are still emerging about OQO’s Model 2+ UMPC, and one of its most interesting aspects: the OLED touchscreen. Aside from brighter colors and improved contrast, OLED is said to offer much-reduced power consumption over LCD; that bodes well for a mobile device like the Model 2+. In the field, though, things aren’t looking quite so positive, with Steve Paine reporting 10.5w drain with the backlight on high – that works out to potentially under 2hrs use from the standard 17wh battery.
Apple have added battery replacement details for their recently-announced 17-inch MacBook Pro to their support database. The new page not only confirms the $179 (pre tax) US replacement price revealed last week but details costs in other locations – for instance CA$219 pre-tax in Canada, or £139 including VAT in the UK – as well as turnaround time.
Schwinn has announced a new Pedal Assisted Bike that, as the name applies, assists the user with pedaling. This in turn takes half of the effort that you would normally put into pedaling a bike up a hill. ShashGear had a few moments to test drive these bikes and now I feel I must have one.
The much-welcomed announcement of the 17-inch MacBook Pro did not come without a little bit of bad news, mainly about the battery. The new MBP’s battery will boast an impressive 8 hours of use, but will unfortunately be non-removable. Apple’s hope is that you’ll never need a battery replacement, but if you do, plan on dropping $179 to get it.
It’ll come as no great surprise when Apple update their largest MacBook Pro, the 17-inch version, with a new unibody design similar to last year’s 15-inch refresh; however, according to the latest rumors, what will be a surprise is the new 17-inch Pro’s power options. 9to5mac claim that their Asian manufacturing sources are talking about a new, higher-capacity and super-slim battery for the big Pro, the downside of which will be that it’s non-user-removable.
After user reports surfaced last week regarding the standard battery on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook being smaller than advertised, Dell have responded to claims that some power packs have only three, not four cells. In a comment on our original post, Dell employee Jay Pinkert blames the third-party software being used to report on the batteries and suggests that Dell has confirmed that this is the case.
Some owners of Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 are discovering their battery has less capacity than advertised, with certain models shipping with a three-cell pack rather than the expected four-cell pack. Labelling on all of the batteries suggest they are 32Wh packs; however battery information software indicates that, fully-charged, the some packs hold at most a 24Wh charge.
There aren’t many wildlife photographers practicing fill flash with supertele-lens, it requires powerful flash unit capable of continued powering multiple-frame per second workloads. As a Canon user, I prefer the CPE3/CPE4 compact battery pack to power the flash unit; it utilizes the commonly used AA batteries instead of a much cumbersome Quantum nickel-hydride powered Turbo battery. On the field, I frequent two set of 12 x AA batteries for the battery pack and flash unit, all rechargeable units, of course and replace them once a year due to the low battery cycle life and charging capacity that continue to decline in time. That’s quite load to carry and put a dent on my wallet, may be I should try one of these lighter, smaller and more powerful PowerGenix rechargeable Nickel-Zinc battery.
Most laptop batteries will have tear and wear over the time of usage and recharge; HP is offering its customers Sonata batteries, a like-new performance battery from Boston Power that would perform as well as it was brand new even after several hundred charges. The battery is manufactured with a refined version of lithium-ion.
When thinking about tech announcements, we often forget about the things that make our gadgets go. Like batteries. But Energizer is not one to be left out and at CES 2009, they will be showing off their latest in battery technology called the Zinc Air Prismatic.
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