A lot of green technology stuff has been coming across our radar today, but that’s okay. After all, it is through these new green technologies that we can expect to move forward in society. The Febot is really just a concept, but it offers a unique idea for harnessing wind energy.
A good idea doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and nor does it have to be huge. In keeping with the Eee PC’s diminutive size, Expansys are offering a range of clip-on battery chargers for the ASUS netbooks that can keep a spare power-pack juiced up without needing it to be fitted to the netbook itself.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, hence the jacked-up MSI Wind you see below. The culprit is a whopping 9-cell battery pack for the netbook, available from third-party sellers on eBay rather than an official MSI accessory, which takes its merely moderate runtime from the standard batteries and boosts it to 7.5 to 10hrs.
Talk about a super bummer. Looks like we have another laptop battery recall situation on our hands. In fact, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a recall of 35,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sony.
And the reason is what you would expect. It seems the Lithium-ion batteries have the tendency to overheat, catch on fire and pose a burn hazard to people. And this is no joke. Apparently, 19 people have already reported problems with overheating. 17 reports involved actual flames and 2 people received mild burns from the faulty batteries.
Duracell, the world-renowned copper-top battery brand, are moving in a new direction. In fact, they have decided to step into the world of flash memory with SD, microSD, USB drives and Compactflash cards in an effort to expand the brand.
Photos of a black Acer Aspire One with a 6-cell battery pack have emerged, believed to be the Aspire One A150. The photos are by Flickr user unten44; specifications of the netbook are in keeping with the current Aspire One netbook range, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard-drive. In fact, the only key difference other than the case color is the battery life, which Acer rate for up to 6hrs use.
With the news last week that Toshiba could have a fuel cell powered device on the market by Christmas, today it’s the turn of Panasonic to make some methanol promises. It won’t be a fight for a spot underneath the tree between the two companies, though; Panasonic say they’ll have fuel cells, capable of running a laptop computer for five hour, on the market by 2012.
Ah, the marvels of science. Researchers at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan have happened upon something called the “spin Seebeck effect” which would mean big changes for our technological devices. Now, we’re still miles away from any product implementation here, but this is big news for what could be coming in the future.
Nintendo’s new DSi handheld, announced today, may be a bit more portable than its DS Lite predecessor – 12-percent thinner in fact – but if you’re expecting to use that portability to take it further afield for even more gaming then the estimated battery life ratings may be a disappointment. While the DS Lite could last for 15-19hrs on a single charge at minimum brightness, that figure drops to 9-14hrs in the DSi; at highest brightness you’ll get a mere 3-4hrs from the DSi, whereas the DS Lite would have entertained you for 5-8hrs.
We don’t readily feature batteries here on SlashGear, but this is a notable exception. The Panasonic Evolta batteries have been recognized by Guinness World Records for the longest lasting AA alkaline battery cell, and that’s saying something.
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