BatteryLife
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Sony's VAIO CW draining the battery while asleep?
Thinking of picking up a VAIO CW over the weekend? You might want to hold those horses just a bit, at least until Sony (or someone) figures out what exactly is causing the batteries on these to zap themselves while asleep. Based on a raft of complaints -- nine pages strong and growing -- over at Notebook Review, it sounds as if the batteries within the outfit's new CW series (at least those with Core i3 CPUs and the 330M GPU) are fading inexplicably quick while resting, leaving many with next to no juice once they crack open the lid the next morning. All sorts of theories are flying, but one in particular seems to note that a bundled Sony battery management application could be causing cells to only charge to a certain percent even when the machine is "off." For now, some folks are actually flipping the battery out for a fraction of a second and popping it back in after putting it to sleep for the night in order to prevent the drain, but we get the feeling that a less janky fix should be in order. Right, Sony?
ExoPC delayed till summer, getting specification upgrades to dull the pain
Now that the tablet PC revolution is upon us (for the second time in as many decades, if you'll recall), there's bound to be a few that really stick out, and a few that get left in the dust. ExoPC is doing its darnedest to be grouped in the former, and it's choosing to hold off on rushing things out in hopes of delivering a superior product to the world this summer. If you'll recall, we heard that the 8.9-inch slate would originally be out and about this month, but the company's own Jean-Baptiste Martinoli has informed us directly why the ship date is being pushed back a few months. For starters, production has been shifted from China into Canada thanks to a freshly signed deal with CiaraTech. And if you're wondering what you'll get in return for waiting just a few more months to get your hands on one, we've excellent news. Here's the good word straight from the outfit: "With [CiaraTech's] help we are improving the specs: better processor, graphics, better battery life, thinner, better screen and touch panel. We should hit FCC soon. As we have more time we are adding more features in the ExoPC UI Layer (ex. an app / media store)." We aren't exactly big on waiting, but we'll let that other tablet keep us company until this one finally gets its shipping papers. Summer ain't too far out, now is it?
Stanford develops safer lithium-sulfur batteries with four times the charge of lithium-ion cells
Longer battery life is high atop our list of gadget prayers, and the brainiacs at Stanford are one step closer to making our dreams come true with a new lithium-sulfur technology. Half of this trick lies in the silicon nanowire anode that the same team developed back in 2007, whereas the new cathode consists of a similarly commodious lithium sulfide nanostructure. Compared to present lithium-ion batteries, Stanford's design is "significantly safer" and currently achieves 80 percent more capacity, but it's nowhere near commercial launch with just 40 to 50 charge cycles (Li-ion does "300 to 500") due to the compound's rapid degradation. That said, we're promised a theoretical quadruple boost in capacity as the technology matures, so until then we'll keep that hamster running in our backpack.
Scientists discover method for rapid charging Li-ion batteries
Huzzah! Yet another discovery for us to add to our ever-expanding list of "awesome things that'll never actually happen!" Ibrahim Abou Hamad and colleagues from Mississippi State University have reportedly devised a method of charging batteries that could hasten the process rather significantly, and better still, it could provide "an increase in battery power densities" as well. The only problem? Lithium-ion batteries have been disappointing tech users for years, and so long as Energizer and Duracell are calling the shots, we kind of doubt a lot will be done to improve the longevity of 'em. Skepticism aside, the new method involves some fancy black magic surrounding molecular dynamics simulations, and researchers have found a way to boost charging time by "simulating the intercalation of lithium ions into the battery's graphite anode." We know we just went way over your heads on a Friday afternoon, but if techobabble's your thing, all you can handle is right there in the Source link.
Panasonic's silicon-packin' batteries boast 30 percent capacity boost, hit stores in 2012
Sure, not a day goes by without some sort revolutionary (if not just plain silly) announcement regarding fuel cells, and once again it looks like it's Panasonic's turn. According to Nikkei, the company will begin volume production of Li-ion rechargeable batteries that use a silicon alloy anode sometime in fiscal 2012. While Si alloy batteries have a tenfold theoretical improvement over current cells that utilize graphite, Panny claims that its device will have an improvement in linear capacity of close to thirty percent -- keeping at least 80 percent of its capacity even after 500 charge/recharge cycles. Currently the bad boy is being marketed towards notebook batteries, although we could be seeing 'em in our electric cars in the near future. Catch a couple pictures from the press conference after the break.
Flash 10.1 might just not be a battery hog on Android
Looking to fight an apparent outbreak of FUD, Adobe's Flash evangelist Mark Doherty has posted some hard numbers (and accompanying video) on the effect Flash 10.1 has on the Nexus One -- and put simply, it really doesn't appear to have much effect at all. To back up his cause, Doherty plays a 17-minute embedded video in the full YouTube site then pops over to Android's built-in battery use utility, which indicates that only 6 percent of the juice has gone to power the browser (of course, leaving the screen on to watch the video is another story altogether). He says that the company's tests suggest they can get about three hours of H.264 playback over WiFi, which is theoretically enough to watch a movie or two; obviously the proof is in the pudding here, but this is a promising sign that these guys have taken battery optimization very, very seriously for this mobile push. Video after the break.
Logitech brings out Wireless Desktop MK710 with a claimed three-year battery life
Logitech raised a few eyebrows with the longevous battery life on the MK700, and for its encore the company is bringing even more endurance with a claimed three-year battery life for both the keyboard and mouse -- a feat it claims to have been first to achieve. Aggressive power-saving algorithms are the purported reason you won't have to swap out the AA cells for a cool 36 months, but Logitech is quick to reassure us that these optimizations won't be causing any unseemly lag. It's also quite boastful about the MK710 coming equipped with its teeny Unifying receiver to really minimize peripheral clutter. If only the keyboard wasn't the size of a spaceship's dashboard, we too might have been interested in dishing out the $99 and saying farewell to our wires. Either way, the combo is hitting Europe this month with Americans having to wait a bit for an April launch.
New lithium-ion battery could last 20 years, long after you've broken the devices they once powered
Modern gadgetry (you know, as opposed to "ancient gadgetry," such as the abacus and the hour glass) lives and dies by its batteries, so it's no surprise that lots of time and effort is spent researching both wacky alternatives to the tried and true power cell, as well as ways to make existing cells better. Among the latter, Nikkei is reporting that Eamex in Osaka, Japan, has developed a lithium-ion battery that will last some twenty years of regular use -- that's 10,000 charges! The secret to the long-lasting lithium-ion? In current designs, the tin that's used for the battery's negative electrode weakens through continual charging and recharging. The new design, however, calls for tin-coated resin that stabilizes the electrode and prevents deterioration. Why didn't we think of that? Look forward to seeing these exciting, new batteries debut in electric scooters sometime this year. [Warning: Source link requires subscription]
Microsoft says it's looking into laptop battery issues with Windows 7
We've already seen some evidence that suggests Windows 7 puts a particularly hard drain on at least some laptop and netbook batteries, and it looks like Microsoft has now heard enough complaints itself to open an investigation into the matter. Details are otherwise a bit light, but Microsoft is apparently looking into the issue in collaboration with its hardware partners, and says that the problem is likely related to the computers' BIOS, which Windows 7 relies on to determine if the battery needs to be replaced. Needless to say, there isn't much in the way of solutions in the meantime, and Microsoft isn't offering any indication as to when one might be forthcoming.
Steve Jobs compares iPad battery life to Kindle's: 'You're not going to read for 10 hours' (video)
Hey, remember back when Steve Jobs said "people don't read anymore" when discussing why the Kindle would be a failure? Heh, funny story: turns out Apple just released a device called the iPad and, at its unveiling, spent an awful lot of time showing off what a great reader it is. However, when comparing it to Kindle (as we did here) you have to think about that battery life figure: 10 hours vs. seven days. When Walt Mossberg caught Jobs after the unveiling for a little gonzo-style interview he asked about this, and Jobs said "you're not going to read for 10 hours...you just end up pluggin' it in." So, Steve now concedes that people do read, but apparently they don't do it for long without coming close to a power receptacle. When asked about price differentials between books on the devices, rumored to be as much as $5 more than on Kindle, Jobs somewhat reluctantly states that "publishers are actually withholding books from Amazon because they're not happy," and that "the prices will be the same" -- but doesn't indicate whether Amazon's prices will be going up or that rumored $14.99 price point is going down. It's all in the video after the break, including plenty of face time with Walt.
Dear Aunt TUAW: What's the low down on battery packs?
Dear Aunt TUAW, Boxcar is killing my battery life (at least, that's what I'm guessing -- I love Boxcar, but since I began getting 20+ notifications a day, I'm seeing the battery drain quite a bit faster). What kind of battery pack can you recommend to help my poor iPhone stay online and available? I need to stay connected. Thanks in advance from your favorite nephew, Mikey Read on for Auntie's reply
Sanyo's Eneloop music booster keeps stage musicians effect-ed
If there's even a faint need for a recharging solution, there's a decent shot that Sanyo will have an Eneloop device to fit the situation. Take the newly announced music booster, for instance, which is designed to sit alongside your Tube Screamer, TU-2 Chromatic Tuner and RV600 Reverb Machine in order to keep the juice flowin' even if a breaker trips mid-solo. Truthfully, the device could be used to energize pretty much anything that taps into a 9V power source, and if you're concerned over noise interference, Sanyo assures us that you shouldn't be. The unit -- which goes on sale in March 2010 -- can be fully regenerated in around 3.5 hours, and depending on the drain of the device(s) it's powering, can keep things going for anywhere between 2 and 50 hours. Rock on, as they say.
Quantum batteries are theoretically awesome, practically non-existent
Today's dose of overly ambitious tech research comes from the physics lab over at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a proposal titled "Digital quantum batteries: Energy and information storage in nano vacuum tube arrays." It's like a who's who of undelivered promises got together and united to form one giant and impossible dream, but it's one we'd prefer to believe in regardless. Aiming to improve battery performance by "orders of magnitude," the project's fundamental premise is that when capacitors -- and we're talking billions of them -- are taken to a small enough scale and packed to within 10nm of one another, quantum effects act to prevent energy loss. The projected result is a wonderful world of rapid recharges and storage of up to ten times the energy current lithium-ion packs can hold, as well as the potential for data retention. The only problem? It would take a year just to build a prototype, meaning we can expect market availability somewhere between a score from now and just prior to the underworld morphing into an ice rink.
Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests
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
Tesla Roadster keeps on rollin', goes 313 miles on single charge
What could be a better feeling than beating a world record? Beating your own world record. The Tesla Roadster has put an extra exclamation mark on its world-conquering single-charge antics by raising the bar from 241 miles back in April to an even more impressive 313 this week. As you can see in that homemade "world record" sign above, that's 501 kilometers in metric terms, or pretty much the exact distance between Paris and Amsterdam. The Global Green Challenge in Australia -- where this feat was achieved -- allows only production battery-powered vehicles to compete, meaning that the new record is down to driver skill on the part of one Mr. Simon Hackett, and not some newfound techno mojo. Kinda makes those long recharge times seem like less of a burden, no?
Rechargeable zinc-air batteries promise a lot, we'll see if they deliver in 2010
Is there any other field of technology that promises as many revolutionary innovations as battery makers do yet delivers so few? We've heard of battery life being made four times, eight times, even twelve times better... and seen pretty much none of it pan out in any sort of meaningful way. Zinc-air batteries are also nothing new, but now some whizkids up in Norway have figured out how to make them rechargeable and set up an entire company, ReVolt, for their commercialization. With more than double the energy density of regular Lithium-Ion batteries, safer operation, lower cost of production, and environmentally friendlier ingredients, ReVolt's tech sounds as sweet as anything, but we'd advise waiting for the pudding-based proof before getting excited. Plans are for small hearing aid and cellphone batteries to show up in 2010, and if all goes well there, larger cells for electric vehicles could also follow. Sure. [Via PhysOrg]
Workaround for HTC Hero battery life issues discovered
Well, there still isn't a fix for the problem some people seem to be having with receiving text messages on their HTC Hero, but it looks like a workaround has been discovered for another pesky issue that can put a strain on the phone's battery life. Apparently, the phone has a bit of trouble going back into sleep mode after you send a text, or after you simply turn on the phone and immediately disable the screen without any activity. While some fairly elaborate fixes were tried by some users initially, it looks like the simplest actually works the best: just don't use the default SMS app to send texts. Instead, you can use a third-party app like ChompSMS or HandCent, which apparently have no problems letting the phone go back to sleep after you send a text. Of course, an official fix would still be the best but, in the meantime, you can hit up the link below for all the necessary details on making the (hopefully temporary) switch. [Thanks, Sean]
10.6 falsely reports 'service battery?' ... I think not
Over the last couple weeks, I've been going back and forth with readers who truly believe that Snow Leopard is reporting battery errors when they have a perfectly good battery. There's even a substantially large thread in Apple's Discussions forums about this topic. I've been notified of that thread many times, accused of not covering real issues, hiding the truth and just plain refusing to believe that it's an issue with the Operating System. After trudging through all of that, I've determined that it's a whole bunch of hoopla. I'm not saying that some of these people aren't experiencing real issues with the software -- just the sheer amount of complaints in the discussion forums would say there are problems -- but the "Service Battery" complaint doesn't appear to be related to software issues at all. One of the big differences between Leopard and Snow Leopard is how they report issues with the battery. Leopard didn't report issues in a place where most users would know to check: System Profiler - Power - Health Information. Snow Leopard reports issues directly from your Menu Bar as shown in the picture. This difference caused a real stir in our tips box because many users never knew that their batteries were bad before Snow Leopard. "My battery isn't bad, it worked fine until I installed Snow Leopard" -- Yes, it may have worked fine but that doesn't mean it didn't have issues before the upgrade. Apple just made the problems more noticeable in the OS. In fact, they're helping their users catch them sooner. Most of the time, people don't realize their battery has issues until it REALLY has issues like 20 minute run-times, random shut downs, the black "x" in the battery icon, etc. All of these are issues we (technicians) use to identify a bad battery. These new battery checks could actually help you find out your battery is bad before the warranty runs out; before it gets to the point of no return. Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers now have a special utility that actually reads the health information directly from the battery and can determine why the Operating System says the battery needs serviced. Most of the time the problem will fall into two categories: battery failure or depletion. This diagnostic tool is actually a game-changer in the world of Apple's battery warranty: batteries are no longer automatically covered through the first year. If the battery legitimately fails, they'll replace it free of charge. If you happen to deplete the battery within the first year, you'll pay for a new battery. Take all of this information with a grain of salt. Apple IS helping us by having the OS show us when the battery fails, but they've also made warranty battery replacements a little more fair on their end. Having blanket warranties for a year probably cost them a lot of money considering it's pretty easy to deplete a battery within that time if you don't take care to keep it healthy. I've had the battery in my MacBook Pro for 9 months now. I have 245 cycles on the battery, 3-4 hours of pretty heavy usage (without the killer graphics enabled), and 99% health rating according to iStat Pro. I'll leave you with a few tips to help maintain the health of your battery: Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life. Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it's drained past 30%. Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge - the better its overall health will remain. 30 cycles in a year is not a good thing. ;) Let the battery drain completely a few times a week. Never let it sit for long periods of time without use. Batteries need to be loved or else they won't love you. For more information on batteries, check out apple.com/batteries UPDATE -- There have been a lot of opinions expressed in the comments about the proper care and feeding of Apple laptop batteries, especially the newer lithium ion units. I'm happy to see that this article sparked such a healthy debate. To be clear, my tips here are not directly based on Apple's recommendations. They are driven by my personal experience servicing Apple laptops and Apple batteries for customers, and my own battery health history. For a different take on proper battery care for modern gear, we were pointed to feedback from Marco Ament that's worth a look. If we have electrical engineers or battery designers in the audience that wish to weigh in, we'd be happy to hear from you.
Carbon nanotubes find yet another purpose, could star in ultra-reliable batteries
Carbon nanotubes are kind of like peanuts. They both seem pretty simple at first glance, but with a little work, you can make pretty much anything out of 'em. Take this case, for example, as MIT boffins have discovered that by forming the tube-shaped molecules of pure carbon into minuscule springs, they could be "capable of storing as much energy, pound for pound, as lithium-ion batteries." The real kicker is exactly how they'd do it -- "more durably and reliably." Essentially, these newfangled cells could be left alone for years on end without losing their charge, and unlike conventional batteries, these wouldn't suffer from performance degradation when exposed to temperature extremes. Of course, anything as pie-in-the-sky as this is probably at least a decade or so out from Walmart shelves, but considering that the group responsible has already filed a patent, we'd say they're pretty confident in the possibilities.[Via Physorg]
LG X130 goes from dawn till dusk on standard 9-cell battery
12 hours. That, according to LG, is the new benchmark by which all wannabe long-lasting laptops will have to measure up. Of course, we've seen similar aftermarket solutions before, but it's good to see a manufacturer stick a flag in the ground -- and a big rump on the back -- in the race for the highest endurance netbook. And boy is the X130 a netbook: 1024 x 600 resolution, 10-inch screen and the predictable Atom N270 et al. Koreans can grab one now for 789,000 Won ($639), with almost worldwide availability to follow shortly. Check out our review of the X120 for a flavor of LG's history in the market, while we go look for actual benchmarks undermining that legendary battery life claim. [Via Trusted Reviews]
