Starting on May 16th, 2012 you’ll no longer be able to use the US Postal Service to ship any item overseas if it contains a lithium-ion battery. That includes most recent laptops, tablets, and phones. Fast Company reports that new Postal Service regulations are a response to two airplane crashes which have been attributed to exploding batteries. You can still…
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In case you hadn’t noticed, Intel has a lot of big plans for future ultrabooks. The company wants to see thin and light laptops thinner batteries, high resolution displays, and cheaper cases, among other things. But Intel isn’t just focused on making ultrabooks smaller and cheaper. The company is also looking at adding features such as touchscreens and other sensors, as…
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One of the obstacles to building affordable thin and light computers is the fact that most laptop batteries are big and bulky. While there are compact batteries for tablets and some ultraportable notebooks such as the MacBook Air and the current crop of ultrabooks, these batteries don’t come in standard sizes. Intel wants to change that by adopting standards for…
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Tired of waiting a few hours for your cellphone, tablet, or laptop battery to go from 0 to 100? Batteries of the future may be able to charge in a tiny fraction of the time. Ars Technica dug up a report this week from researchers working on a way to construct batteries that could charge in minutes rather than hours….
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Four port USB hubs are a dime a dozen these days. And I mean that almost literally, with plenty of places where you can find USB hubs on sale for around a buck. But Brando has found a way to make a USB hub that really stands out. First up, this hub has a built-in rechargeable 130mAh batter and comes…
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Say the batteries in your remote control die. You could get up and walk across the room to change the channel, or you could spend the next half hour looking for a spare set of batteries. I know what I’d do, and I’m not proud of it. But what if there was another way to provide a little extra juice…
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The Asus Eee PC 1008P Karim Rashid Edition is an ultrathin netbook that’s pretty much the same shape and size as the Eee PC 1008HA. But while you can’t easily replace the battery on the Eee PC 1008HA, the 1008P has a battery door that lets you remove the battery and swap it out for a replacement. And it looks…
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The Lenovo ThinkPad X100e stands apart from other notebooks in the thin and light crowd in a couple of ways. First, it has an AMD Neo MV-40 processor and ATI Radeon 3200 HD graphics, which you don’t find in a lot of 11.6 inch laptops. Second, it has a distinctive keyboard design. Third, it’s got Lenovo’s signature TrackPoint system which…
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The Asus UL20A is a 12.1 inch notebook with an Intel CULV processor and integrated graphics. It ships with a 47Whr, 4400mAh battery. The Asus Eee PC 1201N is a 12.1 inch notebook with an Intel Atom 330 dual core CPU and NVIDIA ION graphics. It ships with a 63Whr, 5600mAh battery. Here’s what I discovered today: Those two batteries…
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Some of you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quieter than usual over the past two weeks. That’s because I was visiting family in New Zealand. In case you were wondering, traveling from Philadelphia to New Zealand takes an awfully long time — about 25-30 hours one way. But thanks to a good book or three and some personal…
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Unlike most Asus netbooks, the Asus Eee PC T91MT and Eee PC 1008HA have batteries that are not user replaceable. Most netbooks have batteries that slide out of the back or bottom of the computer. But these models are thin, light, and hide the batteries away inside the case making it much more difficult to remove or replace the batteries….
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A few weeks ago Kevin Tofel from jkOnTheRun and I ran a few tests that seemed to show that netbooks running Windows XP get better battery life than those running Windows 7. Our test machines were the Toshiba Mini NB205 and the Asus Eee PC 1008HA. In both cases, the hardware was virtually identical, the only difference was the operating…
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