Common Paradox Tech Blog

Yes, you read the title correctly. According to Apple’s web site, If your iPad battery fails Apple doesn’t want to bother opening the device to replace it — they would rather ship you a completely new (no word on whether it’s a refurb?) iPad to replace the faulty one within a weeks time period. [...]

Apple to Replace Complete iPad for $99 if Battery Fails is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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The HyperMac Nano by HyperShop is an external battery for iPhone and iPod with a built in charging cable. It’s highly portable, looks and feels great, and is made of 1800mAh lithium ion which provides up 1.5 times full recharge of the iPhone.

To learn more and get details about the give-away, follow us after the [...]

TiPb Give-Away: HyperMac Nano Battery for iPhone/iPod is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

MSI on Monday announced the availability of its "2010 iF Product Design Award Winning" Wind U160 netbook. This is MSI’s second netbook built around Intel’s Pine Trail platform, and taking full advantage of the new spec, the company claims you can expect up to 15 hours of run time when in MSI’s exclusive ECO mode.

Everything you’d expect from a modern netbook is included, such as a 10-inch backlit LED display, Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 6-cell battery, Bluetooth, Windows 7 Starter, and a 6-cell battery. It also comes with EasyFace facial recognition security software.

Where MSI looks to separate the U160 from the spate of Pine Trail netbooks is in its physical design.

"Abandoning the traditional clamshell form, the Wind U160 ushers in a new era of netbook design," MSI said. "From the illuminated MSI logo on the netbook’s outer surface to the power button placed on the U160’s cylindrical hinge, the newest Wind model sports a slim new footprint. Just 0.98 inches at its widest point, the U160 is the thinnest Wind model to date."

The Wind U160 is available now for $380 at Fry’s, Newegg.com, and Buy.com.

Image Credit: MSI

The Seidio Innocell 2600mAh Extended Battery for the Palm Pre will add noticeable bulk – there’s no question about that. The question is this: does the substantial improvement in battery life (and I do mean substantial) make the sacrifice in form factor worthwhile?

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We’ve seen increased efforts lately to push greater cell phone adoption into developing nations, and the latest to enter the fray is a low cost handset powered by commonly available AAA-sized batteries. Called the "FrvrOn," short for "forever on," Indian mobile phone company Oliver Telecommunications also outfitted its mobile phone with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, but has good reason for including an AAA compartment.

"We have electrification all across the country but the power supply is erratic," marketing manager Ravi Perti told AFP. "With our phone, all one needs to do is pack a few extra cells (batteries) if one is traveling in areas where one expects power supply disruptions."

Perti says, the phone can run for up to three hours on the stock lithium-ion battery, and another hour on a single AAA battery.

According to government figures, there are 10,000 impoverished Indian villages with access to grid electricity. Even still, India represents the world’s fastest-expanding mobile market, adding an average of 15 million customers every month.

Image Credit: Olive Communications

ViewSonic, a newcomer to the ULV laptop market, has just unveiled its VNB131 ViewBook Pro, the company’s first nobeook to utilize ultra low voltage technology. According to ViewSonic, this is just the first of many more to come.

"Our mobile and desktop PC products range in size and functionality in order to meet every individuals’ computing needs," said ViewSonic’s senior director of product marketing Sally Wang. "With our ULV VNB131 ViewBook Pro, mobile warriors get all the power they need, packaged to go in a lean, green design."

More specifically, ViewSonic’s first ULV notebook ships with a 13.3-inch screen and an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor clocked at 1.3GHz. Other specs include a 320GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and a removable DVD burner. That last bit is particularly noteworthy because if you take the optical drive out, ViewSonic says you can pop in an extra 3-cell battery for up to 12 hours of run time.

The rest of the specs include 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, a 1.3MP webcam, 7-in-1 media card reader, HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports, a 6-cell battery, and Windows 7 Home Premium.

This one is available now for $950.

Image Credit: ViewSonic 

How do you build a safer battery? By doing horrible things to it. At Sandia National Laboratories, lithium-ion batteries—the kind that are you inside your laptop and cars—are pulverized, overcharged and just plain exploded.

The idea’s to find faults in the batteries so battery makers can fix them. What’s depressing is that the lab’s underfunded and apparently still looks like it’s out of the Cold War, with ancient equipment and tinfoil wrapped around lines for safety. This is even as the lab has alerted battery makers to the kinds of serious problems that cause batteries to you know, explode—leading the industry to create backup systems like mechanical circuit breakers when batteries get too hot.

Check out the full profile at the WSJ, it’s eye-popping, and not just for the detailed descriptions of how the lab tortures the hell out of batteries. [WSJvia Techmeme]

You’re not likely to find the Solar Egg on any Denny’s menu, nor would you want to put one in your mouth anyway. Feel free to toss it out into low sunlight, however, where developers XPAL and Intivation claim the Solar Egg’s internal 500mAh battery can reach over 90 percent charge in just 4 hours of exposure in "average charging conditions."

"Solar power is a huge unrealized energy source particularly in the Western world which tends to have fewer hours of sunlight than developing markets," says Christian Scheder, President, XPAL. "As personal devices demand more energy and solar charging technology improves, we are making solar power available to more consumers and changing the way people power their portable devices."

The two companies are touting the Solar Egg as the world’s first high performance solar charger. They say it’s built to power a range of devices, from phones to MP3 players.

This one will start shipping next month in "select regions," followed by a global rollout later this year. No word yet on price.

Image Credit: XPAL via Engadget

Do you know how often we hear about promising new battery technologies every year? Over 4 million times. That’s what it feels like, anyway, even if we’re way off in our estimation. But here’s another number: One. That’s how many battery breakthroughs we expect to materialize in an actual product in 2010.

The technology we’re referring to comes from a Japanese company called Eamex, who says it has discovered a way to increase the life of high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. We tend to give this one a bit more credibility, if only because Eamex isn’t talking about a theoretical tech that could eventually lead to the demise of lithium-ion.

What Eamex has done is figure out a way to stabilize the electrodes and prevent the deterioration of tin. Why’s this important? Because it means the batteries can withstand a lot more charge and discharge cycles. We’re talking about over 10,000 cycles with a shelf life of 20 years. By comparison, Apple says a MacBook or MacBook Pro battery can withstand about 1,000 cycles over about 5 years of constant use.

Unlike other battery technologies, you don’t have to wait a decade for this one to come to market. Eamex says it will ship a battery with about 10,000W of power per kilogram (suitable for electric cars and scooters) by the end of 2010.

Image Credit: energy.cleartheair.org.hk

The original solBAT was a neat idea—a backup battery that charged through an integrated solar panel, which in turn charged any USB device. But it was $100. The latest sequel, on the other hand, is just $30.

Mounting to a window thanks to some suction cups, or hooking to pretty much anything with a clip, the 1500mA solBAT II puts out 5V through USB, which is enough throughput to charge your iPhone as fast as you can from the wall.

So how was this price drop possible? The original solBAT included perks like voice-enabled caller ID—something most of us are probably willing to live without. For $30 (available soon), I’m willing to give the solBAT II a shot. [Scosche]