Lithium ion batteries are nearing the limits of their possible power capacity, while the power requirements of mobile devices are increasing quickly. Something’s got to give.
If your awesome new smartphone is to have any hope of lasting longer than a day on one charge, it's going to need more power than a typical lithium ion battery can deliver.
Used to be, you could forget your feature phone’s charger at home, go on a long-weekend vacation, and--assuming that you didn’t use it to play hours of Snake--still come home with enough battery life left on it to call a cab.
Today, though, we’re wedded to our chargers, and glare hawkishly at people who hog airport and coffee-shop outlets for too long. Switching over to superfast 4G networks, as many smartphones will in 2011, is only going to exacerbate this problem; and reports already indicate that 4G devices tend to have pitiful smartphone battery life. In fact, the power requirements of the technology being built into mobile devices is growing at twice the pace of battery-capacity increases, according to one Verizon executive.
But catching up with mobile power requirements won’t be quick or easy for the battery industry, and continuing difficulty may discourage public adoption of new 4G devices. Unfortunately, the problem isn't a simple matter of mobile battery R&D falling behind. It extends to the chemical nature of batteries, the way research and development is funded in the global market for mobile tech, and the many different demands users place on our phones and tablets.
Constrained by Chemistry
Battery technology and smartphone technology are at two very different stages in their lifespans. “Unlike smartphones, battery technology has been evolving for over a century, and is much further down the development curve, meaning that improvements in htc battery technology, while steady, no longer happen at the breakneck speed of younger technology like smartphones,” says Keith Nowak of phone and tablet maker HTC.
But aside from tiny incremental improvements in solid-electrolyte efficiency, lithium ion polymer batteries for handheld tech products haven't changed drastically in more than 15 years. Almost all of the batteries that power today's smartphones and tablets run on some variant of the lithium ion polymer battery--a cell in which the anode and the cathode are packaged with a solid, gel-like electrolyte (the substance that makes the battery conduct electricity). This solid-electrolyte design was developed commercially in 1996 as manufacturers sought a sturdier battery for mobile tech products. Previously, cell phones had run on lithium ion batteries with liquid electrolytes, which were bulky and relatively unstable.
Today, mobile phone battery researchers continue to increase the capacity of lithium ion polymer batteries. Since a battery’s power comes from its transfer of electric-charge-bearing electrons between the anode and the cathode, battery researchers focus primarily on optimizing the multitude of mini-transfers. “A lot of chemical reactions can take on a life of their own, and battery scientists try to control that,” said Irving Echavarria of Gold Peak Industries, a company that manufactures all types of consumer batteries, including lithium ion variations. Echavarria estimates that 80 percent of the processes in a battery can be accurately harnessed. And the smaller the battery’s window of errant chemical reactions, the more efficiently the battery will provide power. Battery makers continue to achieve capacity gains by pushing closer to that 80 percent efficiency limit.
But the incremental advances in efficiency aren’t keeping pace with the increasing energy demands of smartphones and other mobile devices. Frustrated by the chemical and physical limits of batteries, developers who want to get longer run times out of smartphone batteries must either add active material to the battery by making the inactive parts of the battery smaller (a technique that has already reached limits of its own) or move from lithium ion polymer to a different, as yet not fully researched material.
Venkat Srinivasan, a battery technology researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, notes that, “the physics that dictates evolution in batteries is different from the physics that dictates evolution in smartphone electronics.” It seems that batteries are doomed to drag along behind the wagon train until a Eureka moment happens occurs with a better material.
New Ideas Coming, Slowly
Small signs of innovation are visible on the nokia battery-life horizon. The unanswered questions are how quickly they’ll emerge, and whether the technology involved will be scalable to serve the entire mobile world.
Lithium ion research continues in the R&D labs of many consumer-battery makers. And university labs across the country have churned out paper after paper on the possibilities of graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite that has the potential to store and transmit energy (though any use of graphene for consumer batteries is still a long way off). But the U.S. government (like many other national governments) has provided almost no funding for consumer battery research, instead putting money into research for vehicle and military-use batteries.
It’s Not Just the Battery, Though
Designing a mobile device is no longer just about perfecting its computing power, design, and user interface; it’s about doing all those things with far less power. At some point, consumers’ desire for faster data plans and monster multitasking capabilities will be overtaken by the simple need for a device that can remain in operation for at least one full workday.
Smartphone screens are getting larger and supporting higher resolutions, both of which suck power like crazy. Lowering your screen's brightness might help eke a few extra minutes out of your battery, but Apple, HTC, Motorola, and other major phone manufacturers are unlikely to move to smaller or duller screens anytime soon. Nevertheless, some (including Samsung and LG Electronics) are focusing on making new types of displays that are no dimmer but use less power.
Another major power drain relates to increasingly complex apps, which impose ever-steeper processing requirements. Most smartphones contain Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS radios inside, and in many instances these components operate simultaneously. The GPS radio, in particular, is a notorious battery killer: You can see the battery bar getting shorter as you run your navigation app. Newer phones add a 4G radio chipset, which requires a lot more processing power to decode far greater amounts of data encoded in the LTE wireless spectrum. On top of all that, new 4G phones have two different chip sets, to connect with a 4G spectrum and with the carrier’s older 3G network. As a result, you can count on your samsung battery to deliver only about a day of juice to your phone, if you're lucky.
One consequence of runaway power consumption is that the makers of mobile processors are feeling a lot of pressure to produce more-efficient chips for phones.
James Bruce, an executive at ARM, which develops and licenses processors for almost all mobile devices in the world, explains that phone hardware is much more battery-efficient today than it was when phones lasted longer, but "the difference between a Nokia [feature phone] and a smartphone today is that there just wasn’t enough there for people to keep using their phones all day."
Dual Cores Will Help
The dual-core processors (made by ARM) that have shown up in a few 2011 smartphones (auch as the HTC Droid Bionic and the Motorola Atrix 4G) may offer some hope. According to Bruce, "dual-core” phones can delegate simple tasks to one core, while directing more-complex (and more-power-hungry) tasks to the other core. As Bruce explains, if the phone is doing only simple tasks--such as sending text messages or running the calculator--on one core, the other core can power down, thereby saving battery life.
The idea that more cores could be the secret to using less battery power may seem a little counterintuitive, but ARM isn’t the only company trying to solve the problem of too-short sony ericsson battery life in that way.
At the beginning of May, a company called Adapteva announced their new "Epiphany Microprocessor," which they hope to place in smartphones and tablets alongside ARM dual-core processors.
Adapteva’s new processor can accommodate up to 64 cores on a smartphone chip. While planting a 64-core chip in a smartphone sounds like the opposite of a power-saving measure, Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of the company, says that most smartphones today run a scaled-down, power-hungry version of a desktop processor to connect to the Internet, run games, and play music.
The Epiphany processor, on the other hand, is a chip optimized for performing specific parts of general commands in tandem with the phone’s CPU (which does all of the phone’s general processing). The processor can streamline the offline duties of the phone to make gesture and facial recognition faster, for example. Olofsson says that this design could "put the power of a laptop in a smartphone today."
It’s the Apps
Smartphone apps are the final culprit in our rogues' gallery of smartphone battery killers (with the physical limits of batteries ranking as the first culprit). An app's power usage is one of the things Apple examines when deciding whether to approve an app for sale at the App Store. “[Apple] wouldn't let you intentionally ruin battery life, like if you were running a game that didn't require GPS, they would reject the app if it was pinging a GPS signal every 10 seconds,” says Cameron Vanga, a developer with iPhone app maker 9magnets.
Though the Android app market might harbor a larger number of potential power-sucking apps, more-established developers usually make an effort not to use more battery life than they need to get the app to function properly, for fear of receiving low ratings or having users delete the app. “Beyond maybe GPS applications, most users are good at correlating which apps are going to kill battery,” Vanga notes.
Most smartphone users are okay with taking their phones out for the day and then plugging them in to a charger each night, but battery makers are going to have to step up soon to deal with the voracious appetites of the miniature computers that everyone is relying on more and more every day. If innovation in computer battery technology doesn’t pick it up a little, the breakneck speed at which mobile tech innovation has been racing along could come crashing to a halt against a usability wall.
2011年5月19日星期四
2011年5月18日星期三
Environmental Concerns
Besides dwindling resources, we also have environmental issues. Concerns relating to burning fossil fuel were first published in the early 1970s, governments acknowledged the possible environmental impact in 1991, and 20 years later global warming is continuing at an alarming rate. The 39 percent increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) since 1900 may have appeared harmless at first, but scientists are beginning to worry about the most rapid changes in temperature patterns in recorded history. Thousands of initiatives have been discussed, some have been implemented, but few slow the production of greenhouse gas and the imbalance continues to grow. We have gotten into whitewater rafting — we are all in it and it’s too late to get out. Everyone hangs on for the ride, lest we drown!
To reflect on our frivolous energy consumption, let’s step into a time capsule and fly 500 years into the future. As we mingle with the crowd in the new world, we hear folks grumbling about the boisterous oil pow-wow that started in the early 1900s and lasted until the end of 2000. We learn that these future generations despise the lavish lifestyle of the past. They say, “Our forefathers burned the vast global oil reserve virtually overnight, built cities with only the car in mind to satisfy adult pleasures, and gave little consideration to children, future sustainability and quality of life.”
No one likes changes, and when the medical associations realized in the 1970s that smoking tobacco is harmful to human health, US president Ronald Reagan hinted, and I paraphrase, “Yes, we must tell citizens to smoke less, but let’s not hurt the tobacco industry.” In newspapers we read how governments spend billions of dollars to reduce the dependency on oil through subsidy, and on the next page we are bombarded with full-page ads promoting monster SUVs and trucks offering larger engines and more horsepower than last year’s models. Governments must work with the private sector to achieve energy sustainability and prepare for alternate energy resources. Opposing the objective is like putting one jet engine on reverse-thrust while flying mid air.
Will our politicians have the strength to lead the world after the peak-oil era? Giving subsidies to encourage old habits for the sake of short-term economical and political gains will not prepare us for the future. Instead of racking up debts to hide from the true cost of energy, a strong government should build reserves to prepare for the higher energy costs. Biblical Joseph did this in Egypt 3,000 years ago. Foretold in a prophetic dream about seven prosperous years followed by seven meager years, Joseph stored grain during the bountiful seven years to bridge the famine years that followed (Genesis 41). It seems as if our Creator has given man enough intelligence to restrain nature but not enough to prevent destruction. Energy, the servant that brought much prosperity, may one day turn back and demand its wages.
To satisfy the hunger for energy, we devour more resources than the Earth can provide. Our consumption is one-and-a-half times what the Earth can produce in a sustainable continuum. Governments are hesitant to educate citizens to live with less, lest the economic will suffer. Yet, while energy is still abundant and cheap, we must begin reducing consumption and switch to renewable resources, an exercise that will gradually replace oil. Scientists have made several attempts at this in the past, but the results have been mixed.
In the 1990s, we put faith in the fuel cell using clean hydrogen. Technical hurdles and high costs still stand in its way as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. The first decade in the twenty-first century drew the world to renewable energies such as solar power, wind energy and bio-fuels. While this is a positive more, these energies cost several times more than fossil fuels, and to compensate governments provide subsidies. An installed solar system costs.
$10–12 per watt; generating one kWh is $0.40. Wind power comes in at roughly half this. Meanwhile, electricity from the gird is only $0.10kWh in many parts of the world. It costs $9 to produce 10 liters (2.6 US gallons) of ethanol. The limitation of ethanol production is availability of land and sufficient water.
We cannot afford another miscalculation, especially when our governments have spent billions of tax dollars to develop a laptop battery for the vehicular powertrain. This outlay comes at a time when our countries are already in deep debt and citizens are not prepared to change their way of life. Nor are cities being planned for efficient transit and fewer cars.
The battery of the future should do more than provide transportation. It must solve our future energy needs by capturing electrical energy from renewable sources and delivering it to the people for consumption. This super battery must store energy when it is available in abundance and distribute it when the demands are high. Such a cycle would be sustainable and do minimal harm to our environment.
No battery exists today that is capable of substituting for fossil fuel. Science may one day discover a power source that lies outside the electrochemical dell battery and works on the law of physics, producing energy in a continuous form much like our sun. Once we shift our minds away from oil, such an achievement might be possible.
Pledge to Humanity
The goal for humanity is to attain an environment that is sustainable, find spiritual fulfillment and provide social justice. Rich nations may not reach this objective without the help of poorer countries. The developing world might one day come forward to teach the well established that material possessions do not satisfy and that the deeper meaning of life lies in love, relationships and spiritual fulfillment. These caring people will tell the rich nations to go back to the basics and rediscover the bounty of this earth by letting go of excess baggage. Individuals who find the virtue of simplicity will enjoy life more with fewer material possessions than those who have plenty and strive for more.
To reflect on our frivolous energy consumption, let’s step into a time capsule and fly 500 years into the future. As we mingle with the crowd in the new world, we hear folks grumbling about the boisterous oil pow-wow that started in the early 1900s and lasted until the end of 2000. We learn that these future generations despise the lavish lifestyle of the past. They say, “Our forefathers burned the vast global oil reserve virtually overnight, built cities with only the car in mind to satisfy adult pleasures, and gave little consideration to children, future sustainability and quality of life.”
Folks in the new word fret over the environmental damage that forced millions of farmers in water-starved territories to flee the land because of encroaching deserts. School textbooks describe how during the time of cheap oil, wealthy businessmen lined their pockets while politicians sank the countries into debt so deep that it became impossible to repay the money borrowed. Folks wonder why educated government leaders could not predict the end of cheap oil.
Will our politicians have the strength to lead the world after the peak-oil era? Giving subsidies to encourage old habits for the sake of short-term economical and political gains will not prepare us for the future. Instead of racking up debts to hide from the true cost of energy, a strong government should build reserves to prepare for the higher energy costs. Biblical Joseph did this in Egypt 3,000 years ago. Foretold in a prophetic dream about seven prosperous years followed by seven meager years, Joseph stored grain during the bountiful seven years to bridge the famine years that followed (Genesis 41). It seems as if our Creator has given man enough intelligence to restrain nature but not enough to prevent destruction. Energy, the servant that brought much prosperity, may one day turn back and demand its wages.
To satisfy the hunger for energy, we devour more resources than the Earth can provide. Our consumption is one-and-a-half times what the Earth can produce in a sustainable continuum. Governments are hesitant to educate citizens to live with less, lest the economic will suffer. Yet, while energy is still abundant and cheap, we must begin reducing consumption and switch to renewable resources, an exercise that will gradually replace oil. Scientists have made several attempts at this in the past, but the results have been mixed.
In the 1990s, we put faith in the fuel cell using clean hydrogen. Technical hurdles and high costs still stand in its way as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. The first decade in the twenty-first century drew the world to renewable energies such as solar power, wind energy and bio-fuels. While this is a positive more, these energies cost several times more than fossil fuels, and to compensate governments provide subsidies. An installed solar system costs.
$10–12 per watt; generating one kWh is $0.40. Wind power comes in at roughly half this. Meanwhile, electricity from the gird is only $0.10kWh in many parts of the world. It costs $9 to produce 10 liters (2.6 US gallons) of ethanol. The limitation of ethanol production is availability of land and sufficient water.
We cannot afford another miscalculation, especially when our governments have spent billions of tax dollars to develop a laptop battery for the vehicular powertrain. This outlay comes at a time when our countries are already in deep debt and citizens are not prepared to change their way of life. Nor are cities being planned for efficient transit and fewer cars.
The battery of the future should do more than provide transportation. It must solve our future energy needs by capturing electrical energy from renewable sources and delivering it to the people for consumption. This super battery must store energy when it is available in abundance and distribute it when the demands are high. Such a cycle would be sustainable and do minimal harm to our environment.
No battery exists today that is capable of substituting for fossil fuel. Science may one day discover a power source that lies outside the electrochemical dell battery and works on the law of physics, producing energy in a continuous form much like our sun. Once we shift our minds away from oil, such an achievement might be possible.
Pledge to Humanity
The goal for humanity is to attain an environment that is sustainable, find spiritual fulfillment and provide social justice. Rich nations may not reach this objective without the help of poorer countries. The developing world might one day come forward to teach the well established that material possessions do not satisfy and that the deeper meaning of life lies in love, relationships and spiritual fulfillment. These caring people will tell the rich nations to go back to the basics and rediscover the bounty of this earth by letting go of excess baggage. Individuals who find the virtue of simplicity will enjoy life more with fewer material possessions than those who have plenty and strive for more.
2011年5月2日星期一
MSI A6200 review: A basic laptop for users who are on a budget
MSI's A6200 is a 2.4kg, 15.6in laptop with a simple configuration and run-of-the-mill features. It's a budget model that's aimed at users who want to spend less than $600 on a computer that can be used for office tasks, Web browsing and even for managing music and video files.
Specifications and performance
The A6200 runs an Intel Pentium P6100 CPU, which has two cores and a frequency of 2GHz. While it was released in 2010, it's not as fast or as efficient as an Intel Core i3 CPU, but it's nevertheless competitive when performing office and multimedia tasks. This was shown in our Blender 3D rendering and iTunes MP3 encoding tests, in which it recorded 1min 39sec and 1min 23sec, respectively.
Its Blender score is around 40sec slower than a typical Core i3-based notebook at a similar price point, such as the Medion Akoya E6224 (MD 98630), and its iTunes time is only 7sec slower. This means it will be a little slow to perform taxing tasks, but not painfully slow. Its time to convert a DVD file into a 1.5GB Xvid file was 1hr 26min, which is only 13min slower than the Core i3-based Medion. Compared to other Pentium-based notebooks we've seen, such as the HP Pavilion G62, the MSI proved to be slightly faster overall.
In 3DMark06, the MSI's integrated Intel graphics recorded a score of 1747, which is faster than the HP's 1434. You can't use the MSI for gaming, but it's fine for viewing high-resolution photos and high-definition videos. You can even plug it in to your TV using HDMI to watch videos and view photos at Full HD as opposed to the screen's native 1366x768-resolution.
The rest of the A6200's configuration is solid: you get 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM and a 500GB hard drive. It's good for multitasking and it has plenty of space for photos and Internet downloads. You can add external hard drives via any of its three USB 2.0 ports, although the location of two of these ports at the back of the notebook is inconvenient. The rear of the notebook also has HDMI and VGA ports. You get a DVD burner on the right side, while the left side has a 10/100 Ethernet port, microphone and headphone ports, an SD card slot, and also an ExpressCard/34 expansion slot — it's rare to see this type of slot on a cheap laptop. You also get 802.11n Wi-Fi and a webcam.
Build quality and user comfort
The A6200's built quality isn't stellar, but for $599 that's hardly surprising. There is some movement along the edge between the top and bottom pieces of the chassis and this is noticeable when you rest your right hand on the palmrest. The hinges are a little too soft, but they are able to hold the screen in place without any problems. The keyboard is decent, but it does bounce a little as you type — after a while you get used to it. It comes with a number pad that has full-sized keys, but the right arrow key is located under the one key, which can be off-putting if you're used to hitting a proper number pad.
We're not fans of the touchpad, which sometimes felt very resistive in our tests and it also doesn't support gestures. Its left- and right-click buttons share the same button molding, which we don't like — if you press it too close to the middle, it will sometimes invoke the wrong button.
Like almost all cheap laptops we've seen recently, the MSI has a glossy screen that's very susceptible to reflections. Its vertical viewing angles also aren't great, and this can be annoying when watching videos. It has decent brightness and contrast though and it's fine for viewing photos and doing office work — as long as you angle it so that lights don't reflect off it.
Battery life
A 6-cell battery sits in the spine of the A6200 and it performed almost as expected in our rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video. It recorded a time of 2hr 25min in this test, which is only 1min off the 2hr 26min that the HP Pavilion G62 recorded in the same test. However, the G62 uses a slightly faster CPU. You can get more battery life out of the MSI if you dim the screen and perform tasks that don't require too much CPU time (such as Word processing and basic Web browsing).
Conclusion
While the A6200 doesn't make use of Intel's Second Generation Core (Sandy Bridge) CPUs, its Pentium P6100 is still a decent processor and it will handle basic tasks without being sluggish. That said, you should only consider buying this laptop if you are on a strict budget and can't afford a Sandy Bridge-based model. Otherwise a Core i3-based Sandy Bridge model is preferred as it will give you better performance and laptop battery life.
2011年4月27日星期三
Samsung’s Droid Charge a Strong Second LTE Phone for Verizon
The Samsung Droid Charge, Verizon’s second 4G LTE phone to hit the market, matches up well against the carrier’s first 4G phone—the HTC ThunderBolt—and may be a better choice for some users. The phone has a truly impressive AMOLED display and superfast data speeds, but suffers from a short battery life and a large design that will turn some people off.
The Charge, which goes on sale April 28, costs $300 with a 2-year contract--$50 more than the ThunderBolt--but does come with free mobile hotspot capability “for a limited time” (provided you buy a nationwide calling plan and an unlimited data plan (starting at $30). The Charge’s mobile hotspot can connect up to 10 devices via Wi-fi or five devices via a 3G CDMA connection.
Key Specs
Like the ThunderBolt, the Charge has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, runs Android 2.2 (Samsung had not comment about why the phone doesn’t’ run the newer Android 2.3 OS), and includes an HTML5 browser. It sports a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera (with flash) and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chatting. A 1 GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor (same as Samsung’s Galaxy S phones) sits under the hood—not dual-core, but not slow either.
Design
The Charge is noticeably larger than the HTC ThunderBolt (left) and the iPhone 4 (right). The Charge is a largish phone with an oval shape that comes to a soft point at the bottom. It is 5.1 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and .46 inch thick. The Charge is about the same width and depth as the ThunderBolt, but noticeably longer.
The Charge, at just over 5 ounces, is also noticeably lighter than the ThunderBolt’s almost 5.8 ounces, which some will like. Personally I like the weight of the ThunderBolt more; it feels like I’m holding a real piece of gear in my hand.
The Charge, like Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G, has a band of smokey chrome-colored plastic (Samsung calls this “mirror gray”) running around the outside front of the phone, which, to me, creates a cheap-looking effect. Question: Would Apple or HTC ever use such materials on a phone? Answer: Nope.
The functional set-up of the phone is pretty much like other phones in its class. Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons on the front bottom, front-facing camera and ear speaker at the top, earphone jack on the top, volume rocker and mini USB port on the left side edge, power button and HDMI port on the right side edge, camera and flash on the top of the back side, speaker on the bottom back.
Display is a Difference Maker
The literature says that the Charge’s Super AMOLED screen “sets a new standard for brightness, clarity and outdoor visibility.” I selected a movie trailer from the “Media Hub” (Sofia Coppolla’s ‘Somewhere’) to see if that was true. I was impressed—the Charge’s display looks as good or better than that on any other smartphone I’ve seen. The picture I saw did have impressive clarity, and the wide range between the most sunlight-bright whites and the deepest blacks of which the display is capable was immediately apparent. The colors were vibrant and true-to-life without being overbearing. This was a tough part of my testing, because I kept watching the pretty moving pictures, and didn’t want to turn it off.
The fat LTE pipe carrying the video data packets is important here too. The high bandwidth will reduce lost packets to the extent that artifacting, skips, and jitter in the video become very rare. The Charge has the bandwidth to bring in high-definition video streams intact and the AMOLED screen to display the video well. That’s a pretty compelling combination.
As for the “outdoor visibility” claim, I’m a believer here too. I held the Charge and the ThunderBolt side-by-side in direct sunlight, pulled up the phone dialer on each, and saw that the Charge’s screen was indeed easier to see. I could see the ThunderBolt’s dialer, but had to squint a little.
The Overlay
Samsung puts its own TouchWiz interface design over the Android operating system in the Charge and other Samsung phones. This overlay presents to the user all the content (and more) that the normal Android interface does, but the presentation is a little more crowded and noisy. I personally prefer HTC’s Sense UI overlay, which looks more elegant and well-organized to me, but that may be purely a matter of taste.
Camera
I was also moderately impressed with the quality of the 8-megapixel camera on the phone. Viewed on the Charge’s screen the still pictures I shot contained some of the contrast and clarity I saw in the videos I watched. When I viewed the photos on the large screen the high resolution of the shots was apparent. On certain shots (when I held the camera steady) I could detect the kind of fine detail you see in images shot with single-purpose cameras, but rarely in smartphone camera shots (click the zoom image at left). On the downside, the photos seemed to have a bit of a dark cast to them. The photos were not quite as good as ones I’ve shot with my iPhone, but noticeably better than those I’ve shot on my HTC EVO 4G.
The video I shot was less impressive. Viewed on my PC screen, the smallest amount of motion caused the video to blur and wash out. I also saw a lot of correction for light balance going on in the footage. The footage I shot in normal light indoors turned out better, but still not as sharp as I’d hoped. All of the videos looked better viewed on the screen of the Charge than on a full-sized display.
The camera software interface itself was easy to use, for the most part. One function allows you to tap the spot on the screen where you want to the camera to focus, which seemed to help some of my shots. I liked that the camera uses the phone’s volume rocker as its zoom controller, but was disappointed that there was no physical button on the phone to start shooting images or video.
Data Speeds
Testing from my office in the South of Market district of San Francisco I recorded an average download speed of 8.5 mbps and an average upload speed of 3.9 mbps. Running the same test on the HTC ThunderBolt at the same time, I recorded a very similar average download speed—8.25 mbps. (Unfortunately, the FCC cannot accurately record LTE network upload speeds on the ThunderBolt, so that comparison is omitted here.)
The Samsung Touch Wiz UI overlay on the Droid Charge.Shortly after I tested the Charge’s speed, I tested the speed of its mobile hotspot in the same manner. The connected at an average 14 mpbs for downloads and 8 mbps for uploads. Verizon is apparently allocating more bandwidth to the hotspot because it must allocate one pool of bandwidth to multiple devices. The bandwidth allocated to the phone, meanwhile, need only be enough to connect one device.
For comparison, I also ran the speed test on a laptop connected with Verizon’s new Mifi 4G hotspot. The Mifi showed a download speed of 15 mbps and an upload speed of 13.7 mbps. It’s possible that the Charge’s hotspot isn’t quite as fast as Verizon’s single-purpose hotspots, but it’s still plenty fast. Word of warning: cell phone battery life disappears extra fast while the mobile hotspot is on; better to use it when the phone is plugged in, if possible. Which brings us to our next issue.
The Battery Problem
Samsung may have named its phone the “Charge” because that may be the mode the phone spends most of its time in.
The ThunderBolt has already gained a reputation as having a weak battery. The first 4G phone, Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G, suffered from the same problem. The 4G radios in these devices demand far more power than those in 3G phones simply because they pull and push so much more data from and to the network.
Of course I was very curious about the longevity of the Charge’s 1600 maH battery. To test it I streamed a movie in standard definition from a server on the web for four-plus hours, a function that would keep the phone pulling down data from the web continuously, as well as keep the display and speaker operating continuously. I then noted the level of battery depletion, worked out the rate of depletion and finally extrapolated how long the battery would have lasted had the test continued. Since the phone is said to use more juice when the LTE signal is weaker, I tested in place where reception could be called “fair” but not “good.”
Samsung says the Charge’s battery will last “up to 660 minutes,” or 11 hours. (Technically, if the samsung battery lasted only two minutes no one could say that it didn’t last “up to 660 minutes”!) At any rate, our battery test found that the Samsung battery life comes up way short of the 660 minute number—after four hours and 8 minute of continuous video streaming the battery had been depleted to 37 percent of capacity. At that rate, the battery would have expired completely in 393 minutes or 6 hours and 33 minutes.
That’s assuming the battery expires at the same rate when it begins to run out of charge. In my (anecdotal) experience, however, that rate of depletion accelerates. So the 6 hours 33 minutes of battery life may be a little on the generous side.
Still, six and a half hours of continuous use isn’t really too bad. After all, who is going to keep their phone in continuous use for that long during the day? It seems pretty likely that a user could make it through a day without the Charge needed a charge—more than I can say for some 4G phones I’ve used.
And six and a half hours certainly beats the ThunderBolt’s rumored battery life of just 4 hours, if you believe the reports. I ran the same video streaming test on the ThunderBolt. After 4 hours and 3 minutes of streaming, the Thunderbolt still had 40 percent of its battery left. At that rate the htc battery would have completely expired in 405 minutes or 6 hours and 45 minutes. HTC promises only 6 hours and 18 minutes of usage time for the ThunderBolt.
Call Quality
To test the voice quality I placed some calls to land lines from a quiet spot, then from beside a busy street in San Francisco. The person I called said they could hear me very clearly but that my voice sounded like “radio voice”—that is, very present but without much body. I heard the same thing coming through the ear speaker on the Charge; the voice was clear but didn’t sound exactly human, as it does on the iPhone 4.
When I called my friend from beside the busy street, I learned two things: the ear speaker was loud enough for me to hear my friend’s voice clearly, without even turning the volume all the way up. Most importantly, my friend said that the traffic noise I could hear so clearly on my end sounded no louder than a dull background noise on his end. The noise cancellation in the Charge must be of fairly high quality.
Bottom Line
Samsung’s Droid Charge is a strong second LTE phone for Verizon, especially for people who like to stream high-quality video, video chat or play web-based games. The combination of the impressive AMOLED stream and the fat LTE pipe to carry loads of high-quality media down to the phone is a powerful combination. If you can deal with the not-so-impressive smartphone battery life, Samsung’s somewhat cluttered user interface and the general biggishness of the phone, the Charge might be a good phone for you
Since the Charge is the second LTE phone to hit the market in the US, it must be measured against the first LTE phone, the ThunderBolt. And here the Charge comes up short. While the ThunderBolt’s display may not looke quite as beautiful as the Charge’s, its connection speeds are the same or a little better, its battery is a little better, its physical design is smaller and more elegant, and its user interface is a more ordered, pleasing environment to work in. In short, if I were choosing between the two Verizon LTE phones, I could choose the one that’s $50 less, and still walk out with the better of the two phones.
The Charge, which goes on sale April 28, costs $300 with a 2-year contract--$50 more than the ThunderBolt--but does come with free mobile hotspot capability “for a limited time” (provided you buy a nationwide calling plan and an unlimited data plan (starting at $30). The Charge’s mobile hotspot can connect up to 10 devices via Wi-fi or five devices via a 3G CDMA connection.
Key Specs
Like the ThunderBolt, the Charge has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, runs Android 2.2 (Samsung had not comment about why the phone doesn’t’ run the newer Android 2.3 OS), and includes an HTML5 browser. It sports a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera (with flash) and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chatting. A 1 GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor (same as Samsung’s Galaxy S phones) sits under the hood—not dual-core, but not slow either.
Design
The Charge is noticeably larger than the HTC ThunderBolt (left) and the iPhone 4 (right). The Charge is a largish phone with an oval shape that comes to a soft point at the bottom. It is 5.1 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and .46 inch thick. The Charge is about the same width and depth as the ThunderBolt, but noticeably longer.
The Charge, at just over 5 ounces, is also noticeably lighter than the ThunderBolt’s almost 5.8 ounces, which some will like. Personally I like the weight of the ThunderBolt more; it feels like I’m holding a real piece of gear in my hand.
The Charge, like Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G, has a band of smokey chrome-colored plastic (Samsung calls this “mirror gray”) running around the outside front of the phone, which, to me, creates a cheap-looking effect. Question: Would Apple or HTC ever use such materials on a phone? Answer: Nope.
The functional set-up of the phone is pretty much like other phones in its class. Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons on the front bottom, front-facing camera and ear speaker at the top, earphone jack on the top, volume rocker and mini USB port on the left side edge, power button and HDMI port on the right side edge, camera and flash on the top of the back side, speaker on the bottom back.
Display is a Difference Maker
The literature says that the Charge’s Super AMOLED screen “sets a new standard for brightness, clarity and outdoor visibility.” I selected a movie trailer from the “Media Hub” (Sofia Coppolla’s ‘Somewhere’) to see if that was true. I was impressed—the Charge’s display looks as good or better than that on any other smartphone I’ve seen. The picture I saw did have impressive clarity, and the wide range between the most sunlight-bright whites and the deepest blacks of which the display is capable was immediately apparent. The colors were vibrant and true-to-life without being overbearing. This was a tough part of my testing, because I kept watching the pretty moving pictures, and didn’t want to turn it off.
The fat LTE pipe carrying the video data packets is important here too. The high bandwidth will reduce lost packets to the extent that artifacting, skips, and jitter in the video become very rare. The Charge has the bandwidth to bring in high-definition video streams intact and the AMOLED screen to display the video well. That’s a pretty compelling combination.
As for the “outdoor visibility” claim, I’m a believer here too. I held the Charge and the ThunderBolt side-by-side in direct sunlight, pulled up the phone dialer on each, and saw that the Charge’s screen was indeed easier to see. I could see the ThunderBolt’s dialer, but had to squint a little.
The Overlay
Samsung puts its own TouchWiz interface design over the Android operating system in the Charge and other Samsung phones. This overlay presents to the user all the content (and more) that the normal Android interface does, but the presentation is a little more crowded and noisy. I personally prefer HTC’s Sense UI overlay, which looks more elegant and well-organized to me, but that may be purely a matter of taste.
Camera
I was also moderately impressed with the quality of the 8-megapixel camera on the phone. Viewed on the Charge’s screen the still pictures I shot contained some of the contrast and clarity I saw in the videos I watched. When I viewed the photos on the large screen the high resolution of the shots was apparent. On certain shots (when I held the camera steady) I could detect the kind of fine detail you see in images shot with single-purpose cameras, but rarely in smartphone camera shots (click the zoom image at left). On the downside, the photos seemed to have a bit of a dark cast to them. The photos were not quite as good as ones I’ve shot with my iPhone, but noticeably better than those I’ve shot on my HTC EVO 4G.
The video I shot was less impressive. Viewed on my PC screen, the smallest amount of motion caused the video to blur and wash out. I also saw a lot of correction for light balance going on in the footage. The footage I shot in normal light indoors turned out better, but still not as sharp as I’d hoped. All of the videos looked better viewed on the screen of the Charge than on a full-sized display.
The camera software interface itself was easy to use, for the most part. One function allows you to tap the spot on the screen where you want to the camera to focus, which seemed to help some of my shots. I liked that the camera uses the phone’s volume rocker as its zoom controller, but was disappointed that there was no physical button on the phone to start shooting images or video.
Data Speeds
Testing from my office in the South of Market district of San Francisco I recorded an average download speed of 8.5 mbps and an average upload speed of 3.9 mbps. Running the same test on the HTC ThunderBolt at the same time, I recorded a very similar average download speed—8.25 mbps. (Unfortunately, the FCC cannot accurately record LTE network upload speeds on the ThunderBolt, so that comparison is omitted here.)
The Samsung Touch Wiz UI overlay on the Droid Charge.Shortly after I tested the Charge’s speed, I tested the speed of its mobile hotspot in the same manner. The connected at an average 14 mpbs for downloads and 8 mbps for uploads. Verizon is apparently allocating more bandwidth to the hotspot because it must allocate one pool of bandwidth to multiple devices. The bandwidth allocated to the phone, meanwhile, need only be enough to connect one device.
For comparison, I also ran the speed test on a laptop connected with Verizon’s new Mifi 4G hotspot. The Mifi showed a download speed of 15 mbps and an upload speed of 13.7 mbps. It’s possible that the Charge’s hotspot isn’t quite as fast as Verizon’s single-purpose hotspots, but it’s still plenty fast. Word of warning: cell phone battery life disappears extra fast while the mobile hotspot is on; better to use it when the phone is plugged in, if possible. Which brings us to our next issue.
The Battery Problem
Samsung may have named its phone the “Charge” because that may be the mode the phone spends most of its time in.
The ThunderBolt has already gained a reputation as having a weak battery. The first 4G phone, Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G, suffered from the same problem. The 4G radios in these devices demand far more power than those in 3G phones simply because they pull and push so much more data from and to the network.
Of course I was very curious about the longevity of the Charge’s 1600 maH battery. To test it I streamed a movie in standard definition from a server on the web for four-plus hours, a function that would keep the phone pulling down data from the web continuously, as well as keep the display and speaker operating continuously. I then noted the level of battery depletion, worked out the rate of depletion and finally extrapolated how long the battery would have lasted had the test continued. Since the phone is said to use more juice when the LTE signal is weaker, I tested in place where reception could be called “fair” but not “good.”
Samsung says the Charge’s battery will last “up to 660 minutes,” or 11 hours. (Technically, if the samsung battery lasted only two minutes no one could say that it didn’t last “up to 660 minutes”!) At any rate, our battery test found that the Samsung battery life comes up way short of the 660 minute number—after four hours and 8 minute of continuous video streaming the battery had been depleted to 37 percent of capacity. At that rate, the battery would have expired completely in 393 minutes or 6 hours and 33 minutes.
That’s assuming the battery expires at the same rate when it begins to run out of charge. In my (anecdotal) experience, however, that rate of depletion accelerates. So the 6 hours 33 minutes of battery life may be a little on the generous side.
Still, six and a half hours of continuous use isn’t really too bad. After all, who is going to keep their phone in continuous use for that long during the day? It seems pretty likely that a user could make it through a day without the Charge needed a charge—more than I can say for some 4G phones I’ve used.
And six and a half hours certainly beats the ThunderBolt’s rumored battery life of just 4 hours, if you believe the reports. I ran the same video streaming test on the ThunderBolt. After 4 hours and 3 minutes of streaming, the Thunderbolt still had 40 percent of its battery left. At that rate the htc battery would have completely expired in 405 minutes or 6 hours and 45 minutes. HTC promises only 6 hours and 18 minutes of usage time for the ThunderBolt.
Call Quality
To test the voice quality I placed some calls to land lines from a quiet spot, then from beside a busy street in San Francisco. The person I called said they could hear me very clearly but that my voice sounded like “radio voice”—that is, very present but without much body. I heard the same thing coming through the ear speaker on the Charge; the voice was clear but didn’t sound exactly human, as it does on the iPhone 4.
When I called my friend from beside the busy street, I learned two things: the ear speaker was loud enough for me to hear my friend’s voice clearly, without even turning the volume all the way up. Most importantly, my friend said that the traffic noise I could hear so clearly on my end sounded no louder than a dull background noise on his end. The noise cancellation in the Charge must be of fairly high quality.
Bottom Line
Samsung’s Droid Charge is a strong second LTE phone for Verizon, especially for people who like to stream high-quality video, video chat or play web-based games. The combination of the impressive AMOLED stream and the fat LTE pipe to carry loads of high-quality media down to the phone is a powerful combination. If you can deal with the not-so-impressive smartphone battery life, Samsung’s somewhat cluttered user interface and the general biggishness of the phone, the Charge might be a good phone for you
Since the Charge is the second LTE phone to hit the market in the US, it must be measured against the first LTE phone, the ThunderBolt. And here the Charge comes up short. While the ThunderBolt’s display may not looke quite as beautiful as the Charge’s, its connection speeds are the same or a little better, its battery is a little better, its physical design is smaller and more elegant, and its user interface is a more ordered, pleasing environment to work in. In short, if I were choosing between the two Verizon LTE phones, I could choose the one that’s $50 less, and still walk out with the better of the two phones.
2011年4月20日星期三
Picking Out a Laptop in the Brave, New World of Tablets
It is too soon to replace my twice-yearly laptop buyer's guides with tablet buyer's guides, but some days it feels like I should. Much of the energy that companies once poured into laptop designs and advances seems to have been drained off into a massive race to create tablet computers.
Still, while tablets are important, they don't fully replace laptops, at least not yet. There remains huge value in the portable, clamshell-shaped computer with a physical keyboard, lots of ports, plenty of storage and more horsepower than tablets offer. So, here is my annual spring laptop buyers' guide, a basic cheat sheet to the most important factors in the shopping process.
While I've focused on laptops, much of this advice also applies to desktop computers, a fading species. As always, these tips are for average consumers doing the most common tasks. This advice doesn't apply to businesses or to hard-core gamers or serious media producers.
As for tablets, some companies are working on designs that go beyond the iPad template to somehow integrate physical keyboards and traditional ports. This would certainly blur the lines and make for new, intriguing choices if you wait.
But laptops still win for intensive work like creating long documents, or doing anything that requires precision and benefits from a physical keyboard. They also are more compatible with printers and external disks.
If you can't wait, or don't want a tablet, you'll find relatively little has changed in laptop-land in the past six months or so. Here's a rundown of what you should look for in a laptop.
As always, capable Windows 7 laptops cost less and offer much more variety than Mac laptops. The latter start at $999, while a few basic, full-size Windows machines can be had for $300 and the decently equipped Windows models are in the $500-to-$800 range. And Apple refuses to make tiny netbooks, leaving that dwindling category to the Windows guys. But Apple laptops combine sleekness, durability and strong dell battery life with well-regarded customer service. Macs can run Windows, at extra cost, if you need to use a program that is Windows-only, and they come with better built-in software. Finally, Mac users generally needn't worry about malicious software, since it's nearly all designed to run on Windows.
In general, less-expensive machines have wimpier graphics hardware, and costlier ones have more-powerful graphics. Some have both and can switch between the two as needed.
Again, with the industry in flux and tablets on the rise, if you can wait to buy a laptop(laptop battery), do so. But if you must take the plunge, don't buy more laptop than you need.
Still, while tablets are important, they don't fully replace laptops, at least not yet. There remains huge value in the portable, clamshell-shaped computer with a physical keyboard, lots of ports, plenty of storage and more horsepower than tablets offer. So, here is my annual spring laptop buyers' guide, a basic cheat sheet to the most important factors in the shopping process.
While I've focused on laptops, much of this advice also applies to desktop computers, a fading species. As always, these tips are for average consumers doing the most common tasks. This advice doesn't apply to businesses or to hard-core gamers or serious media producers.
The first thing to consider is that you may want to wait to replace your laptop. Apple's iPad, and the tablets coming in its wake, have put the computer industry in reset mode. If you own a tablet, you are likely to rely on your laptop less often, extending its useful life. And if you don't, you'll probably find over the next year or two that more interesting choices will appear as companies try to bring tablet qualities to laptops and laptop features to tablets.
Some early inklings: Apple's MacBook Air and the Windows-based Samsung Series 9 start almost instantly, like tablets, and use chips for file storage, like tablets do, instead of hard disks. Also, Apple will soon roll out a new Macintosh operating system, called Lion, that displays programs as if they were tablet apps, and it already has an iPad-like app store for the Mac. Microsoft is working on a version of Windows, likely to appear next year, that fuses tablet and PC concepts. This software will run on some current computers, but new hardware, more tailored to these systems, will be coming.
Laptop shoppers now need to consider if a tablet will suffice—especially if they are looking for a highly portable, secondary machine, as I noted in my last guide. The new iPad 2, which still starts at $499, has at least twice the horsepower of the original model, and now boasts 65,000 tablet-optimized apps. It is gradually morphing into a productivity platform—able, for instance, to edit videos. And it has now been joined by similarly powerful competitors running a new tablet version of Google's Android operating system and by the $499 PlayBook, the first tablet from Research in Motion, which boasts speedy hardware and a new operating system. Hewlett-Packard's new tablet, based on Palm technology, is coming soon.
Tablets tend to beat small, low-cost laptops in weight, start-up speed and battery life. And they are competitive for lots of common tasks, such as Web browsing, email, social networking, and viewing or playing documents, photos, videos and music. But laptops still win for intensive work like creating long documents, or doing anything that requires precision and benefits from a physical keyboard. They also are more compatible with printers and external disks.
If you can't wait, or don't want a tablet, you'll find relatively little has changed in laptop-land in the past six months or so. Here's a rundown of what you should look for in a laptop.
As always, capable Windows 7 laptops cost less and offer much more variety than Mac laptops. The latter start at $999, while a few basic, full-size Windows machines can be had for $300 and the decently equipped Windows models are in the $500-to-$800 range. And Apple refuses to make tiny netbooks, leaving that dwindling category to the Windows guys. But Apple laptops combine sleekness, durability and strong dell battery life with well-regarded customer service. Macs can run Windows, at extra cost, if you need to use a program that is Windows-only, and they come with better built-in software. Finally, Mac users generally needn't worry about malicious software, since it's nearly all designed to run on Windows.
Memory
I recommend 4 gigabytes of memory, or RAM, on a new Windows computer, though a Mac will perform well on 2 gigabytes, unless you're designing complex graphics. A new Windows machine should be labeled "64-bit" for best performance.Processors
The newest, and most advertised, chips in consumer laptops are Intel's i3, i5, and i7 Core models. But a PC with chips from rival AMD, which usually cost less, or older Intel dual-core chips, will do fine for most users.
Graphics
Pay attention to this, even if you aren't big into video or games. Many computers offload nongraphics tasks to potent graphics chips for speedier operation.In general, less-expensive machines have wimpier graphics hardware, and costlier ones have more-powerful graphics. Some have both and can switch between the two as needed.
Hard Disks
A 320 gigabyte hard disk should be the minimum on most PCs, though 250 gigabytes are fine for many average users. Solid-state disks, which lack moving parts and use flash memory, are costlier but faster and use less power. However, they usually have less capacity. As more data are stored online, huge amounts of local storage will be less crucial.Ports
Many PCs now come with a port called HDMI, which makes linking to a high-definition TV easy. There is a new, much faster USB port, called USB 3.0, but so far, few peripheral devices can use it. And Apple has introduced yet another high-speed connector that has little practical use so far, called Thunderbolt.Again, with the industry in flux and tablets on the rise, if you can wait to buy a laptop(laptop battery), do so. But if you must take the plunge, don't buy more laptop than you need.
2011年4月18日星期一
A New AMD Brazos Fusion Acer Laptop Is On The Way, 7 hours battery life
Acer(acer battery) has a nice diverse selection of AMD Brazos Fusion APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) powered machines at the moment. They have 10.1-inch Acer Aspire One 522 ($324.99), a 15.6-inch Acer Aspire 5253 ($384.99) and soon they will have an 11.6-inch model to team named Acer Aspire One 722.
The Acer Aspire One 722 is reported by Macles as featuring shared features with the 522 and a design that is shared with another netbook named Acer Aspire One D257. For the Fusion side of things the 722 will feature the 1.0GHz dual-core AMD C-50 APU (Ontario family) which is paired with AMD Radeon HD 6250 discrete-class graphics.
We will have to play the waiting game for info on pricing and launch on this ultra-portable laptop. Acer hasn’t announced it yet but Macles is a reliable source when it comes to Acer netbook/ultra-portable laptop news.
Replacement for ACER Aspire 5536 Laptop Battery
Battery Volt: 11.1V
Battery Capacity: 4400mAh
Battery Weight: 453.6g
Battery Color: black
Battery Size: 208.20 x44.94 x19.90mm
Product Code: NAC029
Sale price: AU $73.49
Battery Capacity: 4400mAh
Battery Weight: 453.6g
Battery Color: black
Battery Size: 208.20 x44.94 x19.90mm
Product Code: NAC029
Sale price: AU $73.49
2011年4月14日星期四
Laptop Battery Review : Dell & HP & Lenovo not green enough
The NGO praised Apple and Acer for being the only ones firmly committed to phase out these substances. Apple has already met its commitment to have all of its products free of PVC and BFRs by the end of 2008. This is with one exception, which is a technical challenge: getting certified PVC-free power cords.
To their credit, Dell NT379 and Lenovo have both been at work. Dell JD634 has a desktop, Cheap asus a6000 battery a notebook, and several models of monitors that have a reduced use of PVC and BFRs, and a few monitor models that are free from these substances. Lenovo also has two models available that are PVC- and BFR-free. HP is the one that trails farthest behind and has yet to bring out any models with even a reduced use of PVC and BFRs.
The toxic substances in question include vinyl plastic (widely known as PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Lenovo has delayed its deadline by one year, while HP and Dell 312-0383 have yet to set a new timeline.
Other than PC (and Mac) makers, the Greenpeace guide also mentions other electronic vendors. The biggest change in the rankings is the big jump from the 15th to the 4th place made by Philips. The company has significantly improved its position on taking financial responsibility for the recycling of its own e-waste, although it still needs to implement a system to put this into effect. Struggling with the economic downturn, the biggest names in PC makers seem to lag on staying clean.
Apple is not exactly a PC maker, it’s a Mac maker, which produces fewer products than the other three companies. high quality battery , However, this only means it’s even more important that the other three stay committed.
In the March issue of the Guide to Greener Electronics, released Tuesday, Greenpeace decided to knock a point off of Dell 451-10298 ’s, HP’s, and
Lenovo’s green scores for procrastinating their commitment to eliminate toxic substances from their products by the end of 2009. Dell 312-0653 has also been providing free recycling for its products for a long time by teaming up with Staples. Maybe for this reason, it’s still the greenest guy among the not-so-green list of companies.
To Greenpeace, Apple is now the example for other PC makers to follow. “If Apple can find the solutions, there should be no reason why the other leading PC companies cannot,” said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International toxics campaigner. “All of them should have at least one toxic-free line of products on the market by the end of this year.”
Throw in the recent arrival of netbook leader Acer — and Palm’s PDA-pioneer cred and buzzworthy upcoming Palm Pre — and you’ve got a competitive landscape with little elbow room left.
If it wants in on smartphones, Dell 310-9080 will have to reach beyond its comfort zone. Since Research In Motion has the corporate market covered, it has to compete in retail, where it just hasn’t been a very vocal participant in the past. In the smartphone market, Palm would give Dell e1505 a household brand and street cred with both companies and consumers. Palm is attainable.
In an ideal world, Dell would get cozy with Research In Motion. Unfortunately, the BlackBerry maker commands a billion valuation, toshiba battery despite trading at a third of last year’s high. Palm comes laden with warts, but it also comes priced at an enterprise value just less than .7 billion.
Apple may pose legal challenges. Palm has endured seven consecutive periods of quarterly losses, atop negative shareholder equity and more debt than cash on its balance sheet. Even a great device can flop with the wrong marketing campaign. Palm could use Dell Precision M2300 ’s billions to protect and market the Pre. Dell also has an enviable list of big-time customers, making it easier to sell massive quantities of smartphones to a company by bundling them with a large computing hardware order.
Palm will also get more expensive if Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) lives up to the old rumor that it’s interested in buying Research In Motion below a share. Consolidation in the smartphone industry would quickly drive up prices for any remaining stand-alone companies, and Dell 640m doesn’t want to overpay just because it was late to the buyout binge.
We can’t all be Apple.
Dell has fallen flat whenever it strays too far from its bread-and-butter computing hardware roots. Whether we’re talking about Dell-branded televisions or the dirge-inspiring DJ Ditty MP3 players, apple A1175 battery, the company’s graveyard of failed products is a constant reminder of its limited range.
It’s been a little more than a week since industry-watchers at Dow Jones, Reuters, and ComputerWorld pondered the two companies’ potential nuptials. Dell would love a little skin in the smartphone market. Palm would love a sugar daddy to help it escape from its financial straitjacket.
Dell has no business jumping into the crowded smartphone market alone.
How dumb do you have to be to introduce a new smartphone these days? The market already has Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) e-mail-centric BlackBerry, Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) trendy iPhone, and the open-ended nature of devices powered by Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android platform.
Palm shares have taken off since the hype began building for its Pre device in January, but Dell Latitude D620 still has the greenbacks to reward Palm investors, even if they demand a steep premium to cash out. Dell will have to pay now, or pay more later.
Dell can’t just afford to sit this out. If the Pre is a runaway hit, Palm will be off to the races. If not, Palm may get cheaper, but its grasp on the market will get pounded once again.
“Dell’s Smartphone: Dead on Arrival” was my headline when The Wall Street Journal exposed the computer dell inspiron 9400 battery maker’s plans to dive into the high-end handset market two months ago. My opinion hasn’t changed. Buying Palm would help on both fronts, since Dell would be acquiring an established name and also eliminating a potential threat.
Dell closed out the year with .1 billion in cash and short-term investments. In other words, it can afford to get the deal done without making much of a dent in its massive vault.
Some buyout rumors sound so logical that only pride, ignorance, and incompetence could get in their way. I guess that’s why the rumors that Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) might snap up Palm (Nasdaq: PALM) will probably never come to pass.
Dell’s hardly alone in the boneyard. Hewlett-Packard’s (NYSE: HPQ) meandering iPaq is proof that only Apple has the panache points and premium positioning to make a difference in telecommunications as a computer company.
With Palm all but gambling the future of its company on the Pre’s success, there’s really no better time for Dell to make a Pre-emptive strike.
That said, Dell’s had far greater success on the rare occasions when it buys out other companies — as with Alienware, a high-end computer maker for diehard gamers, three years ago.
To their credit, Dell NT379 and Lenovo have both been at work. Dell JD634 has a desktop, Cheap asus a6000 battery a notebook, and several models of monitors that have a reduced use of PVC and BFRs, and a few monitor models that are free from these substances. Lenovo also has two models available that are PVC- and BFR-free. HP is the one that trails farthest behind and has yet to bring out any models with even a reduced use of PVC and BFRs.
The toxic substances in question include vinyl plastic (widely known as PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Lenovo has delayed its deadline by one year, while HP and Dell 312-0383 have yet to set a new timeline.
Other than PC (and Mac) makers, the Greenpeace guide also mentions other electronic vendors. The biggest change in the rankings is the big jump from the 15th to the 4th place made by Philips. The company has significantly improved its position on taking financial responsibility for the recycling of its own e-waste, although it still needs to implement a system to put this into effect. Struggling with the economic downturn, the biggest names in PC makers seem to lag on staying clean.
Apple is not exactly a PC maker, it’s a Mac maker, which produces fewer products than the other three companies. high quality battery , However, this only means it’s even more important that the other three stay committed.
In the March issue of the Guide to Greener Electronics, released Tuesday, Greenpeace decided to knock a point off of Dell 451-10298 ’s, HP’s, and
Lenovo’s green scores for procrastinating their commitment to eliminate toxic substances from their products by the end of 2009. Dell 312-0653 has also been providing free recycling for its products for a long time by teaming up with Staples. Maybe for this reason, it’s still the greenest guy among the not-so-green list of companies.
To Greenpeace, Apple is now the example for other PC makers to follow. “If Apple can find the solutions, there should be no reason why the other leading PC companies cannot,” said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International toxics campaigner. “All of them should have at least one toxic-free line of products on the market by the end of this year.”
Throw in the recent arrival of netbook leader Acer — and Palm’s PDA-pioneer cred and buzzworthy upcoming Palm Pre — and you’ve got a competitive landscape with little elbow room left.
If it wants in on smartphones, Dell 310-9080 will have to reach beyond its comfort zone. Since Research In Motion has the corporate market covered, it has to compete in retail, where it just hasn’t been a very vocal participant in the past. In the smartphone market, Palm would give Dell e1505 a household brand and street cred with both companies and consumers. Palm is attainable.
In an ideal world, Dell would get cozy with Research In Motion. Unfortunately, the BlackBerry maker commands a billion valuation, toshiba battery despite trading at a third of last year’s high. Palm comes laden with warts, but it also comes priced at an enterprise value just less than .7 billion.
Apple may pose legal challenges. Palm has endured seven consecutive periods of quarterly losses, atop negative shareholder equity and more debt than cash on its balance sheet. Even a great device can flop with the wrong marketing campaign. Palm could use Dell Precision M2300 ’s billions to protect and market the Pre. Dell also has an enviable list of big-time customers, making it easier to sell massive quantities of smartphones to a company by bundling them with a large computing hardware order.
Palm will also get more expensive if Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) lives up to the old rumor that it’s interested in buying Research In Motion below a share. Consolidation in the smartphone industry would quickly drive up prices for any remaining stand-alone companies, and Dell 640m doesn’t want to overpay just because it was late to the buyout binge.
We can’t all be Apple.
Dell has fallen flat whenever it strays too far from its bread-and-butter computing hardware roots. Whether we’re talking about Dell-branded televisions or the dirge-inspiring DJ Ditty MP3 players, apple A1175 battery, the company’s graveyard of failed products is a constant reminder of its limited range.
It’s been a little more than a week since industry-watchers at Dow Jones, Reuters, and ComputerWorld pondered the two companies’ potential nuptials. Dell would love a little skin in the smartphone market. Palm would love a sugar daddy to help it escape from its financial straitjacket.
Dell has no business jumping into the crowded smartphone market alone.
How dumb do you have to be to introduce a new smartphone these days? The market already has Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) e-mail-centric BlackBerry, Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) trendy iPhone, and the open-ended nature of devices powered by Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android platform.
Palm shares have taken off since the hype began building for its Pre device in January, but Dell Latitude D620 still has the greenbacks to reward Palm investors, even if they demand a steep premium to cash out. Dell will have to pay now, or pay more later.
Dell can’t just afford to sit this out. If the Pre is a runaway hit, Palm will be off to the races. If not, Palm may get cheaper, but its grasp on the market will get pounded once again.
“Dell’s Smartphone: Dead on Arrival” was my headline when The Wall Street Journal exposed the computer dell inspiron 9400 battery maker’s plans to dive into the high-end handset market two months ago. My opinion hasn’t changed. Buying Palm would help on both fronts, since Dell would be acquiring an established name and also eliminating a potential threat.
Dell closed out the year with .1 billion in cash and short-term investments. In other words, it can afford to get the deal done without making much of a dent in its massive vault.
Some buyout rumors sound so logical that only pride, ignorance, and incompetence could get in their way. I guess that’s why the rumors that Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) might snap up Palm (Nasdaq: PALM) will probably never come to pass.
Dell’s hardly alone in the boneyard. Hewlett-Packard’s (NYSE: HPQ) meandering iPaq is proof that only Apple has the panache points and premium positioning to make a difference in telecommunications as a computer company.
With Palm all but gambling the future of its company on the Pre’s success, there’s really no better time for Dell to make a Pre-emptive strike.
That said, Dell’s had far greater success on the rare occasions when it buys out other companies — as with Alienware, a high-end computer maker for diehard gamers, three years ago.
2011年4月10日星期日
HTC Desire HD: Review
The Desire HD is Taiwanese corporation HTC’s current top dog, and it shows. With a screen size that’s out of this world, gorgeous graphics, large speakers and a fast CPU, this is a mobile phone which has some serious props. But in a market which is about to be saturated with similar devices from HTC’s rivals Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, can the Desire HD continue to hold its own?
Design
With its 4.3” capacitive touchscreen running at a resolution of 480×800, the Desire HD feels in the hand like a mobile phone that has dreams of being a small tablet. Its display is bigger than that of the
original Desire (at 3.7”) and the iPhone 4 (at 3.5”). Your writer has large hands, but it’s a little difficult to hold the phone flat in one hand without stretching the tendons a bit.
As the phone faces you, above the screen is a horizontal speaker grill line, which — like the screen — is larger than we have seen on other phones. Undoubtedly it helps contribute to the HD’s stellar audio
quality. The phone boasts Dolby Mobile and SRS virtual surround sound.
On the bottom of the screen are the usual four standard buttons which most phones based on Google’s Android operating system use — home, menu, return and search. However, unlike the physical buttons on the original Desire, the Desire HD’s buttons are touch-sensitive. You don’t press them in — you just touch them. It’s an effect we’ve grown to love while testing the handset, and we’d find it hard to go back to physical buttons now.
On the left-hand side of the phone are volume buttons, which emit cute ‘pink, ponk’ sounds when pressed, and on the top is the standard on/off/sleep button. There is nothing at all on the phone’s right-hand side, and on the bottom the options are similarly minimised — just a 3.5mm audio jack and a micro-USB port for charging and connecting the phone to a PC.
On the back of the phone you can find its (very large) camera and flash, as well as another audio grill. This area is also where we fell in love with the Desire HD’s case. The aluminium unibody, combined with plastic inserts which allow access to the SIM card, MicroSD and battery slots, is just fantastic on the fingers and — wonder of wonders — doesn’t hold fingerprints. It also grips fairly well, meaning that it will likely be hard to drop the device. And the actual material looks quite futuristic — part metal, part plastic, and all class.
Overall the Desire HD’s design is stellar, although a bit big for small hands.
Features
If you can name the features that you want in a high-end Android handset, odds are the Desire HD has them.
The phone comes with version 2.2 of the Android operating system (Froyo), although we’re sure it wouldn’t be too hard to upgrade it to 2.3 (Gingerbread), and the 1GHz Qualcomm CPU can definitely handle any current or future needs. The device has 768MB of RAM and 1.5GB of flash storage on-board. In addition, you can add a microSD card with up to 32GB of storage to help you cart around your complete music library.
The included camera is a 8 megapixel monster with dual LED flash and autofocus, and the Desire HD will happily interface with the network of your choice, with support for all of Australia’s popular mobile
phone networks; although the phone exclusively sells in Australia through Vodafone (which doesn’t have the greatest network performance in the world), you can get an unlocked version through online retailers like Mobicity and use with your Telstra or Optus SIM. Then there’s a heap of extras … a FM radio tuner, A-GPS support and so on — and all of this is packed into a package which weighs just 164 grams. Pretty phenomenal stuff.
Increasingly, mobile phones are becoming like laptops. Many are based on the same CPU or similar CPUs or chipsets, but the vendors can innovate through little things like better sound, innovative form factors, larger and brighter screens and so on. When seen in this light, most of HTC’s current models, including the Desire HD, are up to the fundamental spec the modern smartphone user needs. But the Desire HD just seems to kick things up a notch higher.
Performance
If you really want to see the power of Google’s Android platform in action, pick up a Desire HD and spend some time with it. You probably won’t want to go back to Apple’s iOS afterwards.
The Desire HD is one of the first Android phones we’ve seen where the power of the phone’s hardware matches the power of its software. Menus snap into place, everything you click loads instantly, swiping has satisfying little bouncing animations that don’t lose frames even when the constantly moving and changing HTC desktop background is shifting around simultaneously. This is how Android ought to be.
Video played online and from the device itself played fine without any delays or jittering, and we watched half an hour of a StarCraft II match on YouTube before we realised we had gotten that far into it. This is truly a screen which you can consume some serious multimedia on.
One area which should be particularly singled out for praise is the Desire HD’s camera. A lot has been said about the iPhone 4’s stellar photography capabilities, but the Desire HD would definitely give the Apple camp a run for its money — the handset is great for taking both stills as well as 720p videos.
However, as with all products, there were some caveats to the Desire HD’s performance.
For starters, we found it a little weird when watching video that much of the audio seemed to be directed away from the viewer, emanating out of the Desire HD’s rear speaker instead of the front one. We’re not sure if this was just the fault of the videos we were watching (standard YouTube, mainly), but much of the audio seemed to end up being directed in the opposite direction to our ears.
Secondly, the Desire HD’s battery life is not spectacular. We tended to pick it up and tinker with it for a while, then leave it on our desk for half a day or so, then tinker some more — and even this
light use left the handset beeping for a power refresh after only a couple of days. We don’t need to charge our current main handset, an iPhone 4, more than once or sometimes twice a week, if we’re using it heavily, but it’s easy to envisage a situation where the Desire HD would need to be charged almost every day.
Most Android handset vendors like to customise their software interface a little for the end user, and HTC is no exception to this rule, with its Sense interface dominating the experience for the end
user on its Desire range. In addition, the company has implemented an online service — HTCSense.com — which allows users to back up their data online, make the phone ring if it’s lost, or even erase data remotely if they believe it has been stolen.
While many of these features are fantastic additions to the Android experience, seeing them as vendor-specific add-ons smacks a bit of lock-in to us. We’d like to see them become more generic Android features through Google, so that customers don’t lose software functionality when sticking with the Android platform but changing phone hardware vendors.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the HTC Desire HD is about to face some stiff competition in the Australian market for smartphones. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, the Motorola Atrix and the Samsung Galaxy S II are all expected to hit Australia shortly, and Apple’s iPhone 4 is also believed to have been selling well since it launched locally in mid-2010.
However, there is no doubt that the Desire HD has a featureset and design which makes it a strong competitor to all of these high-end handsets. And to boot, it’s been available for some time already in
Australia; the possibility exists that its price will come down a little when the competition gets fierce.
With its powerful CPU, massive screen size, top-end amount of RAM and a major manufacturer behind it, the Desire HD is a future-proof phone. As Android marches on, expect to see its functionality extended through software upgrades. If you can stand the toshiba battery life and have big enough hands, this is a handset worth investing in.
Design
With its 4.3” capacitive touchscreen running at a resolution of 480×800, the Desire HD feels in the hand like a mobile phone that has dreams of being a small tablet. Its display is bigger than that of the
original Desire (at 3.7”) and the iPhone 4 (at 3.5”). Your writer has large hands, but it’s a little difficult to hold the phone flat in one hand without stretching the tendons a bit.
As the phone faces you, above the screen is a horizontal speaker grill line, which — like the screen — is larger than we have seen on other phones. Undoubtedly it helps contribute to the HD’s stellar audio
quality. The phone boasts Dolby Mobile and SRS virtual surround sound.
On the bottom of the screen are the usual four standard buttons which most phones based on Google’s Android operating system use — home, menu, return and search. However, unlike the physical buttons on the original Desire, the Desire HD’s buttons are touch-sensitive. You don’t press them in — you just touch them. It’s an effect we’ve grown to love while testing the handset, and we’d find it hard to go back to physical buttons now.
On the left-hand side of the phone are volume buttons, which emit cute ‘pink, ponk’ sounds when pressed, and on the top is the standard on/off/sleep button. There is nothing at all on the phone’s right-hand side, and on the bottom the options are similarly minimised — just a 3.5mm audio jack and a micro-USB port for charging and connecting the phone to a PC.
On the back of the phone you can find its (very large) camera and flash, as well as another audio grill. This area is also where we fell in love with the Desire HD’s case. The aluminium unibody, combined with plastic inserts which allow access to the SIM card, MicroSD and battery slots, is just fantastic on the fingers and — wonder of wonders — doesn’t hold fingerprints. It also grips fairly well, meaning that it will likely be hard to drop the device. And the actual material looks quite futuristic — part metal, part plastic, and all class.
Overall the Desire HD’s design is stellar, although a bit big for small hands.
Features
If you can name the features that you want in a high-end Android handset, odds are the Desire HD has them.
The phone comes with version 2.2 of the Android operating system (Froyo), although we’re sure it wouldn’t be too hard to upgrade it to 2.3 (Gingerbread), and the 1GHz Qualcomm CPU can definitely handle any current or future needs. The device has 768MB of RAM and 1.5GB of flash storage on-board. In addition, you can add a microSD card with up to 32GB of storage to help you cart around your complete music library.
The included camera is a 8 megapixel monster with dual LED flash and autofocus, and the Desire HD will happily interface with the network of your choice, with support for all of Australia’s popular mobile
phone networks; although the phone exclusively sells in Australia through Vodafone (which doesn’t have the greatest network performance in the world), you can get an unlocked version through online retailers like Mobicity and use with your Telstra or Optus SIM. Then there’s a heap of extras … a FM radio tuner, A-GPS support and so on — and all of this is packed into a package which weighs just 164 grams. Pretty phenomenal stuff.
Increasingly, mobile phones are becoming like laptops. Many are based on the same CPU or similar CPUs or chipsets, but the vendors can innovate through little things like better sound, innovative form factors, larger and brighter screens and so on. When seen in this light, most of HTC’s current models, including the Desire HD, are up to the fundamental spec the modern smartphone user needs. But the Desire HD just seems to kick things up a notch higher.
Performance
If you really want to see the power of Google’s Android platform in action, pick up a Desire HD and spend some time with it. You probably won’t want to go back to Apple’s iOS afterwards.
The Desire HD is one of the first Android phones we’ve seen where the power of the phone’s hardware matches the power of its software. Menus snap into place, everything you click loads instantly, swiping has satisfying little bouncing animations that don’t lose frames even when the constantly moving and changing HTC desktop background is shifting around simultaneously. This is how Android ought to be.
Video played online and from the device itself played fine without any delays or jittering, and we watched half an hour of a StarCraft II match on YouTube before we realised we had gotten that far into it. This is truly a screen which you can consume some serious multimedia on.
One area which should be particularly singled out for praise is the Desire HD’s camera. A lot has been said about the iPhone 4’s stellar photography capabilities, but the Desire HD would definitely give the Apple camp a run for its money — the handset is great for taking both stills as well as 720p videos.
However, as with all products, there were some caveats to the Desire HD’s performance.
For starters, we found it a little weird when watching video that much of the audio seemed to be directed away from the viewer, emanating out of the Desire HD’s rear speaker instead of the front one. We’re not sure if this was just the fault of the videos we were watching (standard YouTube, mainly), but much of the audio seemed to end up being directed in the opposite direction to our ears.
Secondly, the Desire HD’s battery life is not spectacular. We tended to pick it up and tinker with it for a while, then leave it on our desk for half a day or so, then tinker some more — and even this
light use left the handset beeping for a power refresh after only a couple of days. We don’t need to charge our current main handset, an iPhone 4, more than once or sometimes twice a week, if we’re using it heavily, but it’s easy to envisage a situation where the Desire HD would need to be charged almost every day.
Most Android handset vendors like to customise their software interface a little for the end user, and HTC is no exception to this rule, with its Sense interface dominating the experience for the end
user on its Desire range. In addition, the company has implemented an online service — HTCSense.com — which allows users to back up their data online, make the phone ring if it’s lost, or even erase data remotely if they believe it has been stolen.
While many of these features are fantastic additions to the Android experience, seeing them as vendor-specific add-ons smacks a bit of lock-in to us. We’d like to see them become more generic Android features through Google, so that customers don’t lose software functionality when sticking with the Android platform but changing phone hardware vendors.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the HTC Desire HD is about to face some stiff competition in the Australian market for smartphones. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, the Motorola Atrix and the Samsung Galaxy S II are all expected to hit Australia shortly, and Apple’s iPhone 4 is also believed to have been selling well since it launched locally in mid-2010.
However, there is no doubt that the Desire HD has a featureset and design which makes it a strong competitor to all of these high-end handsets. And to boot, it’s been available for some time already in
Australia; the possibility exists that its price will come down a little when the competition gets fierce.
With its powerful CPU, massive screen size, top-end amount of RAM and a major manufacturer behind it, the Desire HD is a future-proof phone. As Android marches on, expect to see its functionality extended through software upgrades. If you can stand the toshiba battery life and have big enough hands, this is a handset worth investing in.
Rebuilding a Sony Vaio Battery
Recently the battery in my aging laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-NR498E) took a nose dive. This is to be expected after 4 years or so, so I was not too upset about it. What I am upset about, is the fact that Sony doesn’t seem to sell a genuine replacement for the battery. The original is a VGP-BPS9/B and the only “Sony” batteries I found online were from unreputable sources and cost around $150. I decided to take the battery apart and see if I could replace the cells directly, but in the process I had to break most of the battery connections and it did not seem trivial to replace them. After whining about it for a week I opted to buy a third party battery off buy for $59.
I received the shipment within 5 days and inside I found the battery, a couple pages of instructions and a mini CD. There was also a written warning in poorly translated English stating that I needed to update the BIOS in order to use the sony battery. It was so poorly translated that I couldn’t even get a loose interpretation of some of the text. For example, “You’re system may isn’t suitable for this software or has already not renewed at first the bios file of factory” (side note: is it really that hard to get a fluent English-speaker to proof read your instructions?). Anyway, the instructions suggested that I may damage the battery and/or system if I didn’t update my BIOS before plugging in the battery, so I popped in the CD which presumably contained the update. The CD was blank. I ended up finding the necessary software on a site mentioned in their instructions, but the software gave me a vague warning that my BIOS was not supported and even after I forced the update the software crashed. At this point I gave up on bricking my laptop via a failed BIOS update and opted to plug it in and hope for the best. The battery showed about a 40% charge but the laptop said it was not charging it (I don’t haveSony’s anti third-party battery software installed). After much frustration and trying different combinations of removing and replacing the battery at different times, I decided to take the Steve approach and hack it 
.
I had already taken my original battery apart and thrown the dead cells away, so I don’t have any pictures of it, but it looked almost exactly the same as the replacement: 6x 3.6V battery cells and a controller card. Batteries are nothing but a means of storing power, so the controller must be responsible for communicating things like battery capacity and charging status. I decided to transplant the new battery cells onto the old Sony controller and give it a shot; in short, it worked! Here’s the process in pictures.
If you are going to attempt this, you should know that there is a very real possibility that things could go horribly wrong if, for example, you wired the battery pack in backwards. You could destroy the charging circuit in your laptop or even melt it down into a heap of plastic and potentially burn down your house in the process. That having been said, if you know what you’re doing, this is a great way to recover an investment in a low-grade battery!
Battery Shipment Contents
. Original Sony battery (top) and replacement (bottom)
Step 1: Take batteries apart – remove 4 screws and pry top cover off, then gently pry out the batteries and controller card.
Replacement Battery
Step 2: Remove the controller card from the batteries by desoldering the four metal tabs that connect to the different battery junctions. I used desoldering wick, flux and a hot soldering iron.
A closeup of the new controller (attached), and the original Sony controller next to it.
Step 3: Solder the battery leads to the new controller.
Solder Sony Controller
Finished Controller
Step 4: Reassemble the battery and secure it with some hot glue.
Glue the Batteries and Controller
Finished Battery
Step 5: Once the top cover is replaced, put the battery back in the computer – you’re done!
For best results you will also need to recalibrate the battery by letting it charge completely, then unplugging the power cable and let the battery discharge until it’s completely dead. I let my new battery charge overnight, then discharged it in the morning. Incredibly, the new battery kept the laptop alive for over 3 hours – a significant improvement over the 5-10 minutes I was getting before!If you are going to attempt this, you should know that there is a very real possibility that things could go horribly wrong if, for example, you wired the battery pack in backwards. You could destroy the charging circuit in your laptop or even melt it down into a heap of plastic and potentially burn down your house in the process. That having been said, if you know what you’re doing, this is a great way to recover an investment in a low-grade battery!
2011年4月7日星期四
Lenovo laptop buying guide
If you're in the market for a Lenovo laptop, you need to know which model will best suit your needs. Lenovo has three different laptop ranges: ThinkPad, IdeaPad and Essential. There are different series available within these ranges, so it's not a clear-cut choice as to which might be right for you. In this guide we will go through all of the options available in Lenovo's ThinkPad, IdeaPad and Essential G series so that you know which laptops(laptop battery) are suitable for serious work, play, entertainment, or all of the above.
Lenovo ThinkPad
ThinkPad laptops are Lenovo's professional-grade models. They are known for their business-like good looks, strong build quality and reliability. They are designed to appeal to professional users who want a no-fuss laptop computer that can be used for crunching numbers, word processing, creating presentations, displaying multimedia files and much more. ThinkPad laptops have undergone only slight modifications over the years — some have almost the same styling they had 10 years ago — but the range has been expanded to cater to users who want a small, basic computer, right up to users who want a high-end machine for the ultimate in processing performance. Here are the different ThinkPad ranges that are available in Australia.
ThinkPad Edge: The ThinkPad Edge is the most basic of the ThinkPad models, and it's designed for small business users who want something inexpensive, yet stylish and capable of running office programs comfortably. It's available in 14in and 15in sizes and with Intel Core i3 or Core i5 CPUs. Like all ThinkPads, it has dual pointing devices (a TrackPoint and a touchpad). Pricing starts from $649.
Thinkpad L: For business users who want a simple yet serious laptop for running an office suite and using the Internet, the ThinkPad L Series should be enticing. It makes use of Intel Core i3 or Core i5 CPUs and is available in 14in or 15in sizes. Lenovo claims that it also contains more post-consumer recycled content than any laptop in the world (post-consumer recycled content includes items such as used paper and cardboard, aluminium cans and plastics). Pricing starts from $729.
ThinkPad T: The ThinkPad T Series is tailored for corporate users who want a well-built and comfortable laptop with a long battery life. ThinkPad T notebooks feature Intel's Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, so they're very powerful, and they have all the features that have made ThinkPads famous, such as dual-pointing devices, a matte screen and a screen-mounted keyboard light. T Series notebooks have a sturdy built quality that includes metal hinges. Pricing starts from $1799. Back in 2009, a ThinkPad T Series notebook was the first ever notebook to receive a 5-star rating from the PC World Test Centre.
ThinkPad W: Professional users who want the ultimate in computing performance should find the ThinkPad W Series appealing. The ThinkPad W Series consists of a 15in mobile workstation that can be configured with either an Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 CPU, and it ships with professional-grade graphics solutions (such as the NVIDIA Quadro). The W Series is perfect for designers and engineers who need to take a powerful computer with them between home, work, and on-site locations. Pricing starts from $3099.
ThinkPad X: With a thin frame, a light weight and long battery life, the Lenovo ThinkPad X Series is designed for executives, or indeed anyone, who want a very mobile notebook that has very good specifications. The X Series comes with a 12in screen and it's available with either an Intel Core i5 or a Core i7 CPU. Pricing for an X Series ThinkPad starts from $1879. Those of you who want a tablet-convertible notebook will also want to look at the ThinkPad X Series — models with touchscreens are available and start from $2699.
Lenovo IdeaPad
The IdeaPad represents Lenovo's lifestyle selection of notebooks, which means they are tailored to offer home entertainment features and swift performance that home users and students can take advantage of. IdeaPad notebooks have a lot more flair than their ThinkPad stablemates; they have more curves, a glossy finish and they can even sport patterned lids, which will really make you stand out from the crowd. There are three series of IdeaPad laptops: S Series, Y Series and Z Series.
IdeaPad S Series: The S Series is Lenovo's netbook offering. It's a 10in laptop that sports Intel Atom CPU technology and it's suited to basic tasks such as Web browsing, media consumption and document creation. Pricing starts at around $399.
IdeaPad Y Series: The Y Series is designed for home users and students who have a creative side and an appetite for entertainment. It features a 15in screen, glossy styling, a two-tone colour scheme and it's fast! It can be configured with a high-end Intel Core i7 CPU and an AMD Radeon graphics card, which allow the Y Series to be used for video encoding, video editing, watching Blu-ray movies, gaming and many other multimedia tasks. Pricing for a Y Series laptop starts at around $1099 depending on the configuration.
IdeaPad Z Series: The Z Series is also designed for multimedia pursuits, such as watching videos and editing photos, but it's not as powerful as the Y Series so it can be found at more affordable prices. It's available with Intel Core i5 CPUs and pricing start at around $799.
Essential G Series
The Lenovo Essential G Series of laptops(computer battery) are similar to the IdeaPad in size and design and they are suitable for home users and students looking for a bargain. They are useful for everyday computing and multimedia work, and depending on the configuration, you could even use them for taxing tasks such as video and photo editing. Essential G Series laptops have a 15in screen and can be configured with Intel Core i3 or Core i5 CPUs and pricing starts from $829.
2011年3月27日星期日
TravelMate 6592G (601G16N)
The formal introduction to Intel's Centrino Pro and the next generation Centrino platform, codenamed Santa Rosa, has come and gone. The Acer TravelMate 6592 business notebook(acer laptop battery) is one of the first Centrino Pro review units to become available on the market so we eagerly got it into the test centre to put it through its paces.
The new Santa Rosa Centrino platform brings a few welcomed improvements to the notebook space, such as the faster Wi-Fi 802.11n, an 800MHz front side bus (FSB), a range of new processors based on the Core 2 Duo Merom CPU, optional Turbo Memory, and some new power saving features. As part of Centrino Pro Intel has also added its Active Management Technology (AMT), which is similar to the vPro technology already released in desktops. This technology allows IT administrators to access the Acer TravelMate remotely via a wired or wireless network connection for maintenance or support.
The Acer TravelMate 6592 runs on Windows Vista Business edition and has the new 2.20GHz T7500 Core 2 Duo CPU with an 800MHz FSB and a 4MB L2 cache, 2MB of DDR2 667MHz RAM and one of ATI's new Mobility graphics cards, the ATI Radeon X2300-HD.
The increased bus speed offered by this platform allows more bandwidth for the CPU, chipset and memory to shuffle data to and fro, providing faster overall performance. Apart from that, however, the new Santa Rosa platform has a few tricks up its sleeve for performance and power saving. Among these is the new Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration, which allows the platform to power down one core of the CPU when no applications require it, and use that added power to boost the still-active core. This can save power, but it can also give a power boost to single threaded applications that are only using the one core.
We put the new platform and all its fancy features to the test with WorldBench 6, in which it scored a healthy total of 74. This is a very good score for a business notebook, but overall, the results don't show any specific areas of spectacular performance. In our MP3 encoding test, we did see a more impressive result. In this test we take 53 minutes worth of WAV files and convert them to 192Kbps MP3 files using Cdex, a freely available, single-threaded application. This test took the Acer TravelMate 6592 just 119 seconds, exactly the same time as the Dell with its T7600 2.33GHz CPU, using the 667MHz FSB Centrino platform.
One area that really impressed us with this notebook was in its battery life. The new Santa Rosa Centrino platform offers a number of power saving features such as CPU and FSB performance scaling according need, but no distinct battery life advantages have been evident in our tests of the Asus or the Fujitsu . Regardless of the reasoning, the Acer TravelMate 6592 lasted for 134 minutes in our worst case scenario acer travelmate 6592 battery test. For this test we loop a DVD until the battery drains completely. It is considered a worst-case scenario as the speakers and optical drive are both in continuous use throughout the test, as well as the core components such as the CPU and RAM.
The graphics chip used in this TravelMate is the first we've seen form ATI's new range of mobile graphics processing units (GPU). Unlike the rest of the range this model only supports DirectX 9 and is considered an entry level card, but will be fine for most business purposes. As a gauge of its ability we ran 3DMark 2001 SE, in which it scored 7784. This shows it has a little bit of grunt for simple tasks, but don't expect it to run any 3D games or other heavy graphical tasks.
The 15.4in screen has reasonable brightness, but is a little dark by comparison to the majority of screens we see. Contrast levels are good though, and so is the viewing angle. It's also very sharp, with a 1680x1050 screen resolution. The keyboard has an ergonomic, curved layout, that is designed to match the natural curve of the wrists when typing. Included are a touchpad and an eraser-head track-point.
The TravelMate offers three USB ports for connectivity as well as a FireWire port. it also includes integrated Bluetooth. For an external monitor there are VGA and DVI ports and for TV-out there's an S-Video port. This allows the notebook to connect to any monitor or projector, which can be handy in the office or on the road giving presentations. There are also a parallel port and a serial port for older devices. For wired connectivity there's a 56Kbps modem and a gigabit Ethernet connection.
For storage, the TravelMate has a 160GB hard drive, which will be more than enough for the average business user, but it also has a DVD re-writer installed for additional storage needs. A 5-in-1 media card reader is installed for SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro and xD media cards. It also includes a PC Card slot (type II). For additional security, the notebook has a fingerprint reader, providing the option for a more secure login procedure.
2011年3月15日星期二
Lenovo U160: The notebook with looks and packed with power
MANILA, Philippines – When performance, style and portability are the main considerations in buying a mobile computer, the ultra-light IdeaPad U160 notebook features an etched aluminum cover, minimalist design language and a fashionable chiclet keyboard. It’s your fashion statement.
Featuring the all new Intel Core i5 processor, HD video support, Dolby Advanced Audio, and DirectShare synchronization technology, long term asus a32-f5 battery life and easy system maintenance tools, Lenovo U160 is the ultimate tool for busy and demanding road warriors.
With a thickness of 0.9 inch and weighs 1.25kg, the Lenovo IdeaPad U160 is indeed slim and light. Packed with Intel Core i5 processor, a six-cell battery, Bluetooth, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB of hard drive. This computer features include an 11.6-inch LCD display with 1366×768 resolution, 802.11n Wi-Fi, eSATA port, 3x USB ports, VGA and HDMI outputs and 1.3MP webcam.
The Lenovo IdeaPad U160 appears to be an ideal travel companion that combines great technology, great features and amazing specs in one ultra portable package, designed to fill the place between a low-powered netbook and a full pledged laptop.
Lenovo IdeaPad notebooks, including U160 is distributed by MSI-ECS and are available through its authorized resellers.
Featuring the all new Intel Core i5 processor, HD video support, Dolby Advanced Audio, and DirectShare synchronization technology, long term asus a32-f5 battery life and easy system maintenance tools, Lenovo U160 is the ultimate tool for busy and demanding road warriors.
With a thickness of 0.9 inch and weighs 1.25kg, the Lenovo IdeaPad U160 is indeed slim and light. Packed with Intel Core i5 processor, a six-cell battery, Bluetooth, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB of hard drive. This computer features include an 11.6-inch LCD display with 1366×768 resolution, 802.11n Wi-Fi, eSATA port, 3x USB ports, VGA and HDMI outputs and 1.3MP webcam.
The Lenovo IdeaPad U160 appears to be an ideal travel companion that combines great technology, great features and amazing specs in one ultra portable package, designed to fill the place between a low-powered netbook and a full pledged laptop.
Lenovo IdeaPad notebooks, including U160 is distributed by MSI-ECS and are available through its authorized resellers.
2011年3月9日星期三
Lenovo ThinkPad Links Laptop And Tablet
Lenovo is releasing its ultraportable ThinkPad X220 laptop and X220 convertible Tablet PC this April in Australia, aimed at business professionals.
The new 12.5 inch ThinkPads look to push battery life and portability for all day use on the go in the corporate environment, with 15 hours of battery life on the standard battery and 24 hours with a ThinkPad external battery added.
The convertible tablet weighs in at around 1.8 kg but can be lighter with a downgraded battery at the expense of battery life. If you're willing to sacrifice some portability with the bigger battery and external battery pack, the tablet can run for 16 hours.
Weighing more than typical consumer tablets, the X220 runs Sandy Bridge Intel Core i5 and i7 processors rather than smaller tablet- and smartphone-specific CPUs, increasing performance.
The business-centric functions like Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 come stocked for quick boot-up and shut down for jumping in and out of work. Coupled with Instant Resume, users can keep their wireless connections active during PC sleep for up to 99 minutes.
Connectivity options are given a slight upgrade with USB 3.0 slots over the usual 2.0.
Durability, profile and utility are all upgraded on the latest ThinkPad models, with greater drop resistance and spillage resistance for the keyboard on the slimmer, lighter design.
These ThinkPad models start at $2749 and range up to $3699, coming in multi-touch tablet form or in an ‘outdoor' version that includes Gorilla Glass for durability and enhanced visibility.
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The convertible tablet weighs in at around 1.8 kg but can be lighter with a downgraded battery at the expense of battery life. If you're willing to sacrifice some portability with the bigger battery and external battery pack, the tablet can run for 16 hours.
Weighing more than typical consumer tablets, the X220 runs Sandy Bridge Intel Core i5 and i7 processors rather than smaller tablet- and smartphone-specific CPUs, increasing performance.
The business-centric functions like Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 come stocked for quick boot-up and shut down for jumping in and out of work. Coupled with Instant Resume, users can keep their wireless connections active during PC sleep for up to 99 minutes.
Connectivity options are given a slight upgrade with USB 3.0 slots over the usual 2.0.
Durability, profile and utility are all upgraded on the latest ThinkPad models, with greater drop resistance and spillage resistance for the keyboard on the slimmer, lighter design.
These ThinkPad models start at $2749 and range up to $3699, coming in multi-touch tablet form or in an ‘outdoor' version that includes Gorilla Glass for durability and enhanced visibility.
2011年3月8日星期二
Lenovo U160 review
With a 1GHz Celeron processor and just 2GB RAM, this isn’t the kind of laptop(laptop battery) that will set pulses racing. Its price and weight are two low figures that are more attractive, though. After using it for a while, we found ourselves growing to like it despite its shortcomings.
With an 11.6in screen, the U160 is about the size of a netbook, and at 1.4kg it's just as light. It doesn't have the low screen resolution of most netbooks, though; 1,366x768 is the same resolution as most 15in laptops, and it gives plenty of space for office documents and busy web pages. It's also ideal for watching HD video. The screen’s 16:9 aspect ratio reduces the size of the black bars above and below widescreen video that appear on netbooks’ 1024x600-pixel screens.
Squeezing such a high resolution into a small space means that each pixel is smaller, making images pin-sharp, although it also makes text quite small. Colour accuracy isn't spectacular: the LED backlight is slightly uneven and the glossy finish and tight viewing angles mean we had to adjust the screen's tilt carefully or else contrast was ruined. Once we’d done so, colours were quite vibrant and accurate.
The dual-core Celeron U3400 processor is based on the Intel Core design but it runs at a slower 1GHz – hence the lower benchmark scores compared to Core i3 chips. However, its overall score of 36 is almost twice the performance of a netbook. Its best result was 46 in our image-editing test, which doesn’t benefit from multiple processors. That’s true of most office and entertainment software, too – given a single task to handle, the U160 should be able to keep up. The integrated graphics chipset can decode HD video but it's not powerful enough to run demanding 3D games.
Visually, the U160 is stunning. Its dark brown case sandwiches a white interior, and the lid has a smart etched pattern. Opening the lid reveals a white keyboard panel and a glossy black bezel surrounding the screen. The keys are an odd shape but their slightly concave surfaces make them comfortable to type on, while their crisp, light action gives plenty of feedback for touch-typists.
Other than placing the Fn key in the bottom left corner where the Ctrl key should be, Lenovo has stuck to a fairly standard layout, including a double-height Enter key. Below is a small but responsive touchpad, with two separate, light-action buttons. There's a small, fiddly switch to toggle WiFi and Bluetooth, and a standard complement of expansion ports. One welcome exception is the inclusion of a shared eSATA/USB port, which is useful for adding a fast eSATA external drive.
It may not be screamingly fast or packed with the latest features, but the U160 is light, lasts for over six hours per charge and costs little more than most netbooks. The 11.6in screen may be a bit cramped for some people, and those using demanding applications such as photo or video editing will be frustrated by its basic performance, but for web browsing on the move it's a great little laptop. It’s worth considering the pricier Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11 for its superior performance and battery life, though.
2011年3月3日星期四
HP Pavilion dv7-4035sa review
HP's dv7-4035sa has a 17in screen and a dedicated graphics card, as well as a triple core AMD processor. It's fitted with two ATI graphics chips: one is an older 4250 part integrated onto the motherboard, while the other is a dedicated 5470 chip that supports DirectX 11. Both can handle HD video decoding. The idea is that you can use the dedicated graphics cards for playing games with the laptop plugged in, but when you're on the move you can switch to the integrated graphics chip to save power.
This logic is undermined by the fact that the 5470 isn't that powerful a chip: a score of 20fps in our Call of Duty 4 benchmark means that you'll have to turn down graphics quality settings to get playable frame rates in action games. Older games, or those optimised for network play such as World of Warcraft, should be fine.
Using the low-power 4250 gave four hours battery life instead of three, which is a significant improvement but still isn't that impressive. In any case, few people are likely to want to lug this 3.7kg laptop very far from a mains socket.
The dv7-4035sa scored poorly in our benchmarks, getting 57 overall and scoring only 58 in the single-threaded image-editing test. Although this is plenty for office and web use, it's not so promising for creative tasks such as photo and video editing. Laptops at this price that are built around Intel Core i3 and i5 processors manage scores of between 79 and 93.
Build quality is superb. The khaki-coloured case is made from a metal alloy with a smart pattern etched into its surface, which feels sturdy and partly explains the laptop's weight. Inside, the design is tastefully unadorned, and the only indicator lights are on the relevant keys, such as Caps Lock. There's a numberpad on the right side of the keyboard, and the flat, isolated keys have a crisp, light action.
Sadly, the dv7-4035sa's touchpad is the same flawed design as on the HP(hp laptop battery) dv6-3065ea. The left and right click buttons are simply marked out by a T-shaped line drawn on the touchpad. Because the whole thing is a just a single surface, we often found ourselves moving the mouse pointer when trying to double-click, or clicking on something when we meant to move the pointer. It's a shame as otherwise it's a large and responsive pad, but in its current form it's virtually unusable.
The 17in screen has a 1,600x900 resolution that gives significantly more desktop space than 15in laptops with 1,366x768 resolutions. While it seemed dimmer than other LED-backlit screens, contrast and colour accuracy were better, especially where flesh tones were involved.
The screen is probably the biggest attraction in this package, with the decent keyboard coming in second. The dual graphics chip setup is a waste, though, as the dedicated card isn't powerful enough and there's not much need for a power-saving integrated chip on a 3.7kg notebook(notebook battery). Performance is poor considering the price, and the frustrating touchpad is the last straw. The Dell XPS 15 is only a little more expensive, but it's far more powerful in both 2D and 3D and a joy to use.
2011年3月2日星期三
Apple's iPhone could be next to get dual-core A5 chip
After making its first appearance in the iPad 2, the next stop for Apple's A5 chip could be in the next version of the iPhone, where it would bring a significant boost in graphics and application performance without compromising battery life, analysts said.
The A5 microprocessor, announced by Apple at the iPad 2 launch on Wednesday, would provide the next iPhone with better-quality FaceTime videoconferencing, and gaming capabilities that could allow it to compete with handheld gaming consoles, those analysts said.
"What it would bring to smartphones is increased [processing power] for computationally intensive applications," such as photo and movie applications, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. "Those do require more horsepower under the hood than you would get with a single-core processor."
The A5 chip, designed by Apple and based on an ARM design, has two cores running at 1GHz, versus a single 1Ghz core in the A4 processor, which was used in the first iPad and the current iPhone 4. The A5 provides twice the CPU performance and nine times the graphics power of its predecessor, according to Apple. cell phone battery
Apple hasn't announced the next version of the iPhone or disclosed its specifications, but the company has released new models in the middle of each year since the first iPhone came out in 2007.
The A5 adds "a lot more speed to things you do everyday, like surfing the Web, sending e-mail and multitasking," said Bob Mansfield, senior vice president of hardware at Apple, in a video on Apple's website.
More significant is the graphics boost, which falls in line with Apple's goal of improving the video capabilities on its devices, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. "If you're trying to do heavy media-intensive apps, it does matter," he said.
If it is introduced, an iPhone with the A5 chip won't be the first dual-core smartphone. Motorola's Atrix 4G, which has a talk time of up to nine hours, runs on a dual-core ARM processor. LG's Optimus 2X, which is available for pre-order and due later this month, also uses a dual-core ARM chip.
Brookwood said the A5 could be a step forward in Apple's efforts to bridge the gap between tablets and Macbooks. Like Motorola's Atrix smartphone, the next iPhone could be plugged into a dock with a screen and a keyboard to give it laptop-like functionality.
The A5 could ultimately make its way to Apple TV devi
ces as well, analysts said. Apple doesn't have a big share of the TV market, but a chip like A5 could be a differentiator if it supports full high-definition video. The existing Apple TV device, which uses the A4 chip, plays video at only 720p resolution.
Apple shipped nearly 50 million products in 2010 based on its A4 processor, including the iPad, iPhone and Apple TV, according to research firm IHS iSuppli.
Analysts said the A5 chip may be based on ARM's Cortex-A9 design, which is used in Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip. The next logical step for Apple would be to make a quad-core version, which would deliver even more processing power.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, Nvidia announced a quad-core chip code-named Kal-El, which it claims is twice as fast for Web browsing as the dual-core Tegra 2, which is used in Motorola's(motorola battery) Xoom tablet. Qualcomm also announced a quad-core Snapdragon chip for mobile devices at the show.
The A5 microprocessor, announced by Apple at the iPad 2 launch on Wednesday, would provide the next iPhone with better-quality FaceTime videoconferencing, and gaming capabilities that could allow it to compete with handheld gaming consoles, those analysts said.
"What it would bring to smartphones is increased [processing power] for computationally intensive applications," such as photo and movie applications, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. "Those do require more horsepower under the hood than you would get with a single-core processor."
The A5 chip, designed by Apple and based on an ARM design, has two cores running at 1GHz, versus a single 1Ghz core in the A4 processor, which was used in the first iPad and the current iPhone 4. The A5 provides twice the CPU performance and nine times the graphics power of its predecessor, according to Apple. cell phone battery
Apple hasn't announced the next version of the iPhone or disclosed its specifications, but the company has released new models in the middle of each year since the first iPhone came out in 2007.
The A5 adds "a lot more speed to things you do everyday, like surfing the Web, sending e-mail and multitasking," said Bob Mansfield, senior vice president of hardware at Apple, in a video on Apple's website.
More significant is the graphics boost, which falls in line with Apple's goal of improving the video capabilities on its devices, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. "If you're trying to do heavy media-intensive apps, it does matter," he said.
If it is introduced, an iPhone with the A5 chip won't be the first dual-core smartphone. Motorola's Atrix 4G, which has a talk time of up to nine hours, runs on a dual-core ARM processor. LG's Optimus 2X, which is available for pre-order and due later this month, also uses a dual-core ARM chip.
Brookwood said the A5 could be a step forward in Apple's efforts to bridge the gap between tablets and Macbooks. Like Motorola's Atrix smartphone, the next iPhone could be plugged into a dock with a screen and a keyboard to give it laptop-like functionality.
The A5 could ultimately make its way to Apple TV devi
ces as well, analysts said. Apple doesn't have a big share of the TV market, but a chip like A5 could be a differentiator if it supports full high-definition video. The existing Apple TV device, which uses the A4 chip, plays video at only 720p resolution.
Apple shipped nearly 50 million products in 2010 based on its A4 processor, including the iPad, iPhone and Apple TV, according to research firm IHS iSuppli.
Analysts said the A5 chip may be based on ARM's Cortex-A9 design, which is used in Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip. The next logical step for Apple would be to make a quad-core version, which would deliver even more processing power.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, Nvidia announced a quad-core chip code-named Kal-El, which it claims is twice as fast for Web browsing as the dual-core Tegra 2, which is used in Motorola's(motorola battery) Xoom tablet. Qualcomm also announced a quad-core Snapdragon chip for mobile devices at the show.