by Sujoy on November 16, 2011
The Li-ion battery as we know it, is going to have a major overhaul, if reports are to be believed. In a research work done by Northwestern University, this most common place battery used in pretty much every laptop and smartphone could be made to charge much faster and last much longer.
There is a major change in the design of the Li-Ion battery, which currently uses carbon-based graphene sheets, which have a limited capacity to hold Li ions. During charging of the battery, these free ions need to oscillate to and fro between anodes, and due to the limitation in capacity of graphene to hold more than one Li ion, the charge process takes place at a much slower rate.
The solution – Silicon. Silicon has more capacity to hold four Li ions, which is four times the amount that graphene can hold. Here is an excerpt of the methodology of creating a “shortcut” to charge Li-ion batteries faster. (from Wired’s article).
Silicon is the answer after all — it can hold a whopping four lithium atoms for every silicon atom — but carefully sandwiching clusters of it between the graphene sheets avoids the disastrous fragmentation problem. And by poking tiny holes (10 to 20 nanometeres wide) in the graphene, the lithium ions have a “shortcut” to the anode.
For the research report, visit Professor Kung’s page on NorthWestern University’s website here.
(via WIRED )
by Sujoy on September 9, 2010
Finally, something good happening for Samsung Galaxy Portal on T-Mobile UK (No points for guessing what my current phone is).
After being stuck with Android 1.5 aka the cupcake for almost a decade and a half ( it felt that long at least), T-mobile has finally decided to give its (now) older phone – the Galaxy Portal the much awaited Eclair upgrade. This would finally bring a lot of awesomeness to the new phone such as Live wallpapers, better ROM stability, much better memory utilisation and compatibility with all those new apps in the Android market which work for Android 2.1 onwards.
This announcement comes from a T-Mobile employee on its product support forums where customers have been moaning about why the carrier has been delaying the roll out of Eclair for so long, when 3-mobile released the Galaxy portal with Eclair out of the box. The announcement can be read here.
What is not clear, is that the employee’s comment mentions – We will be releasing a software update for the Samsung Galaxy Portal within the next month. This will update your Samsung Galaxy Portal to Android 2.1.
Hence, there is no ETA provided. Well, I’ll surely be refreshing that damn forum page for sure for at least a thousand times a day.
The announcement of a new operating System from Google called the Google ChromeOS came as no surprise to me as an OS from Google had been long expected. The rumors had been doing the rounds – remember the gOS which was mistaken for the Google OS. Well, it never really took off. Wonder if any single PC right now is running the gOS. And then, Google launched the mobile OS – Android. And for a long time, people believed that it was the Google OS which people expected. And now, in the recent announcement [ Read: Introducing the Google Chrome OS ], GOOG has made it official, that come next year[ a vague dateline of second half, next year] Google’s new OS – Chrome will be released for users. And yes, it will be opensource, free, lightweight and is initially going to be targeted at netbooks.
So what does this mean to me and you? What does it mean to Microsoft/Windows XP-Vista-7 users, Apple/MacOSX users and Linux users? Is all the buzz and hoopla worth it? Let’s deal with them one by one.
a) Google Chrome OS is Chrome extended :
It has worked for the browser- which is clean, clutter free, simple, fast, instant start-up, reliable and lightweight. Going by the name, ChromeOS is aimed at replicating all of these features. From what we get from Google’s release post, it is indicated that the user interface will be kept extremely simple, and most of the user experience will take place on the web.Now that raises certain eyebrows and questions about the user experience in an offline environment. We have yet to see any demos and exact feel of how the OS is going to look like, so its a bit early to comment further on this.
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The new iPhone is here, and in full 3GS glory. Here S stands for Speed, and it is claimed to be the fastest iPhone yet. It has major hardware upgrades for a faster performance. Plus a 3MP video camera, Digital Compas, Voice Controls and an impressive price-tag [ for the current version]. Explore the Launch of the new iPhone 3GS in the pictures below. Cheers!
The Phone that changed..
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