Toshiba has announced a new Lithium-Ion battery that it claims will recharge to 80% in just one minute, 60 times faster than conventional batteries.
A full recharge can be achieved in 10 minutes.
The new battery could be installed in Toshiba notebooks as early as 2006, although early uses may well be in other products such as within the automotive industry.
The batteries are not sacrificing long life for charging speed, losing only 1% of capacity after 1,000 cycles of discharging and recharging and can operate at temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius.
The battery uses nanoparticles that store vast amounts of lithium ions.
March 31st, 2005
Sony couldn’t have picked a worse night for it with freezing temperatures and snow on the East Coast and unseasonably cold temperatures on the West, but the North American PSP launch has proved a massive success.
Shoppers were starting to queue yesterday morning and waited over 12 hours to get the chance to buy their PSP the moment it was released.
In New York, where Sony held a massive launch party, Sony CEA President, Kaz Hirai, handed over the ‘first’ US PSP to the lucky guy who had been waiting in line for most of the day. He wasn’t that lucky though because they still made him pay for it.
Earlier during the party Hirai nailed Sony’s colours to the mast when he said, “If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.” So that’s clear then - the PSP is a portable media center.
Joystiq has a lot of pictures from the event that will break European gamers’ hearts - broken PSPs littering the floor. If we can’t trust our American cousins to look after their PSPs then they shouldn’t be getting them before the rest of us.
Three hours later it all started again on the West Coast with similar, and only slightly warmer, scenes at Sony Style in San Francisco.
The big news of the night is that one million units seems to be more than enough. Demand is high, but it looks like Sony have estimated it correctly and you will have a chance of getting a PSP even if you don’t rush out today.
March 30th, 2005