Start-up to launch safer notebook battery
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Boston-Power is about to uncover its long-awaited Sonata battery, which it says is less likely to blow up. HP appears interested.
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As&#160;One Laptop Per Child prepares to ship its highly anticipated XO laptops in two weeks, it is developing a &quot;supercharger,&quot; a mass battery recharger that will draw power from cows and yo-yos to help the laptops run longer.The supercharger is a box that will charge 15 batteries at a time, said Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer for OLPC.The supercharger complements other environmentally friendly battery charging technologies being used or under development for the XO laptop, Jepsen said. Users can hook up handcranks, cows, yo-yos, foot pedals and solar panels to the box to recharge batteries.Last week OLPC said it was designing a cow-powered generator through a dynamo with a system of belts and pulleys using cattle to generate power.A typical charge cycle for a laptop battery should be about three hours, Jepsen said. Groups of children will be able to share batteries.Currently in design, the supercharger will be ready for manufacturing next year, Jepsen said.A laptop&#39;s mileage depends on its usage, so OLPC designed an environmentally friendly laptop that could work with a rugged, low-power battery, Jepsen said. The laptop&#39;s specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, Jepsen said. It lasts five years and works in environments up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said.The XO batteries do not work on normal laptops, which can sap up to 40 watts of power depending on usage, Jepsen said.The XO is also the first laptop that uses only alternative energy, Jepsen said. Low-cost solar panels are great as a power option where there is plenty of sunlight, Jepsen said. Energy is especially scare in developing nations, so the laptop will hopefully pass on energy preservation lessons, which could help preserve battery life in the XO, Jepsen said.The laptop goes into manufacturing this week after three years of design experimentation and attempts to reduce manufacturing cost. It will first be offered in two weeks to consumers in the Give 1 Get 1 program, in which two laptops can be purchased for about US$400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.&quot;We&#39;re exhausted, but exhilarated,&quot; Jepsen said.REFERENCES:OLPC experiments with cow-powered laptops ... seriously, Oct. 24, 2007
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(InfoWorld) - Sony Corp. will conduct its own replacement program to address overheating problems that have hit some notebook batteries. The company is planning a worldwide program to replace battery packs that use certain Sony lithium-ion cells, according to a brief statement issued Thursday. It is discussing the plan with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and will also work with governments in other countries. More details will come soon, Sony said. The planned replacement program will address the cells involved inÂ Dell Inc. andÂ Apple Computer Inc. recalls earlier this year, said Sony spokesman David Yang. It will reach other vendors that used those batteries. Sony is already talking to some manufacturers and will work with the system vendors on possible recalls, he said. The affected cells were made between January 2004 and February 2006, Yang said. The announcement came the same day that a fourth notebook vendor,Â Lenovo Group Ltd., recalled Sony-based battery packsÂ used in its products. A recall by Toshiba Corp. followed Dell's and Apple's actions. Sony has helped support notebook makers' recalls but has not yet initiated a program itself. The recalls have been one more embarrassment for consumer electronics and media giant, which has suffered a number of pratfalls in recent years. In the case of the lithium-ion cells involved in this replacement program, microscopic metal particles in the battery cells can come into contact with other parts of the cell and cause a short circuit, Sony said in its statement. The battery normally powers off at that point, but "under certain rare conditions" the short circuit may lead to overheating and fire, the company said.
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APPLE has issued a safety recall for 28,000 batteries for its Powerbook notebooks, saying they posed a potential fire hazard.
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Apple Computer Inc. Thursday morning launched a voluntary worldwide 15-inch PowerBook G4 battery exchange program to deal with 28,000 potentially faulty units.
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Taiwanese notebook PC vendor Asustek Computer plans to launch its 1.25 kilogram, battery-friendly U2E laptop in Taipei next week, the company said Tuesday.The new laptop, wrapped in either black or brown leather, is built for power-savings with an LED (light emitting diode) backlight behind its 11-inch LCD panel, and a 32GB SSD (solid-state drive) instead of a hard disk drive (HDD).LED backlights use about 10-15 percent less power than the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) backlights that are currently used in most laptop PCs. SSDs save power as well, because unlike HDDs, they do not contain any moving parts.Asus isn&#39;t disclosing pricing details until the launch ceremony next week, nor which markets will be first for the device. Normally, Asustek products hit Asia and Europe first.
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New battery a welcome addition to the market after battery recall costs laptop manufacturers millions.
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In statements made to the AP, Reuters, and other services this morning, spokespersons for Sanyo said they would help bear the cost of Lenovo's recall of an estimated 205,000 lithium-ion notebook computer batteries sold worldwide, whose risk of overheating and explosion was determined yesterday to be too tenable.
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Blog: Dig enough, and you'll finally get a reality check on the claim of 12-hour battery life from the One Laptop Per Child project.
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By Rachel Konrad< Associated Press  SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Computer Inc. on Thursday recalled 1.8 million Sony-built notebook batteries that could overheat and catch fire, just 10 days after Dell Inc.'s record-setting recall involving the same problem and the same supplier.
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Question: We're in the early stages of startup and beginning to shop for technology. We'll need basic hardware and software, plus many other technology and Web-based services to sell online, service customers and keep it all secure.
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Vendor's announcement of new Centrino notebooks is slightly early.
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Inside Apple's latest Worried about changing the battery in a MacBook Air? Don't - according to one tech site that's taken the skinny machine to bits, opening the laptop up is "a surprisingly pleasant task".â¦
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Ultracapacitors will prevent the need for jump starts in chilly weather. In Autopia.
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Problems with the battery pack's latch could lead to overheating, company says.
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(InfoWorld) - Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.Â (Panasonic) said it has developed a lithium-ion battery that won't overheat even if a short circuit occurs. The new battery includes a heat-resistive insulator inside the battery cell, next to an existing separator that insulates the anode and cathode. If that separator is punctured a short circuit occurs that typically causes the battery to overheat and in some circumstances catch fire. Panasonic said its insulator layer ensures that the battery won't overheat even in the event of a short circuit. Panasonic's announcement responds to consumers' concern about the safety of lithium-ion batteries following a number of incidents involving them. Earlier this year most major laptop computer makersÂ started recall or exchange programsÂ for batteries containing lithium-ion cells made by Sony after a number of batteries overheated and caught fire. Sony blamed the problem on metallic particles that got inside the battery during production, puncturing the separator layer and causing a short circuit. The replacement program covers 9.6 million batteries and willÂ cost SonyÂ up to Â¥51 billion (US$432 million). Then on Dec. 7, Japanese mobile-carrier NTT DoCoMo and handset-maker Mitsubishi ElectricÂ recalled 1.3 million cell-phone batteriesÂ made by Sanyo Electric, saying they could overheat and catch fire. Panasonic's new batteries are made by another company in the Matsushita group, Matsushita Battery Industrial Co., and are ready for mass production, said Akira Kadota, a spokesman for Panasonic in Tokyo. The batteries aren't available directly to end users but are sold in bulk to electronics product manufacturers, so Panasonic wouldn't reveal their price. Kadota said they could be more expensive than current cells but could also work out cheaper if large orders are placed. Matsushita Battery Industrial is one of the largest battery makers in Japan. Â
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By Kyodo News International, Tokyo  Sep. 4--TOKYO -- Japan's battery makers plan to set uniform safety  standards for lithium-ion batteries used in laptop computers, following a  large-scale recall those made by Sony Corp., the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported  Monday.