Wednesday December 12, 2007
- Toshiba Unveils 5 minutes Rechargeable Batteries - Lionel - 10:17:08
Source : Toshiba
Toshiba announced the future availability in March 2008 of a new generation of battery, named SCiB, Super Charge ion Battery, that can recharge to 90% of full capacity in less than five minutes.
In addition, such battery will feature en exceptional long-life cycle, as Toshiba announced that the capacity loss after 3,000 cycles of rapid charge and discharge is less than 10%.
Each cell will have a capacity of 4.2Ah, for a 2.4V voltage, while weighting 150g for 62x95x13mm. Toshiba aims to make this high capacity battery a dedicated product for industrial systems and automotive products businesses, before being able to miniaturize it further to make it available for consumer electronics applications. One should also not forget that to recharge such battery one needs a huge and powerful power unit.
[translation by Linathael]
- How to Use Time Machine on the same HD than the System - Lionel - 10:16:33
If you create 2 partitions on the same HD, you can use the first one for the system and storage, and configure the second one for Time Machine. When selecting the second partition, you will be warned that this solution is not reliable, as you will lose all data in case of HD failure.
However this solution might also be useful if you simply need to recover previous versions of files or files involuntary deleted.
However, you should keep in mind the following points:
- as you will lose all data in case of HD failure, pay attention to perform regular backup of this HD
- backups performed by Time Machine will place heavy request on HD heads, and could lead to a shorter life cycle.
- also due to those reading/writing cycles, the computer reactivity will massively decrease when Time Machine will be running, so it might useful to only perform such backup every 12 hours instead of the default 1 hour with applications such as TimeMachineScheduler.
[translation by Linathael]
- New Blu-ray Burner from Optiarc - Lionel - 10:16:05
The market for BD burner is dynamic and many products have been or will be announced around Christmas time. Optiarc, the joint venture between Sony and Nec announced its new BD burner, the BWU-200s. This drive is able to write BD-R at 4x, BD-RE at 2x, but also DVD at 16x, DVD-RAM at 12x and CD at 40X. It will only be available with a SATA interface, and its price should be around US$600.
Despite the recent release of a 6x BD burner by LG, other manufacturers are not ready to launch a war based on delivering the fastest drive at lowest price. One will most likely have to wait that other manufacturers such as Lite-On enter the market to really bring price down, and make BD burner a popular product.
[translation by Linathael]
- Toshiba Drops its OLED-based large size TV Projects. - Lionel - 10:15:43
Toshiba was originally planning to introduce OLED-based large size TV models by the end of the decade. It will not happen, as the company does not expect the production cost of OLED panels to drop significantly to make such project financially profitable. Production of smaller OLED-based panels dedicated to mobile phone, handhelds or camera will continue.
Sony is more optimistic, and plan to launch OLED-based TV in USA next year; but it will most likely be small size models such as the XEL-1 currently available in Japan, with its 11" display for US$1800.
[translation by Linathael]
