Panasonic have designed and built a new battery designed for laptops that has an increased capacity and is less explosive. The new battery uses a form factor numbered 18650 that see’s the battery measuring 65mm in length with an 18mm diameter making them just the right size to be built as laptop batteries.

The batteries are lithium-ion and have a larger capacity allowing 3.1Ah of capacity to be stored vs the standard batteries which generally reach 2.9Ah. [Read more…]

If you have a jailbroken iPhone then you can now connect up a bluetooth keyboard to it so you can more easily type while on the move.

To get a bluetooth keyboard working you’ll need an iPhone 3G(S) and the bluetooth driver as well as a keyboard of course. All you need to do is install the driver on your iPhone and then pair the keyboard to the phone.

The driver is based on the open source BTstack project and is available in Cydia. There is one problem at the moment though in that the BT keyboard will only work with in the application although the developers of the app have said that compatibility with other apps (running the program in the background) will be available soon. [Read more…]

A Maine legislator is trying to make it a requirement that mobile phones used in that area carry warnings that using a phone can lead to brain cancer.

It’s still unclear if mobile phone usage can cause brain cancer though and as of yet there is no general consensus on there being cause for worry or not.

Although it’s a bit of a strange requirement, I guess there is no harm in putting a warning message on the back of a phone to warn people that there might be dangers. [Read more…]

A couple of weeks back several HTC phones being launched in 2010 were leaked when a firmware was found, opened up and a number of codenames found. One of those phones was the HTC Espresso. Not much is known about this particular phone just yet, but an Italian site claims to have managed to pull some images from the Espresso that reveals it uses a new Sense UI.

A few changes on the Sense UI show a bar across the bottom of the screen that gives direct access to people. Icons on the main pages have also been spruced up a tad by adding a transparent effect around them. [Read more…]

Vodafone have announced details of the Apple iPhone that will be coming to their network in the UK shortly. The iPhone will be made available on January 14th 2010.

Three iPhones are being made available on the network which includes the iPhone 3G as well as two iPhone 3G S models (16GB and 32GB).

The iPhone 3G is available in black and will be available free on all plans £35/month and up (24 months) although if you pay £30/month you can get the phone for £59. Full details of pricing available here. [Read more…]

Palm have launched a new in-browser SDK called Ares pitch that allows you to create apps for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi with out a lot of coding knowledge.

The service uses drag and drop features where you can place buttons, boxes and other types of functions on to the screen. When all objects are placed in the correct location you then need to know a bit of coding to get them to work correctly together. [Read more…]

HTC have launched four new widgets for the Hero/Eris Android phones. The first is a battery widget that shows a small battery icon on the home screen. When tapped a widget pops open that shows the current status of the battery including how much charge is left, what the battery temperature is, how it is being charged/discharged as well as the general health of the battery.

The next widget shows information on events from history over the past years such as historic events. [Read more…]

TnkGrl managed to check the Google Nexus One phone out recently and spotted a few interesting things. One of the main features lacking on the phone is multi-touch. It seems that the phone does not allow for it. I am sure that some clever folk will managed to figure a way to get it working though so that’s no biggie although it would be nice to see it function out of the box.

On the plus side, the phone is extremely thin, has a fairly decent battery capacity of 1400 mAh. It has an OLED screen from what tnkgrl mentioned. It is unlocked for now (that might change) and has a super snappy interface. [Read more…]

A kind of cool and weird application has launched on the Apple App store that allows you to more safely type while walking. The application is called Type and Walk and makes use of the camera on your iPhone to push video in to the background of an application where you can type on top of the video, thus being able to see obstacles as you are walking.

Type n Walk was designed to work with your favorite apps — not try to replace them. Use it to compose your email, text message, status update, or tweet and paste it into your target app (or the browser) to send.

[Read more…]

Belkin have created a new Bluetooth music receive for iPhones that allows you to listen to music from your hifi. The device comes with the bluetooth receiver along with a cable that can attach to your hifi. When you pair your iPhone up to the receiver you can then listen to music from the stereo as well as use your iphone as a remote control to skip though music.

The Bluetooth Receiver has a working distance of about 33 feet allowing it to work quite well in a regular sized home. [Read more…]

Oppo are preparing to launch a new smartphone early next year that will run the Android OS and have a 3.5 inch WQGA screen with an 800 x 400 pixel resolution.

The renderings of the phone show a number of LED’s running down the side of the device which according to Akhibara news will be used to reports on the current temperature and humidity as well as providing the date. [Read more…]

A new iPhone application has been launched by Microsoft [MSFT] that brings Bing the search engine to the iPhone. The new Bing iPhone application gives you the ability to search for webpages, images, movies, maps, news and even directions from your iPhone. One of the features built in allows you to use voice search while looking for places on a map as well as using voice for regular web search.

As can be expected, the Bing iPhone App makes use of your GPS or radio location and when you perform a search for something it can localise the results pointing you in the direction of the nearest electronics store for example. [Read more…]