battery

In conjunction with the Canon EOS 40D and 1Ds Mark III announcements, Canon also let loose with some new lenses and accessories.

At the high end, intimidating all the other lenses, sits the EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM, a $2,199 prime lens optimized for use with the 1Ds Mark III. Among other things, it's got improved dust-proofing and weatherproofing around the lens mount, and a round aperture (for a more natural depth-of-field blur). Canon says it's sharper than the original in the corners as well as the center, and that the increase to two aspherical … Read more

Security will be crawling at Lake Tahoe on August 17 as bigwigs such as U.S. Senator Harry Reid and former president Bill Clinton along with his wife (who has some sort of government job) attend the Lake Tahoe Summit.

(Update: Arnold Schwarzenegger was listed as a possible attendee. But apparently he can't make it now, according to his press office.)

And one of the highlights, at least in my mind, will be the test-drives of the all-electric SUV from Phoenix Motorcars. Phoenix's car can go 130 miles on a single charge and hit 100 miles per hour. (… Read more

General Motors may lease the battery packs for its Chevy Volt electric car to make it more affordable, according to a news report.

GM's electric car will take lithium-ion batteries which are known to be expensive and have a limited lifespan compared with the life of a car.

Bob Lutz, GM's global product chief, has said that the company hopes to make the car available in the $30,000 price range.

While GM has several leading battery technology developers and manufacturers onboard in its effort to build an affordable, long-range rechargeable battery for the car, critics have pointed … Read more

Companies have been trying to figure out how to use carbon nanotubes in electronics. Batteries may be the answer, say researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The device is a piece of paper infused with carbon nanotubes and a salt, which serves as an electrolyte. Because it stores energy and conducts it, the device can act like a battery.

A number of corporate labs and universities have come up with flexible batteries in the past. Power Paper from Israel makes a flexible battery printed on polymers that relies on zinc as an electrolyte. It sells it to the cosmetics industry. Japan … Read more

Is your cell phone feeling a little extra toasty after a long chat? Well, if it's one of 46 million made by Nokia it could be part of a massive battery recall.

On Tuesday, Nokia, the world's largest cell phone maker, said that a batch of cell phone batteries that were made for the company between December 2005 and November 2006 have been overheating. The company said that around 100 incidents of overheating have been reported, but no one has reported serious injuries or property damage.

The phone batteries affected were made by Japanese manufacturer Matsushita Electric Industrial. … Read more

Yes, you've seen this headline before. For the third month in a row, Toshiba customers are being urged to exchange potentially dangerous notebook batteries for the nonexploding kind.

This time around, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says 1,400 of the lithium-ion batteries containing Sony-made cells sold with Toshiba laptops pose a fire hazard. There have been three reports of models with those batteries overheating in other countries, but none of the incidents caused injury, according to the CPSC.

Users of Toshiba's Satellite A100, Satellite A105 and Tecra A7, it's your turn. If your notebook was made … Read more

Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard was in Los Angeles today to give members of the Motor Press Guild the story behind the making of its cars. For the past couple of years, the Bay Area-based company has gotten oodles of press coverage, much of it on the merits of its technology. But until this afternoon I wasn't entirely convinced. First, some background:

A year ago, I stood on Peter Hay hill at the Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach with a rather prominent car designer. Not too far in the distance, hordes of spectators gathered around a pair of … Read more

One of Crave's many obsessions has long been the "convergence" of various products and technologies into all-in-one devices, whether it be a refrigerator TV or an air-purifying speaker lamp. (We didn't say these were useful combinations.) But here's one mashup we didn't see coming--battery-powered cars and rodent birth control.

Now that we've got your attention: Panasonic, which recently introduced its version of a battery-powered plane, has applied the alternative-fuels technology to the road as well with an electric car powered by 192 AA cells that it says can reach 100 kilometers per hour, … Read more

When the X Prize Foundation announced that it was going to give an award to inventors who can get 100 miles a gallon and win a cross-country race, I thought "so what?"

Full-electric cars like the ones coming from Think and Tesla Motors top that, and so do the hydrogen vehicles that DaimlerChrysler says it will release in 2012 to 2105. Plug-in hybrids also get 100 miles per gallon.

You could even load up a Winnebago with a bunch of lithium-ion batteries and go for the victory. (Such a stunt could also mean dying in a fireball after … Read more