battery style

Motorola Android lighthouse is still as exciting, all aspects of the information is now carried out in a steady stream of exposure. Recently, some foreign media to photograph a new type of battery, 1500 mAh battery capacity is very likely prepared for the shadow.
The exhibition of new models of the battery capacity 1500 mAh, is the maximum capacity of the battery from Motorola. The previous products used MOTO DROID battery capacity 1420 mA BP6X no accident, then the new models will be equipped with the battery in the next version of the shadow in the coming months on this product. The mysterious Shadow is currently the highest profile mobile phones from Motorola, using a screen resolution WVGA 4.1 inch, and the first use of the processor TI OMAP 3630, support for 720p high-definition video output HDMI.

With the release date Shadow approach, all kinds of information are now emerging. VGP-BPS9，VGP-BPS9/B，VGP-BPS9/S，VGP-BPS9A，VGP-BPS9A/B  , Let us continue to be patient, I think Motorola next month will give us a satisfactory answer.

Because the used batteries pollute the environment to allow children to collect used batteries. Seems to reduce environmental pollution, but how these batteries to cope?
Recycling of waste batteries process the following steps:  laptop battery

1. Category. Recycling of used batteries will be broken, torn zinc battery shell and bottom rail, remove the cap copper and graphite rods, the material remaining in the black heart of the battery of manganese dioxide and a mixture of ammonium chloride, respectively will focus on materials collected treatment, you can get useful information. The graphite rods were washed, dried and used as electrodes.

2. System of zinc tablets. Will be stripped of the shell of zinc washed and placed iron pot, heat melting and heating for 2 hours, remove the foam top, pour cool down iron, zinc tablets should be obtained after coagulation.

3. Recovery of copper. After washing flattening copper cap in warm water,battery ,  then add a certain amount of 10% sulfuric acid boiling for 30 minutes to remove the oxide surface, remove and wash, dry or get copper .

4. Ammonium chloride recycling. Dark matter in the tank, adding 60 ° C warm water and stir for 1 hour, dell Inspiron 1720 battery, dell FK890 , while ammonium chloride is dissolved in water, even filtered, the residue washed 2 times, collected mother liquor; in the mother liquor by vacuum distillation at the surface of white crystals appear until the film, cooling, filtration was crystals of ammonium chloride, recycling the mother liquor.

5. Recovery of manganese dioxide. After the filter residue washed three times, filtered cake in pan and dry, then remove the bit of carbon and other organic material, then add water to mix for 30 minutes, filtered, Sony VGP-BPS8, Sony VGP-BPS8A , the filter cake dried at 100 – 110oC, which was black manganese dioxide.

Today’s looking to be a pretty big day for both Sony Ericsson and Microsoft: with the official announcement of SE’s new Aspen handset, both companies are ready to show off what they should have done in the first place.

Sony Ericsson has never had much luck with their portrait-QWERTY portfolio, with their last attempt being the weirdo P1i a few years back, but the Aspen looks to be a solid (if rather dull) step in the right direction. It packs a 2.4-inch QVGA touchscreen display, 3.2 megapixel camera, WiFi, A2DP, with quad-band GSM/EDGE support into a svelte little frame, and its Greenheart pedigree means even the most eco-conscious among you will find something to like about it.

Microsoft’s Zune HD is a touchscreen portable media player that has a number of things going for it. It’s thin, light, and has a brilliant OLED display. It can play 720p WMV and H.264 videos, which means you may be able to copy movies from your collection without transcoding them first. But the device doesn’t actually have an HD display. Instead, it has a 480 x 272 pixel widescreen display that’s actually smaller than the iPod Touch screen, which may come as a surprise to anyone that assumes a devices with HD in its name would actually display HD video.

The Zune HD is also one of the first consumer electronics devices to use the new NVIDIA Tegra platform, which bundles an ARM-based processor with NVIDIA graphics. This is how the low-power media player can play high bitrate HD video flawlessly. The Tegra processor also enables 3D graphics effects which show up in menu animations and in some of the handful of applications currently available for the Zune HD.

The folks at NVIDIA sent me a Zune HD to review for a few weeks. I recently took it on vacation to put it through the paces. The model featured in this review has 16GB of storage. A 32GB version is also available. They normally sell for $220 and $300 respectively, but you can enter the Liliputing Holiday Giveaway to win this review unit.

Physical Design

It’s hard not to compare the Zune HD to the iPod Touch. Both are portable media players that for the most part forego hardware buttons for on-screen, finger-friendly controls. But I plan to review the Zune HD on its own merits, largely because I haven’t spent a lot of time with an iPhone or iPod Touch.

That said, I did get a chance the other day to snap a few photos of the Zune HD next to a friend’s iPhone the other day. Bear in mind, the newer iPhone 3GS is thinner than the model shown in these photos, and the iPod Touch is even thinner. But measuring less than 2.1″ x4.1″ 0.4″ and weighing just 2.6 ounces, the Zune HD is smaller, thinner, and lighter than them all.

The Zune HD fits comfortably in the palm of your hand, and if you spend a little time with it, you can easily learn to manipulate the touchscreen menus with a single hand, although I generally find it easier to hold the media player with one hand and poke at it with a finger on the other hand.

At the top you’ll find a power button. You can hit this one just to shut off the screen, or press and hold the button to power down the Zune HD altogether. Bear in mind, the device will go to sleep after a period of inactivity, thus saving battery life, while still allowing you to start using the Zune HD within a second of hitting the power button again. Resuming from a complete shut down, on the other hand, will take a few seconds.

On the left side there’s a button that you can press to bring up on-screen menus for adjusting the volume, skipping tracks, fast-forwarding, or rewinding. The front of the Zune HD has a single button near the bottom that will bring up the main menu.

The headphone jack and sync port are all the way at the bottom. This placement seems a bit awkward if you want to place the Zune HD in your pocket while listening to music. Essentially you wind up having to throw the media player into your pocket upside down. But since you’re probably going to have to pull it out of your pocket to operate the controls anyway, maybe that’s not such a big deal.

The player has a nice solid feel to it, but my demo unit has the NVIDIA logo laser etched onto the back and I’ve noticed that after carrying the Zune HD in my pocket for a few days, the logo appears to be a bit scratched up. The rest of the casing and screen appear to be OK, but you might want to invest in some sort of protective case if you plan to throw the Zune HD in a bag or pocket on a regular basis.

While the 3.3″ OLED screen can’t actually display HD video, it does look quite crisp and clear and the colors are extraordinarily vivid. On the down side, it’s a fingerprint magnet. You may want to carry around a microfiber cloth to keep the display clean.

The zune HD also features an accelerometer which can be used to control some applications, although there are few programs that actually take advantage of this feature at the moment.

Features and Applications

The Zune HD is primarily an audio and video player. But that’s not all it can do. Microsoft also packed in an HD radio, which works quite nicely. It also has built-in WiFi capabilities which you can use to download music and album art from the Zune Marketplace. There’s also a web browser which works better than most version of Pocket Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile that I’ve used. It would be nice if the Zune folks and the Windows Mobile folks at Microsoft spent a bit more time working together.

The Zune HD also runs a handful of applications, but right now the emphasis is on handful. While Apple boasts over 100,000 apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, there are just over a dozen applications for the Zune HD at the moment. On the bright side, they’re all free. On a dimmer side, they’re ad-supported, which means you have to look at a brief ad every time you launch and app. And on the much cloudier side, aside from a few games, a calculator utility, and a weather app, there’s really not much available to run on the Zune HD.

If Microsoft opens the Zune HD up to broader third party development, the platform could hole a lot of promise. Some applications such as the PGR: Ferrari Edition racing game feature rather impressive 3D graphics. And I’m mildly addicted to the Texas Hold’Em poker game. But right now there just aren’t that many apps to play with. For now, the main reason to pick up a Zune HD is for its user interface, form factor, and media playback capabilities, not its app platform.

User Interface

There are so many aspects of the user interface that it’s hard to decide where to begin. But overall, the Zune HD features a UI that is both flashy and intuitive. It would have been easy for Microsoft to have gone overboard by trying to make the interface so beautiful that it was actually difficult to use. And at first glance, you might almost think that’s exactly what happened. But the truth is, that most of the animations and other effects are seamlessly integrated into the UI in a way that provides the Zune HD with a little wow factor without making the UI confusing.

Here’s a video overview of the user interface:

When you power on the device you’re greeted with a wallpaper, clock, and battery meter. You can slide up the wallpaper to visit the home screen, the now playing screen, or whatever menu you were looking at when the screen powered down.

The home screen is broken up into categories including music, videos, pictures, radio, marketplace, social, podcasts, internet, apps, and settings. You can also flick your finger from left to right across the screen to see the item that is now playing, as well as any items that are pinned to the home screen, thumbnails showing your history, and recently added media.

I won’t go into everything in this space, but her are some of the highlights.

In the music menu you can sort by playlists, songs, artists, albums, or genres. When a song is playing, the Zune HD background will change to an image of the artist drawn from the internet. You’ll also see some album art, and after a moment, song information will start to scroll across the display.

You can tap the screen to bring up a menu for skipping tracks, adjusting the volume, pausing, fast-forwarding, or rewinding. You can also create and manage playlists from the music menu.

Songs, artists, or other items are sorted alphabetically. You can sift through these items by dragging your finger up or down the screen. If you have a long list to go through, you can also click on a box with a letter in it. For example, there’s a box with a C before all of the artists that start with the letter C. Clicking on this brings up a screen with all the letters of the alphabet that are represented in your music collection, making it faster to skip from A to T than by scrolling through dozens or hundreds of artists.

The videos menu is organized by TV, movies, all, and other. I was pleased to note that TV shows I’d recorded using the BeyondTV DVR software on my computer were recognized on the Zune HD, complete with show descriptions and series groupings. For instance, I copied several episodes of Heroes to the media player, and it grouped them together.

As with the music, when you click on the screen when watching a video a set of controls pops up allowing you to pause, fast forward, or rewind. You can tap on the fast forward button to skip ahead by about 30 seconds, and the back button to go back about 8 seconds. Or you can tap and hold to fast-forward or rewind. There’s also a progress meter at the bottom of the display, which you can tap on to move from place to place in the video, although I found this to be a bit tougher to use.

You don’t have a lot of control over things like aspect ratio from the Zune HD video player. If a movie is in 16:9 aspect ratio when it’s copied to the device, you’re golden. 4:3 videos look a bit funky, but that may just be due to the fact that it looks odd to put black bars to the left and right of any video on such a small display. You can zoom in on some videos that don’t have widescreen resolutions, but this just tends to crop off the top and bottom of the video, thus robbing you of some detail, while still failing to use up all the screen real estate on the Zune HD.

The settings menu lets you configure wireless networks, adjust the display brightness, choose EQ settings for music, set the clock, check your free storage space, and make a number of other tweaks.

Desktop software

I’ll be honest. I kind of wish Microsoft would scrap Windows Media Player altogether and replace it with the Zune desktop software. While the Zune software is clearly designed first and foremost as an application for finding and purchasing music and syncing music, video, and applications between your PC and Zune, the software also features a decent built-in media player and an excellent user interface for sorting your media into “collections.”

Collections on the Zune desktop software are similar to those on the device. They’re sorted into music, video, picture, podcast, and channel categories. And under each of those sections you can sort further by category, title, type, album, artist, and so forth.

I’m particularly fond of the podcast client, which lets you find podcasts in the online Zune Marketplace or enter the RSS feed for any audio or video podcasts that aren’t available in the marketplace. If you delve into the settings, you’ll find options to keep a certain number of fresh episodes of each podcast, a feature that comes in handy if you want to have just the last few day’s worth of newsy podcasts, but larger collections of entertainment podcasts or others with “evergreen” content.

The Zune software is far from the only application that gives you this sort of control over podcasts, but I find iTunes to be rather clunky on PCs, and it tends to want to rearrange my music collection for me, while my old favorite Podcatcher, Juice, isn’t updated very often anymore.

In order to sync media files from your PC to your Zune, you just add a folder or other location to the “Monitored folders” list in the software settings and then select the songs, artists, or other items you want to sync. When your Zune HD is connected, the software will copy the files to your mobile device. Most supported audio and video files will be copied automatically and quickly, while I found that the Zune software wanted to transcode some video files before copying them. I haven’t seen this happen often enough to pinpoint what types of files the software transcodes.

The Zune desktop software isn’t perfect though. It takes a fairly long time to load, and most importantly, it’s Windows only for now. There’s currently no officially supported way to synchronize a Zune with a Mac or Linux machine.

Verdict

I like the Zune HD. I really do. It’s small, light, attractive, and does a great job of playing supported audio and video files. The few games that are available look good too. But as much as I want to judge it on its own merits, it’s hard to justify the $220 and up price tags when you can pick up an iPod Touch with a larger (if less vivid) display and the ability to run thousands of third party apps in addition to audio and video files.

If you have a huge collection of 720p videos that you really want to play on a mobile device, the Zune HD will do it while most other portable media players won’t. But the Zune HD is hardly limitless. For instance, while it can handle 720p WMV and H.264 videos, it can’t handle DiVX videos at any resolution.

It would probably be fairly easy to add support for DiVX and some other codecs with a software update, but there’s no indication that Microsoft will be doing this any time soon. And since I’ve been spending the last few years recording TV programs using BeyondTV and an over-the-air antenna and saving them as DiVX files, this severely limits the usefulness of the Zune HD for me.

I’ll probably stick with my aging Dell Axim X50v for my audio/video/mobile app needs for now, or think about picking up a more versatile portable media player/PDA in the future such as the iPod Touch. If Microsoft opens up the Zune Marketplace for more third party app development, on the other hand, I’d certainly take another look at the Zune HD. If it could play DiVX files and run Pocket Informant, I’d almost be ready to kick my Axim PDA to the curb.

What do you get when you mix a dedicated GPU, 50FPS Crysis gaming, A Core2Duo, an 11-inch screen, and a $800 price tag? An absurd(ly powerful) little laptop, which nobody—and apparently Alienware—is comfortable calling a netbook.

We first saw the M11x back at CES—impressions here—where we were told it’d hit the market in about a month, for under $1000 dollars. Well, a tipster sent Engadget a little bit of info scraped from the HTML of the notnetbook’s official product page, which is currently holding some kind of “Guess the Price” sweepstakes:

The Alienware M11x, with over 6.5 hours of battery life and weighing under 4.5 lbs. will start at an amazing $799! Leave it to the folks at Alienware to enable truly mobile performance gaming at an affordable price.

Er, contest’s still open, folks!

Dell recently issued a BIOS fix for its Studio 17 with Core i7, designed to solve a serious crashing issue. However, after the release of Intel’s new Core i5 processor and a number of vocal user complaints about its Core i7 product, the company has made the lower-powered and priced Core i5 the Studio 17’s default CPU choice. Though, as of this posting, we did not see a Core i7 option on Dell.com, a rep assured us that the Core i7 model, labeled the Dell Studio 1747 has not been discontinued and will return to the site within days.

When we reviewed the Dell Studio 17 with Intel’s Core i7 processor (aka Dell Studio 1747) in November, we gave the notebook a 4-star rating due to its blazing performance and relatively affordable price. However, we noted two major problems we experienced with our review unit. First, the initial system we received stopped booting (and made several beeping noises) just after testing had been completed and, second, we noticed that the exterior of the chassis got hot, with the underside of the system registering a troubling 112-degrees Fahrenheit after just 15 minutes of playing a Hulu video.

We returned the first unit to Dell, which repaired it and sent it back to us a couple of days later, saying that the first issue we encountered was an isolated incident. The repaired unit worked, but we did experience experience a couple of mysterious blue screen crashes the first time we tried to play Hulu videos on it, though these seemed to disappear on subsequent tests. After we informed Dell about the uncomfortably hot temperatures, they sent us a second review unit to test. This second unit  did not break or crash, but was just as hot as the original.

Readers Respond

Without having tested an entire assembly line of Dell Studio 17s with Core i7, it was impossible for us to tell if the one defective review unit we received was a fluke or a harbinger of trouble. However, after the product began shipping, we began receiving negative reports from many users, claiming that their Dell Studio 1747s (with Core i7) had died after a few days or hours of use.

A number of users also posted on forums that their Dell Studio 1747s slowed down after intense use. For example, a French-speaking user posted this experiment, which claims that after running two CPU-intensive programs, Prime 95 and Furmark, the CPU speed dropped from 1.6 to 1.06-GHz. Notebookcheck.com, a professional review site, did not see a clock speed drop but did see their test notebook’s 3DMark06 scores drop significantly after 12 hours of intense use. We did not test our review unit for performance throttling before we had to return it to Dell.

Dell’s BIOS Update

Recently, Dell  issued a BIOS update that fixes what they call the “7 beeps problem,” the same issue that bricked our first review unit. Dell advises that, if you own a Dell Studio 1747 that is working properly, you should install the BIOS update to insure you never get the 7 beeps problem. If your Dell Studio 1747 has already stopped booting, you can call Dell support or try re-seating the CMOS battery to bring the system back to life.

Whether the new BIOS update (termed the A04 BIOS) makes the system cooler or resolves its alleged performance issues remains to be seen. If you have a Dell Studio 1747, please let us know if the BIOS update has improved your system by posting in the comments below.

Own another Dell notebook or netbook? Sound off here on what you think of the brand.