developing new products for their battery market segment
The new technology comes from the California company PowerGenix. The company holds 23 patents (granted and pending) on Nickel-Zinc batteries. The base formulation for HP Compaq Business Notebook NX9020 Series Battery sn’t new (Thomas Edison attempted but gave up on making the formulation work), but as PowerGenix CEO, Dan Squiller noted, “What the engineers and chemists at PowerGenix discovered was how to make the elements play nice together and last for an extended period of time while charging and discharging.”
Toyota’s engineers were not ready to adopt the compact high-energy, lithium-ion batteries in a mass-production vehicle, opting to run them in test fleets first. Though the company is optimistic about the potential of lithium IBM ThinkPad T60 Battery (like those in laptop computers), challenges remain as to their durability and range of operating temperatures.
There was earlier news that Acer and Asus are not making new netbooks until the release of Intel’s Pine Trail Platform expected in Q1 2010. Thus, both these companies are also working for developing new products for their CULV market segment.
In spite of this success, don’t look for PowerGenix brand batteries to be on sale at your local Radio Shack or under the hood of a Toyota Prius anytime soon. While the company already manufacturers their NiZn cells for use in power tools, electric scooters, electric bikes, and for companies selling rechargeable AA and Laptop Batteries (check out the NiZn cells at Ritz Camera), PowerGenix has opted not to create a brand name for their batteries (they don’t want to take on the big-spending bunny). Regarding automotive applications, PowerGenix plans to license their technology.
6. There are two ways to look at this situation. The first is the all-electric-car perspective. For a purely electric car, lithium-ion’s greater energy density — how much electricity HP Compaq Business Notebook NX9030 Battery can be packed into a given space — and compactness would be a great asset, allowing the range of such cars to be extended, perhaps to as much as 300 miles. For this application, lithium-ion looks essential.
If you’ve ever wanted to run Apple’s beautiful yet functional OSX but lacked a Macintosh to do it on, now is better than ever to dive into the world of the Hackintosh. Since their switch over to Intel x86 processors getting Mac software up and running on your own Intel box has never been easier to accomplish.
When a vehicle goes into the “auto stop” mode, the engine shuts down, but all accessories stay running. As in some GM hybrids (the Saturn Vue and Chevrolet Malibu, for example), a helper electric motor can also add torque to the internal combustion engine. NiZn batteries will supply the power for these applications. Squiller wouldn’t comment on which automotive manufactures might first use PowerGenix NiZn technology, but the CEO hinted that it would be a company known for its “aggressive” pursuit of environmental technologies. Our bet is Honda and/or Mercedes.
Even if lithium-ion battery problems are solved, some experts estimate their cost at $20,000 a car. Industry analysts say that Toyota’s profits on the Prius hybrid are very slim, and this is for a car with a nickel-metal-hydride IBM ThinkPad T500 Battery that has been in production for a decade. If a hot-selling hybrid brings only small profits even 10 years along its learning curve, it is unclear whether advanced generations can become a sustainable business — or will remain a public-relations experiment.
The new 256GB SSD doubles the performance of Ssamsung’s existing 64GB and 128GB SSDs. To give you numbers, the sequential read speed and sequential write speeds are 220MB/s and 200MB/s respectively. It’s obviously faster than even the best 7,200RPM laptop HDDs if these numbers are to be believe. Samsung says that having a 256GB SSD in your laptop is like having a 15,00RPM drive without its size, noise, clutter and heating drawbacks.