It has happened to every one of us, when we need to use the notebook on the go there is no power left in the notebook battery. Imagine if there was a battery that would charge 90 percent in 10 minutes, how many problems that would solve. Last week at CEATEC 2008 in Tokyo, Japan, Toshiba unveiled its prototype notebook battery that charges 90 percent in 10 minutes. Toshiba calls the battery Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB) and it uses a new lithium-titanate anode material.
Toshiba has been talking about the new battery technology for almost a year now, but this is the first working prototype that Toshiba has shown.  The use of lithium-titanate improves thermal stability, increase flash point of electrolyte and decrease the possibility of internal short-circuiting and thermal runaway. Toshiba claims that capacity loss has also been improved and the SCiB battery loses only 10 percent capacity after 3,000 cycles compared to around 20 to 30 percent loss in today’s lithium-ion batteries after 500 charge cycles. The company will start mass production of the new battery in 2009.
[Via Aving]

Members of Mac Observer’s AFB have been tracking the IMEI numbers for the iPhone sold. International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number is a unique 15-digit code assigned to each individual iPhone found in its settings. The members of Apple Finance Board at Mac Observer are maintaining a spreadsheet of iPhone IMEI data points with the purchase date, model and production week.
According to the data from early September Apple was on its eighth TAC, each TAC can register one million iPhones, meaning 8 million 3G iPhones have already been manufactured. The latest IMEI data collected was 9,190,680 – a 8GB black iPhone that was manufactured on September 29 and sold on October 5. AppleInsider says that even if we assume that 1.5 million iPhones are unsold, the data shows that 7.6 million have been sold. That will bring the total number of iPhone sold in 2008 to more than 10 million, the goal that was stated by Apple when they released the iPhone in 2007.
This also means Apple has surpassed the 4 million units estimated by many analyst for iPhone 3G in Q4 2008 that ended on September 30th. If the data is accurate then Apple sold at least 7 to 7.5 million iPhone in Q4, which will make the sales 80 percent above the general consensus.
In other related news, NPD Group is saying that the iPhone 3G is now the second best selling handset behind Motorola Razr 3. According to NPD Group’s research one in three iPhone 3G purchasers switched from other carriers to join AT&T. Verizon suffered the worst hit with 47 percent of new customers who joining AT&T for the iPhone were from the company, followed by 24 percent from T-Mobile and 19 percent from Sprint.
“The launch of the lower priced iPhone 3G was a boon to overall consumer smartphone sales,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis. “While the original iPhone also helped win customers for AT&T, the faster network speeds of the iPhone 3G has proven more appealing to customers that already had access to a 3G network.”
NPD says that the top-selling smartphone between June and August 2008 was the iPhone 3G. BlackBerry Curve in second place, BlackBerry Pearl in third place and Palm Centro in fourth place followed it.

BlackBerry’s upcoming touchscreen phone will follow the iPhone by giving its users and developers an application store called “App Center”. Additionally, it will try to one-up the iPhone by including the copy-and-paste feature. The App Center will be a portal for third party apps like the Apple App Store but carriers will control it. Though, BlackBerry will host all the applications on a central RIM server, filter will be in place depending on carrier network that is accessing the server. Basically, giving complete control to carriers, who will decide what applications, the consumers can download on their phones.
The App Center will be available via the web browser on the device initially and will only show applications for the particular BlackBerry OS that on the phone. The user won’t be able to reload apps that were already running or resume interrupted downloads as the App Center will be web browser based. Both the installation and deleting of applications will be managed through the apps (web) browser.
RIM has added the copy and paste function to the new BlackBerry Storm by using the dedicated menu button, which lets user issue a copy command. User can they select the starting and ending of the text by touching the screen. Verizon hasn’t announced a date for release of the BlackBerry Storm, but it is believed we will see the handset in first week of November at the earliest.
[Via Macnn]

The netbooks are selling like hot cakes, if you check the Amazon’s top 10 laptops list you will see all netbooks except MacBook on number seven position. Asus the company that started the netbook trend is also seeing record sales. The company reported that they shipped 700,000 Eee PCs in September this year, a monthly record for the company. The total shipment for the quarter was 1.7 million. Asus said that they expect similar high sales for coming holiday season, as October and November are traditionally peak months for the company.
Market watchers expect to see a drop in gross margins for Asus’s netbook business with increase in competition. But Asus says that the margins will remain study, as the shipment of the high-end 10-inch models will start to pick up in the fourth quarter. We have normally found the small netbooks difficult to use because of their small keyboard and screen, and limited OS capabilities. But it looks like consumers are finding the low price point of the netbooks very attractive and this holiday season will be all about the netbooks.
[Via Digi Times]

Toshiba’s new 14.1-inch Satellite E105 laptop is available for pre-order at Best Buy for $1,199.99. The MacBook like laptop comes with 1280 x 800 resolution display, 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, DVD burner, Intel 4500MHD integrated graphics, WiFi a/g/n and Bluetooth. The E105 is based on Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition that will allow it to take advantage of 4GB RAM. The ports on the laptop include HDMI, Ethernet, two USBs and multi-format card reader. For security the E105 has a built-in fingerprint reader, which is present just below the zero profile trackpad. The laptop will weigh 5 pounds. The asking price $1,200 is bit more for the laptop, but it will include two years warranty.
[Via Best Buy]

The ‘Brick’ was rumored as codename for a new product that Apple will introduce soon. But, 9to5mac is reporting that ‘Brick’ is the codename for a new manufacturing process developed by Apple for upcoming MacBooks. The name Brick is used to refer to a block of high quality, aircraft grade aluminum, which is used in the new manufacturing process.
According to Seth, the new process is totally revolutionary and Apple has spent last few years building it. The process uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of an aluminum block aka Brick. The advantage of using the new process include:

In past, information released by 9to5mac about upcoming Apple products had been very accurate, so we think that this Brick rumor will also come true. Seth from 9to5mac also says that MacBooks are still on target for an October 14th announcement and the press should be getting invites within the next few days.
Earlier today, we reported that new MacBooks will be powered by NVIDIA chipset and they will be released on 14th October. And, now the information from 9to5mac also points to the same date. Based on the latest information from our sources, we are almost certain that we will see new Apple laptops on 14th October.

T-Mobile has again started taking pre-orders for Google Android G1, which they will ship in November. Customers who have ordered the G1 in the first round of pre-orders will get their phone on October 22nd. To meet the rising demand T-Mobile has tripled the pre-order stock said company’s spokesperson. T-Mobile has increased its estimated sales of the G1 to half million before end of this year. The initial demand was so high that T-Mobile’s website went down and the T-Mobile customer service lines were tied up for hours. T-Mobile’s spokesperson said, “Given the great anticipation and the heavy pre-sale demand for the T-Mobile G1 with Google, we nearly tripled the number of phones initially available for delivery on our October 22 launch date, and have sold through them all.” It looks like the G1 has already had a good start, it will be interesting to see how the sales keep up in coming months.
[Via BGR]

It has been rumored for past few months that Apple is looking to improve performance of the MacBook lineup by using more powerful chipset along with Intel’s new Core 2 Duo processors. Many news websites and blogs have been reporting that Apple will use upcoming NVIDIA MCP7A-U chipset, which will give MacBook more graphical performance and decrease power requirements. NVIDIA plans to release the new chipset around mid-October, which adds fire to the speculation that Apple will announce the redesigned MacBook on 14th October.
 TUAW is also reporting that their sources are saying new MacBooks are right around the corner, and that they might use NVIDIA’s chipset. A source has informed TUAW that NVIDIA is showing off new MacBooks to their employees and word is getting around that the new MacBook will be released on 14th October. It is not a normal practice and Apple wouldn’t normally allow its partners to show unannounced products to their employees. In fact, TUAW itself points out that these are just rumors.
But, more and more evidence is piling-up and it’s more likely than not that Apple will launch the new MacBook on 14th October. It is also very likely that Apple will pair a NVIDIA chipset with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor. As it is always with Apple, we will only know for sure when Apple announces the product. But we would advise our readers to not buy an Apple computer for next 10 to 14 days, as we are very sure that Apple will announce new product in that time range.

Andy Rubin, head of Google Android said that Google would differentiate Android Market from Apple’s App Store by not imposing many of the restrictions Apple does. He added that developers using Android would be able to allow consumers to try their applications for free before they buy them. According to Rubin, this is one of the biggest complain from developers about the App Store.
Another example, Andy gave about how the Android Market will be different, is that it won’t place limits on how much bandwidth a given application may use up. App Store doesn’t allow applications more than 10MB in size to download over cellular network, you need to use WiFi or computer for that.  Now the problem with this is that developers who have free apps bigger than 15MB will have to pay T-Mobile $2 monthly fee. Rubin believes that because of the less restrictive nature of the Android Market Apple developers might migrate over and Android could become bigger hotbed of innovation than even the App Store.
[Via Business Week]

Asus officially announced the new high-end fashion-friendly Eee PC S101. To make S101 fashionable Asus went Microsoft’s way (brown Zune) by designing brown casing, which is never a good idea. Anyway, the high-end features on the netbook include 10.2-inch LED backlit LCD screen, up to 64GB of flash memory, multitouch trackpad, Bluetooth and WiFi b/g/n support.
The processing power for the machine comes from 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, which is supported by Intel 945GSE chipset and 1GB RAM. The choice of operating system depends on size of solid state drive (SSD) and price. The 16GB SSD version comes with Windows XP and includes additional 16GB SD card for $699, whereas the 32GB and 64GB SSD versions use Linux operating system, and are priced $699 and $799 respectively. 
The other features on the netbook are 4-in-1 card reader, three USB ports, VGA out and 0.3-megapixel webcam. The netbook will come with a 6-cell battery that will give it 5 hours battery life. And, don’t be sad, it will come in two other colors except brown, champagne and graphite.