90 Percent Charge in 10 minutes

That’s what Toshiba reckons its latest Super Charge Ion Battery (SCIB) is capable of, and the icing on the cake is that it should be able to withstand between 5000 and 6000 charge/discharge cycles, or up to ten times the number of charge cycles for a standard Lithium Ion battery pack. There’s even more good news, they won’t explode when crushed, which is probably not something most people need to worry about, but it could happen. However, there’s no word on what SCIB’s do when they are short-circuited, which is one of the possible reasons for the recent spate of well-publicised laptop battery fires. So what’s the catch? Well, Toshiba hasn’t announced a launch date yet, which usually means there are some manufacturing or cost difficulties, or both, still to be ironed out, but the idea of being able to get a dead laptop battery up and running in just a few minutes is going to appeal to a lot of power-users, so we probably won’t have to wait too long for it.

Introducing the Popfly Game Creator

Game development, like it or not, remains a territory largely off limits as it involves hard coding. And if this is the general rule, Microsoft offers the exception. The Redmond company has evolved its web and mashup tool in order to accommodate game creation. Now, the fact of the matter is that users won’t be able to create their very own sequel to a preferred title, but Popfly will enable the creation of simple, casual games without writing a single line of code. This is now possible through the addition of the Popfly Game Creator.

“Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build. What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario, Frogger, Asteroids, and a host of other old arcade games”, revealed a member of the Popfly team. Read More »