HP Pavilion N5250 Battery |
Posted: September 29, 2017 |
The X1's processor is only dual-core, but it's clocked at 2GHz and is backed by 8GB of RAM -- owerful for a 21mm thick, 1.5kg device. It came second only to the Envy 17 in our benchmark test.The case is claimed to be dust- and water-resistant, and also has a fingerprint reader. Its 14in screen offers ten-point touch sensitivity, making it easy to whizz through the Windows 8 tiles. But, at a less-than-HD resolution of 1,600 x 900 pixels, it's a bit of a disappointment -- especially for a PC at this price point. £1,480For all the benefits of smartphones, battery life remains the lowest common denominator – the thing that can transform your device into a powerful marvel of technology, or a useless hunk of circuitry topped with glass.While it's obvious batteries are critical, many of us don't understand the technology and, more importantly, ignore batteries when buying a new phone.Fear not. Here's what you need to know about battery tech in two simple points.1. A battery is only as good as its capacity and energy densityImagine your city's business district. Monday to Friday, it's filled with people. On the weekend, it's a ghost town. This difference in activity, or energy level, has everything to do with the capacity of the area and how many people are bustling through its streets. When trying to understand battery technology, a similar principle holds true. Energy stems from packing as much punch as possible into a given space. Most are aware of the importance of battery capacity (measured in mAh), but the energy stored in the battery's region of space per unit volume/mass – known as "energy density" – is just as critical.To this end, Huawei has integrated two of the industry's highest capacity and energy density batteries in its new flagship smartphones – the 5-inch Ascend P7 and 6-inch Ascend Mate7.The Ascend Mate7 uses a super slim 4100 mAh lithium polymer battery – just 4mm thick and featuring 590 /Wh/L energy density, for more than eight hours of video streaming and over nine hours of web browsing. The Ascend P7's 2500 mAh lithium polymer unit is also unbelievably slim at 3.41mm, boasting 580 /Wh/L energy density. That means mild, moderate and frequent users are able to use the smartphone for up to 1.95 days, 1.47 days and 0.92 days, respectively, on a single charge.Materials also matter. And Huawei batteries utilise only materials from industry-leading suppliers to guarantee ultimate power efficiency and user safety. Surface Pro 3 is also designed to help you stay entertained using the multi-position Kickstand to watch films in full HD. Enjoy Dolby audio as you stream millions of songs for free, and import your iTunes playlists. Easily integrate all your social content with free apps like Facebook and Twitter, or stay in touch with the pre-installed Skype app.This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Ever felt like hitting your computer? Or wrestled with an app that was apparently coded by a caveman? Take comfort from the fact that most technical jargon is derived from Stone Age words that existed thousands of years before even writing, never mind microchips.A laptop, for instance, is named using two syllables that date back to a neolithic tongue known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).These early farmers, who probably lived on the Eurasian steppes of what today is Russia, developed the monosyllables that act as the building blocks of most modern languages. One of these words was lab. It means "hanging", like a lobe or flap. In early English, the skirts of a dress or coat, the hemmed part, was the lap or lappet; it could also be the hanging part of an apron, covering the upper legs -- the part we now call the lap.In PIE, "top" meant a precise place, somewhere that could be pinpointed, such as the highest piece of ground. "Top" has given English lots of place words, such as topography, the study of localities, and utopia, literally "no place".A laptop, then, is just two ancient sounds bashed together like a couple of chunks of rock. A farmer 8,000 years ago would have had no trouble recognising the words, even if the finer nuances of C++ might have foxed him.The nomads who settled and built the first homesteads also made a discovery that gives us the word for a 21st-century plague: the computer virus. Stone Age man realised tribes that built villages near swampy ground suffered from diseases such as malaria. The PIE word for damp ground is "weis". That became the Latin word "uirus", which was the poison sap of plants that grew in mud.By medieval times, "uirus" was pronounced "virus".This neolithic language possessed viral qualities of its own.
The monosyllables could be used as verbs, nouns or adjectives: we don't understand PIE grammar because it was never written down, but the way it pervades everything, including Icelandic and Hindi, is testament to its effectiveness.Think of PIE as the DNA of modern language, the core code. It spread like a fire across Europe and Asia (exceptions such as Basque, a non-PIE tongue that survived in a pocket of the Iberian peninsula, are rare). For computer programmers, this has a massive implication. The most successful language in millennia consists of flexible blocks fitted together in infinite shapes, and the meaning can always be traced back to the root.Take "memory", which is at the heart of computing. It comes from two PIE syllables, "men" and "mor'. "Men" is the "mind", the silent thought process. "Mor" is "grief", a syllable found in morbid, mourn and mortuary. Together, "memory" is literally "grief of the mind" -- very apt if your hard drive crashes and you haven't backed up.This rule also applies to invented languages that run our machines too. To be most effective, the code must grow by accretion. It will be robust only if it can be run backwards and broken down into its smallest components.An artificial language, where segments consist of arbitary groups that are manufactured rather than built up, will not survive. Something better will come along and destroy it. A caveman could have told you that. This latest version of its super-slim executive standby is ThinkPad doing everything it does best. Still impossibly portable -- at 1.5 kilos despite the bumped-up 12.1-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display -- Lenovo packs in everything a travelling professional (or just about anyone else) is likely to need. The centrepiece is a new Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor, which upends the middling performance we usually expect from an ultralight. Benchmarks trounce just about everything we've tested of late -- save for a few recent-vintage high-end machines -- and they completely blow historical ultralight benchmarks out of the water, beating most machines with the last-generation chip by 30 to 40 percent.What's more remarkable is that the chip's beefed up integrated graphics gave us a solid gaming experience on the machine, too, with performance clocking at or above what you'd normally get with a lower-end discrete graphics processor. Much has been said about the joys of Sandy Bridge already, of course, but to see it put to good use in such a compact machine is almost beyond words. Beyond the i5, the machine's specs are totally up to code: 4GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, SD and ExpressCard slots, and three USB ports. There's no optical drive and while there's no HDMI port, there is a DisplayPort socket, so plan your cabling accordingly.The keyboard is outstanding and typical of the ThinkPad brand.Audio isn't particularly inspiring but it's good enough for a machine of this stature.Lenovo trumpets the X220's better-than-average battery life, but in our testing, it hit a mere 4h53m using the six-cell battery.Hardly epic, but that's still good. There are a few battery options available as upgrades if you want to stretch your work time.I reserve just one complaint for the X220 and that is the touchpad design. The textured surface is pleasing to the touch, but Lenovo has foregone separate buttons in order to maximise the size of the touchpad in a very cramped area. The bottom portion of the touchpad wraps around the end of the palm rest, and to click you press on these corners of the pad. Unfortunately, something's off with the engineering of this: The pad misses clicks all the time, and it makes the cursor stutter badly when you're (subconsciously or not) resting a thumb on the pad as you prepare to click. Great idea, but the execution isn't there. At £850, it's certainly on the higher end of prices for modern laptops, though it isn't obscenely expensive. We've seen higher price tags for bulkier machines that didn't come close to performance like this.For countries to switch their electricity generation from fossil fuel to renewable sources, they'll also have to dramatically reconfigure their electrical grids to be able to store electricity when there is oversupply. However, a study looking into the effectiveness of different batteries has found that the environmental savings from switching over may be negligible until better storage technology is developed.When a wind turbine or solar panel generates power, it's not necessarily when that electricity is needed -- it could be the middle of the night, or during a holiday when lots of people are outside. That power needs to be stored somewhere so that it can be used, otherwise renewable energy can't ever replace coal, oil, nuclear or similar plants that can output a reliable level of power whenever needed. For that reliability, there are three main options: pumped hydroelectric storage (PHS), where water is pumped upwards into a reservoir where it can be released later; compressed air energy storage (CAES) where the air can be expanded again through turbines when needed; and batteries, of which there are many different types, each with their own maximum number of effective charge cycles.
Currently, roughly 12.1 percent of the US's energy comes from wind, solar and other renewable sources, while the national grid has a storage capacity of only one percent. Climate and energy researchers Charles Barnhart and Sally Benson from Stanford University were curious as to which of these technologies would be best for a national grid if 80 percent of energy comes from renewables sources, taking into account the energy it would take to actually build each kind of storage. They compared PHS, CAES and five types of batter: lead-acid, lithium-ion, sodium-sulphur, vanadium-redox and zinc-bromine.The researchers then worked out the cost of both building the technology and maintaining it over a 30-year timescale, chosen as the kind of length of time any realistic technology should be looking to deliver over to minimise replacement costs. They derived the "energy stored on investment" for each of the seven technologies to work out how much more energy it could store over its lifetime than it took to build and maintain.By far the best technology was PHS, which could store 210 times as much energy as is took to construct. The best lithium-ion batteries, by comparison, only managed a score of ten, while the worst batteries, lead-acid, had a measly value of two. Effectively, switching to these batteries is almost self-defeating. This is in large part because battery technology currently can't handle enough charge cycles. Lithium-ion batteries can handle at most around 6,000 cycle, lead-acid batteries only 700, compared to more than 25,000 cycles for a PHS facility. Even though the material costs for large-scale batteries are more prohibitive than for PHS (rare-earth minerals versus what is often no more than concrete and steel), it's the lifecycle of batteries that we'll need to work on if we want to be able to rely on them as affordable parts of the grid.Benson said: "The most effective way a storage technology can become less energy-intensive over time is to increase its cycle life. Most battery research today focuses on improving the storage or power capacity. These qualities are very important for electric vehicles and portable electronics, but not for storing energy on the grid. Based on our ESOI calculations, grid-scale battery research should focus on extending cycle life by a factor of 3 to 10."As much as PHS might sound like a great idea, the reality is that you need a relatively hilly or, even better, mountainous landscape in which to build it. Those locations tend to be limited -- often they are within national parks or have other environmental qualifications, and those that aren't take up a huge amount of room. The largest such facility in the UK, Dinorwig in Wales, consists of 16km of tunnels but only generates 1.7GW of electricity at peak capacity -- that's only roughly two percent of the UK's total energy demand. Plus, people tend not to live in the mountains, so there are transmission issues in getting that power to far-away towns and cities.
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