Finally, some sensible advice on prolonging batteries! I know that batteries will lose their ability to hold a charge no matter what, but that doesn’t mean you can take steps to make it last for a few extra charge cycles.
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo recently interviewed Isidor Buchmann, the CEO of battery-testing equipment manufacturer Cadex Electronics, about characteristics of contemporary gadget batteries and how to use them to your advantage. Note that the tips below only apply to Lithium-Ion batteries, the most popular type used in gadget today:
Keep Your Batteries Away From Heat. Heat lessens a battery’s lifespan, and unfortunately many gadgets …read more

Savvy laptop owners learned a long time ago that manufacture claims on laptop battery lives were essentially best-case scenarios. An XPS M1330 for instance never reaches the promised 3 hours—even with all connectivity off and the screen dimmed to minimum.
But why, you ask? Here’s Daniel Lyons’s theory
These battery-life numbers are based on a benchmark test called MobileMark 2007 (MM07). The test was created by a consortium called BAPCo (Business Application Performance Corp.), whose members are—you guessed it—computer makers and other tech companies.

Thanks to a “can do no wrong” image cultivated by its effective marketing machine, people make the mistake of assuming that Apple’s the best out there—bar none (may we invite you to revisit the myth of the Apple iPhone’s overwhelming superiority?). So you can imagine the amount of press coverage the flaming iPod nano (which has something to do with its battery) has received:

reuters.com
bbc.co.uk
allthingsd.com
zdnet.com
consumerist.com

Wha? The Apple iPod nano actually failing is news? When did we anoint Apple and Steve Jobs as god-incarnate, incapable of any gadget-related error whatsoever? Apple may have a lot of undeserved attention from the online and …read more