BMW Recalls Nearly 1.3 Million Vehicles Worldwide for Battery-Cable Flaw

BMW announced Monday that it would recall about 1.3 million 5 Series and 6 Series vehicles worldwide to fix a potential hazard involving a faulty battery-cable connection in the cars’ trunks.
About 367,000 cars are affected by the recall in the United States, according to Thomas Plucinsky, a BMW spokesman. In a document dated and sent March 23 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, BMW noted that more than 300,000 of the affected vehicles were 5 Series sedans from the 2004-10 model years. Other vehicles named in the action were 5 Series wagons, as well as 6 Series coupes and convertibles, also from the 2004-10 model years.
In its letter to the safety agency, BMW said that a bolt connection securing the battery cables could come loose, causing increased electric resistance and an overheated cable connection. Possible results are a malfunctioning electrical system and failure to start. In extreme situations, this could lead to melted insulation and a smoldering trunk mat.
“The worst-case scenario is a fire,” Mr. Plucinsky said. “We are aware of one fire in the United States.” No injuries or accidents have been reported as a result of the problem, BMW said.
The company announced it would contact owners of affected cars by mail in April to bring their cars in to local dealers. The fix, which Mr. Plucinsky said would take half an hour, would include securing the cable if necessary, adding protective grease and replacing the plastic battery cable cover.
As of Monday afternoon, N.H.T.S.A. had not uploaded notice of the recall to its Web site.
next blog: Ad-supported apps leave smartphones in high-power states, drain batteries

Ad-supported apps leave smartphones in high-power states, drain batteries

Apps can stick hardware into a high-power-usage state even when they're not in use, resulting in excess power use.

If you find your phone is often low on ACER Aspire 4736Z Battery, the free apps you use may be to blame, according to a new study. Using a monitoring tool they developed, the authors of the study—two researchers from Purdue University and another from Microsoft—found that serving ads and collecting data inside an app results in excessive use of the hardware components inside a smartphone. These parts of free apps will turn on components like the 3G chip or GPS and cause them to stay on well after an information transaction has been completed, resulting in unnecessary power loss.
Most smartphones can show a basic breakdown of which resources are consuming the ACER Aspire 5515-5879 Battery life (display, Wi-Fi, individual apps, etc.), but the way in which individual apps use that power is more opaque. To unpack the details at this level of power consumption, three researchers developed a tool called "eprof," a "fine-grained energy profiler." Eprof can track power used at the level of individual threads as well as routines running in an app, and can also track what the authors call "asynchronous power behavior."
Tracking an individual piece of software's activity—when processes stop and start, for instance—is contained, so it's easy to say how much power they use in that regard. But the authors found that tracking the hardware was more subtle, as many apps seem to stir hardware into action without turning it off right away, or ever. For example, the authors note the Wi-Fi and 3G chips may start up to communicate an app's data, and then remain in a high-power state even after the app has closed.
Likewise, smartphone OSes also include "wakelock APIs," which allow apps to prevent different pieces of hardware from sleeping, such as an app that wakes the CPU to check for new messages or a video application that stops the screen from sleeping while playing a movie. Items like the camera and GPS presented a similar problem: the researchers found that apps that use these devices start them up and put them in a high power-consuming state, and the hardware will sometimes continue this way until explicitly turned off by another service.
All of these actions mean power consumption triggered by one app can extend beyond when an app is finished using a piece of hardware and overlap into another, making good power accounting tricky (the authors note that this kind of Aspire 5738 Laptop Battery consumption, known as "tail energy," is being studied to reduce its consumption). For the purposes of this study, the authors account for the energy use triggered by an app, even if it extends beyond the period of app use.
Using eprof to monitor app power use on an HTC Passion running Android 2.3, the researchers made a few discoveries. In a study of the free version of Angry Birds, the authors found that the third-party ad generator and data aggregator Flurry consumes 45 percent of the app's energy tracking the user's location and serving ads to the app. But of that 45 percent, uploading the information and downloading the ads over 3G was only a 2KB transaction, taking 1 percent of the app's energy.
After the data exchange, the researchers found that the 3G chip continued to eat up energy, and it consumed another 24 percent of the total. Meanwhile, the core CPU-intensive thread that actually runs the program consumed 18 percent. Once the app was closed, a thread called HeapWorker performed cleanup and closed a socket, pushing the 3G chip into action and creating another tail that used 28 percent of the total energy.
The app Free Chess showed similar energy use excesses. Fifty percent of the app's energy went to running the third-party ad creator AdWhirl, and of that 50 percent, around 5 percent was used to download and render the ads; the rest was tail energy used by the 3G chip.
In total, 80 percent of the energy Angry Birds used went to I/O components (3G and GPS), and 77 percent of Free Chess's did. Others, like the New York Times app (67 percent) and MapQuest (72 percent) used somewhat less on components that had been triggered into a high power state by a short task, but the difference these states make are significant.
One simple lesson here is that if you find yourself drinking your ACER Aspire 5920G Laptop Battery dry by 7pm every day, springing for the paid versions of apps that don't need to use extra energy to serve you ads could help. The difference could be significant, depending on how much time you spend on ad-supported apps or, to a lesser extent, ones that perform frequent exchanges with GPS and data collection services like Flurry.
More importantly, there is some optimization to be done on the part of app creators. We can fault smartphones for skimping on ACER Extensa 4630Z battery size, but all the milliamp-hours in the world can only do so much good when apps use two to three times as much energy to collect data and serve ads as to run the actual program, all because these services amp up hardware components to high power states and let them stick there for too long. The authors suggest that eprof could be combined with static analysis to optimize energy use, as well as with smartphone OS schedulers to make them more aware of when components are using energy, but not actually in use.

Asus Eee PC 1025C Flare

The good: The Asus Eee PC 1025C Flare has amazing battery life, and is probably the least expensive Windows 7 laptop you'll find.
The bad: Just about everything else is substandard. A machine like this was acceptable a few years ago, but it just doesn't cut it in the post-iPad world.
The bottom line: Asus brought Netbooks into the world, and with the last-gasp Eee PC 1025C Flare, it looks like it's going to take them out as well.

Review: Once upon a time, cheap, tiny laptops ruled the land, acting as travel, backup, and kids' computers to millions, and completely upending what consumers expected to pay for a PC. Those laptops were called Netbooks, and starting in 2007 they exploded out of the gate, first from Asus, then Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and others. Every laptop maker (save Apple) had to launch one of these $300 machines, and they were a real democratizing force in making basic computing and online access available to nearly everyone.
But, like many hot trends, the Netbook was oversold. The big PC makers struggled to ... Expand full review

Once upon a time, cheap, tiny laptops ruled the land, acting as travel, backup, and kids' computers to millions, and completely upending what consumers expected to pay for a PC. Those laptops were called Netbooks, and starting in 2007 they exploded out of the gate, first from Asus, then Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and others. Every laptop maker (save Apple) had to launch one of these $300 machines, and they were a real democratizing force in making basic computing and online access available to nearly everyone.
But, like many hot trends, the Netbook was oversold. The big PC makers struggled to differentiate their mostly identical systems from each other--which is hard to do when no one expects to pay more than $299. Even worse, the stock combination of an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive was fine for very simple tasks, as long as one understood the limitations of the hardware. But too many Netbooks were pitched as replacements for full-price laptops, and consumers ended up disappointed by sluggish performance and tiny keyboards.
The final nail in the Netbook coffin was Apple's iPad, which for $499 did many of the things people wanted their Netbooks for--e-mail, Web surfing, playing videos, gaming--better than a Atom-powered laptop. Since then, we've seen a precipitous decline in the number of Netbooks released, with most companies cutting way down on available models or dropping them altogether.
The last gasp for Netbooks may be the Asus Eee PC 1025C Flare. Asus practically invented the Netbook market, so it's fitting that the company provide the only new Netbook we've seen in more than six months. The most notable change from Netbooks of the past is the use of the new 1.6GHz Intel Atom N2600 dual-core processor, but otherwise it has familiar specs: 1GB of RAM and a slightly bigger 320GB hard drive, for the standard Netbook starting price of $299.
With slightly more expensive (but much more practical) 11-inch ultraportables using Intel's Core i3 or AMD E-450 CPU, and the continued success of the Apple iPad, it's hard to see where a Netbook fits in these days. Yes, the EE PC 1025C's performance may be marginally better than that of some past Netbooks, and the laptop battery life is excellent (because this is such a low-power system). But the era of the $299 Netbook has passed, and even this decent example of the form is unlikely to bring it back, especially as it looks as if zero thought has gone into the physical design of these systems over the past couple of years.

Price as reviewed	$299
Processor	1.6GHz Intel Atom N2600
Memory	1GB, 1,333MHz DDR3
Hard drive	320GB 5,400rpm
Chipset	Intel NM10
Graphics	Intel GMA 3600
Operating system	Windows 7 Starter
Dimensions (WD)	10.3x7 inches
Height	0.8 inch to 1.4 inches
Screen size (diagonal)	10.1 inches
System weight / Weight with AC adapter	2.5 pounds / 2.9 pounds
Category	Netbook

If the Asus Eee PC 1025C Flare looks familiar, it's because it has the same general shape and styling as most of the Eee PC systems we've reviewed over the last few years. The almost entirely plastic body tapers towards the front, and is propped up in the back by a big six-cell battery.
In previous years, this would have been a very slim laptop. But today, hitting nearly 1.5 inches means you're big and bloated. To be fair, low-cost Netbooks have never been lookers, but we've seen other budget laptops update their styling over the years. At least this is still a lightweight laptop--it's about half a pound less than Dell's XPS 13 ultrabook, for example.
The keyboard and touch pad will be familiar to anyone who has picked up a Netbook before. The Eee PC 1025C's flat-topped, island-style keys look like the keys you'd find on nearly any current laptop, just slightly shrunk down. The difference between the keyboard on a 10.1-inch laptop and on an 11.6-inch laptop is pretty significant, and typing on the Eee PC is closer to typing on an iPad--doable, but not an optimal experience. Fortunately, the Enter, Backspace, left Shift, and Tab keys are big enough to hit easily, but the right Shift key and arrow keys are smaller than usual.
The touch pad is a decent size, given the overall small size of the system, and the sensitivity was cranked up enough by default to get from one end of the screen to the other in a single swipe. Multitouch gestures are, not surprisingly, weak, with a simple two-finger scroll being frustratingly laggy. The touch pad doesn't have a special drag-free surface; instead it's made of the same plastic as the rest of the chassis, and demarcated by a slight indentation in the wrist rest. A single, thin rocker bar below the pad is used for both a right and left button click.
The standard resolution for even the least expensive laptops today is generally 1,366x768 pixels. In that sense, the Eee PC 1025C Flare is a bit of throwback, using the same 1,024x600-pixel screen seen on dozens of Netbooks up through early 2011. It's fine for casual Web browsing and e-mail, but many sites are designed to be read on at least a 13x7-inch display, so excessive scrolling may be required. That said, the matte finish on the screen was welcome. Horizontal off-axis viewing was surprisingly good, while vertical off-axis viewing was terrible.

	Asus Eee PC 1025C Flare	Average for category [Netbook]
Video	VGA plus HDMI	VGA
Audio	Stereo speakers, combo headphone/microphone jack	Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jacks
Data	3 USB 2.0, SD card reader	3 USB 2.0, SD card reader
Networking	Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi	Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Optical drive	None	None

Netbooks offer few surprises in terms of ports and connections, and the only difference between this model and most older Netbooks is the additional of an HDMI port for outputting video to a bigger screen. Bluetooth would have been a nice extra, but there's only so much one can expect for $299.
It's been so long since we tested a Windows 7/Intel Atom laptop that direct comparisons were nearly impossible. But even compared with a Dell business Netbook with an Atom N550 or a Netbook-like Acer system with the very low-end AMD C-50 CPU, the Eee PC 1025C Flare was a slow performer. Web surfing in one or two tabs was fine, but performing any kind of system task, even calling up Windows menus, was painfully slow.
This is pretty much the Netbook performance we remember, but now that people are used to iPads and $399 ultraportable 11-inch laptops, it doesn't seem as acceptable as before. A 720p streaming video played smoothly for the most part, with a few dropped frames, so online video viewing should at least be possible.
Asus also offers a pre-Windows quick-start OS called Express Gate, but we've never found one of these modes to be all that useful, especially as they require learning the ins and outs of a non-Windows OS. Plus, instead of being more responsive, Express Gate was, if anything, more sluggish than the Windows experience.
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iPad 3’s Battery: Apple’s Latest Engineering Magic

In addition to iPad 3’s release date, the device’s battery is also making a buzz these days. Even though there’s no concrete list yet of what’s inside the upcoming model, Chris Burns posted on Slash Gear that Apple’s new tablet has a huge battery under the hood. What’s news-worthy about this feature is that the battery can make the device last longer than iPad 2.

iPad 2 vs. iPad 3
For iPad 2 owners, you know that Apple’s current tablet can keep up longer than its 10 hours rate. It only makes sense because its other features are power-hungry. However, iPad 3’s battery can live 60% longer despite both devices’ almost similar physical size.
Compared to iPad 2, iPad 3 is heavier at 1.44 pounds (652 grams) versus the former’s 1.33 pounds. In terms of thickness, the new iPad is slightly thicker at 0.37 inches (9.4 mm), while the older version is at 0.34 inches. Despite the difference, the battery occupies most of the space in both models. Regardless, it’s the reason behind why every model’s features are working well.
What Lies ahead for iPad 3
It’s apparent that Apple is making a sort of engineering magic here. According to ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, the iPad 3 has a massive 11,666 mAh battery. This bulk suits the device’s 2048 x 1536 Retina display LCD panel and 4G LTE connectivity.
Although it almost doubled iPad 2’s capacity, this larger power storage is placed into a slightly larger area. This feature alone is enough to inform people that what they’ll be seeing in the future is a superb and long-lasting device.
The Future of Battery Engineering
Even though there was a huge bump in the battery’s capacity, it’s still rated at 10-hour mark. Apparently, Apple is not interested in making a war of numbers when it comes to battery life. What the Cupertino-based company really wants to do is maintain the 10-hour mark of the upcoming device’s battery life, while incrementing new features.
Obviously, an increase in battery size is needed to boost its life span. But Apple was able to balance its size, so that it won’t affect the weight distribution of the device. With Apple’s effort to increase the life span of iPad 3 through its powerful battery, what people are seeing here is an improvement in battery engineering.
This is one component that doesn’t significantly progress fast, as compared to the development of chip sets and software. Regardless, a huge increase in battery capabilities is the component’s first step. The only thing left now is to see Apple’s iPad 3 in action, and confirm that it’s all as it seems.
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iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

I’m hearing a lot of complaints about the iPhone 4S (and for that matter iOS 5) in general related to battery life. It seems that some people are finding that they’re not getting as much out of their SONY VGP-BPS13/S Laptop Battery  as they used to.

Want to uncover iOS 5 ’secrets’? Check out these posts! Part 1 | Part 2

It’s seems that excessive battery consumption is a common complaint for the initial releases of iOS updates, and something that gets fixed by Apple (or at least improved on) with subsequent updates.
Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to help you squeeze more out of each charge. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do.

Note: I’ve tested every single one of these options and each one does seem to have a positive impact on LG P1-P2LCF Laptop Battery life. I’m not suggestion you employ all of them, but turning off what you don’t use makes a lot of sense.

Drop the screen brightness

One of the easiest ways to improve battery life on the iPhone is to drop the screen brightness. When I updated my iPhone 4 from iOS 4 to iOS 5, Apple jacked the brightness up to an unnecessary ’supernova’ level. Unless I’m outdoors, I usually keep my screen pretty dim.

Auto-Lock the screen

Another tip that makes a big difference is to lock the screen after a short interval. This helps conserve ACER Aspire 5738 Laptop Battery life because it turns the screen off when your handset is not in use.
Set it to go off after a minute or two.

Location, location, location!

iO 5 bought with is a lot of Locations Services features, but all of these features have a negative effect on battery life.
Settings > General > Location Services

Either disable the whole lot, or selectively enable it for a specific set of apps. The more apps that can use Location Services, the more juice they’ll use.
iOS 5 has some hidden tweaks too (hidden because you have to scroll to the bottom of the Locations Services screen and click on System Services to find them):

You can keep Location Based iAds and Setting Time Zone off permanently (your time is set by the local carrier automatically anyway).

Kill off background apps

The more apps you have running in the background, the more juice you’ll use. Kill off any apps you don’t want running in the background regularly by double-tapping the Home button to bring up the multitasking dock and then press down on an icon until they all start to jiggle, then kill any apps that might be working in the background - apps such as Skype and Pandora are likely suspects.

The last resort

Turn the handset off to conserve power - Press and hold the top button until the Slide to power off instruction appears, then slide to power off. Simple really!

Be your own recharge station

Carry a battery pack with you. I like and extensively use a few New Trent HP EliteBook 6930p battery packs (the 5000mAh IMP50D and the monster iPad-compatible 11000mAh IMP1000).

Bonus tip!

Never pass up an opportunity to charge up! That means carrying a charger with you (or at the very least an iPhone USB cable) and having a car cord handy when on the road.

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

dstrader 12th Nov

It is probably more of an inadequate settings issue, but I would like more information about the impact of the notifications, whether turning them off also disables them in the app when it is running....

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

jscott418 24th Oct

@keebaud@... Lithium ion ACER Aspire 5740-5513 Battery  do not suffer so much from the frequent recharge problem of old. But battery makers do suggest at least once a month allow the battery to go below 10% to get the most life out of it. Yes, it is a shame as much as I like the iPhone. The lack of a removable battery prevents me from buying one.

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

toadc 24th Oct

@jscott418 -- I've had all the models of iPhone since 2008 and no problems w/ the ACER Aspire 5920G battery giving up the ghost before its time to move on to the next model. the same can not be said for my ipod Touch. but the batteries on the iPhone - i haven't noticed even degradation in performance at all. don't let that stop you. It's the unreasonable U.S.-based telecom carriers that make the iPhone exhausting after a while, but not the battery life.

btw, there's an essential jailbreak app called SBsettings which gives you a instant drop-down control panel for most of the settings mentioned in the article (bluetooth, brightness, wifi, airplane, gps, etc. -- this helps tremendously w/ extending SONY VGP-BPS13B/S battery life.

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

John in Brisbane 24th Oct

@keebaud@... Yep, current batteries aren't as susceptible. I tend to still "train" a new battery with a few complete charge/discharge cycles but I'm just hedging my bets. New batteries don't degrade when left discharged either - some actually last longer that way. My preference remains to run a battery down a fair bit before charging but I suspect that's just habit.

So basically make it a dumb phone

jscott418 24th Oct

So I guess you spent all that money on a smart phone and now to save battery life you say to turn everything off and make it a dumb phone? Basically that's what is happening. Phones have become so reliant on web access and updating that battery life has suffered greatly.
Unfortunately the Dell 6Y270 battery technology has not kept up and is a roadblock to smart phones. Apple has increased its iPhone speed, added more features which do affect data access and battery life. The bad part about the iPhone is you can't just swap out batteries either.

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

tonymcs@... 24th Oct

On my WP7 phone I have WiFi and Bluetooth on and haven't activated the ACER Extensa 4630Z battery saver setting and still get 2-3 days while my iPhone friends seem to be plugging in each night.

Of course the real battery saver is to use it as a smartphone, rather than an entertainment or gaming device

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

chuck1111111 24th Oct

@Peter Perry i thought the same thing too but i adjusted some settings and it's great now. i'm not an expert but the two things i did that seemed to help the most were turning off weather and stocks in notification center and turning off "Set Automatically" under the Date and Time in settings.

seriously this article is worthless. google ios 5 ACER Aspire 5740-5513 battery tips and you'll get some practical advice. note: avoid any article written by this dude

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

Rama.NET 24th Oct

@Peter Perry
Probably you are charging it wrong. . Well keeping jokes aside, I think you have a bad device. I had this type of problem with my iPhone 4. It had trouble with earphone and the push notifications. Apple changed it to a newer device. My advice is take it back to Apple.

RE: iPhone/iOS 5 battery saver tips

dstrader 12th Nov

It is probably more of an inadequate settings issue, but I would like more information about the impact of the notifications, whether turning them off also disables them in the app when it is running.
In any event I am trying to follow the CRAFTSMAN 223310 battery tips, but especially since the patch my iPhone 3gs crashes so often it is hard to get to them all. Turning off iCloud is so far impossible and a very lengthy procedure. It churns and churns while processing and then crashes before completing the off setting. Very frustrating. I was glad to see Stanza back but it crashed often when doing anything although seemed to work once reading. I cannot blame it though, the iPhone General settings keeps crashing too, so it is the iOS5.0.1 that is the main culprit. I only mention Stanza as the neat screen dimming feature may only be a neutral filter type dimming, thus not actually saving battery life. Perhaps they have fixed this. MegaReader when it introduced the feature actually uses the system dimming thus saving in Presario 2232US-PR309UA battery life, although there is another option too.

Samsung Rugby Smart hands-on

Easily one of the best things about Android is its ability to cover the entire market: whatever your hardware or budget needs are, you can probably find a phone that fits them. The Samsung Rugby Smart is now on sale at AT&T, and it presents a fascinating little section of the market: mid-range hardware and specifications combined with a true ruggedized chassis for a small but tough Gingerbread phone. Samsung was kind enough to send us a review unit, and we immediately set to trying the Rugby Smart out.

Two years ago the Rugby Smart might have been a top-of-the-line phone, but today it’s in the shallow end of the Android pool. And speaking of pools, this little guy might be the perfect companion for a day in the sun: its water and dust-resistant frame can be submerged in up to a meter of water for thirty minutes without damaging the internals. Samsung manages this with a design that locks all the essential ports and pieces underneath swinging tabs and a back camera battery plate with a turning lock – yes, even with all that, you can still replace the battery yourself.

Aesthetically the phone isn’t much – it looks kind of like what an M-16 would if it were a phone. A 3.7-inch 480×800 screen is surrounded by impact-resistant plastic, and the familiar Android navigation buttons are real buttons, something I haven’t seen on a slate Android phone since the Droid X2. They’re pleasantly coated with the same rough, bumpy texture that covers the back. Other than the tank-like build, it’s a typical Samsung phone, with the power button on the right side and the colume on the left. The rear camera is 5 megapixels and shoots 720P video, while the front-facing cam is a generous 1.3.

Removing the back cover can be tricky – it’s possible to do it with your thumbnail, but a handy coin will make it a lot easier. Once you get it off the bay for the 1650mAh battery presents itself, along with a precariously empty MicroSD card slot. It looks like the card is actually held in place by the weight of the battery above it, which might be tricky to line up. Thankfully the camera gets the standard LED flash, so the Rugby Smart can take better pictures and double as a flashlight.

Inside you get a single-core Snapdragon processor running at 1.4Ghz, backed up by 512MB of RAM. That’s not going to smoke any of the recent superphones, but it’s more than enough to get around Gingerbread and TouchWiz. There’s no word on Ice Cream Sandwich, and with the target market it could take quite some time. The phone runs on AT&T’s HSPA+”4G” network, and comes with just 4GB of internal memory, though you can add a MicroSD card for more. As usual, the Super AMOLED panel is excellent, with bright, rich colors and great viewing angles.

Check the video below for the unboxing experience, and stay tuned next week for our full review. If you’r already convinced, the Samsung Rugby Smart is going for $99.99 with a two-year contract at AT&T stores.

usa battery store: http://www.buy-battery.com/ and http://www.great-batteries.com/
related tags: camera batteries, laptop battery, battery charger