Battery group seeks laptop safety

A working group of computer firms says updated safety standards for laptop batteries should be in place within the next 12 months, reports the BBC News.

The Portable Computer Battery Working Group was set up last month following reports of problems with batteries overheating and sometimes exploding.

Faulty batteries in laptops made by Dell, Apple, Fujitsu, Toshiba and others were produced by Sony. Batteries in more than 10 million laptop computers have since been recalled.

HP has partnered with Cingular to offer a notebook that could be considered the ultimate mobile broadband device at this time, reports tgdaily.com.

In addition to the common WiFi connectivity, the nc6400 comes with integrated UMTS/HSDPA-based technology that provides users with more high-speed Internet alternatives.

According to HP, the new notebook is the first with a tri-band UMTS modem supporting data rates of up to 3.6Mbps in the US.

Sun Microsystems has introduced Java Platform Standard Edition 6, reports eweek.com.

"This new version of Sun's Java platform is an exciting release for us because it's our first community release," said Jean Elliott, director of developer marketing at Sun.

The Java SE 6 release is the result of more than two years of industry-wide development involving open review, weekly builds and extensive collaboration between Sun engineers and more than 330 external developers, the company said.

Ofcom has unveiled plans to sell a chunk of radio spectrum for new broadband and mobile services, reports the BBC News.

The sale, which could be completed by the end of 2007, will see 215MHz of frequency sold. This will be the largest single sale of radio spectrum to date.

Ofcom said the spectrum could be put to a range of uses, such as in high-speed broadband and mobile TV services.

A group of companies led by IBM have designed, built and demonstrated a prototype phase-change memory device that switched more than 500 times faster than flash while using less than one-half the power to write data into a cell, reports TechNewsWorld.

The device's cross-section is a minuscule 3x20nm in size, which is far smaller than flash and is equivalent to the industry's chip-making capabilities targeted for 2015.

Flash memory is widely used in computers and consumer electronics, including digital cameras and portable music players.