photo credit: AT&T’s LG Thrive Pre-Paid Droid

AT&T is the last of the cell phone service providers to offer a Droid Smartphone in their pre-paid lineup. Beginning April 17th, AT&T is offering the LG Thrive for $180. The Thrive is a mid-range Droid, running on the Android OS 2.2 (Froyo). It only has a 3.2 megapixel camera and 160 MB of memory, although it can be expanded to 32 GB with a MicroSD card. The customers will have to pay pretty dearly for using this phone however. Customers can choose the “Smartphone 10 cents per minute” plan or “Smartphone $2 USD per day for unlimited talk and text” plan. Their choices for data plans range from $5 for 10 MB to $25 for 500 MB. There is no contract, which is probably a good thing since customers may dump AT&T once they find out how poor the service coverage areas are.

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photo credit: Cell Tower Fits in Your Hand

Mobile data usage grows almost exponentially. With more and more Smartphone usage, Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile technology in general, how to handle growing mobile data usage is the focus of wireless companies. Wireless companies are spending billions each year to maximize capacity. As their research and development costs grow, so do our cell phones bills. Costly cell phone towers being built at alarming numbers not only push our wireless bills up, but are unsightly as well. A tiny little device the size of a Rubik’s cube is being developed by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) that may be the answer to both cost and more cell phone towers.

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photo credit: Carbon Nanotubes

A team of scientists at the University of Illinois has possibly discovered a way to make cell phone batteries that don’t need charging for months at a time. The team believes their method will enable mobile phone and laptop batteries to last up to 100 times longer. According to Stephen Adams, The Telegraph, it focuses on changing the way a device’s digital memory works, as this consumes much of the charge. Feng Xiong, a graduate student on the team who was lead author on a paper, to be published in the journal Science, explained: “The energy consumption is essentially scaled with the volume of the memory bit. By using nanoscale contacts, we are able to achieve much smaller power consumption.”

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photo credit: ReadySet Changes Africa

There are over 500 million cell phone users worldwide. This is according to research by the GSMA, the international association of mobile operators. The problem with all those cell phones isn’t access to a network. The problem is that most of the users in 3rd world countries live off the grid and can’t charge the darn things. ReadySet, manufactured by Fenix International, San Francisco, California, may be the solution.

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photo credit: Solar Charging Screens

Solar powered cell phones are not new. UMEOX Mobile, a Chinese manufacturer, featured their solar charged “Apollo” Smartphone at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona earlier this year. Samsung has 3 models of solar-powered cell phones. There are a variety of solar-powered cell phone chargers on the market. But the newest innovation is the thin, transparent film that turns your phone’s screen into a solar charger.

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photo credit: New Fast Charge Batteries

A new technology may change the battery industry. According to article published by John Timmer, Ars Technica, this new technology uses a whole new approach and can work with both lithium- and nickel-based batteries. Imagine being able to charge your cell phone 90% capacity within 2 minutes. Charging a NiMH battery to 90% takes only 20 seconds.

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Unlike the old energizer bunny commercials, cell phone batteries do not keep on going forever. With high-tech features like video, music, and Internet demanding large amounts of power, your cell phone battery is often bound to drain, sometimes slowly but surely. Read the rest of this entry »