Emirates Airlines announced yesterday that passengers will no longer have to switch off their mobile phones and will be allowed to make calls and text people during their journey on-board.

The first flight with authorized mobile phone calls was made on 20th of March between Dubai and Casablanca on-board of an Emirates Airbus A340-300 fitted with AeroMobile system, which ensures mobile telephones operate at minimum power during flights and make sure mobile phone signal does not interfere with aircraft navigation equipments.

A second aircraft equipped with the same AeroMobile system will be in service shortly.

Rates were not published, but in 2007, cost per minute was estimated between 2.50 and 3.50 USD.

Source: Arabnews via Wi-Fi Networking 

Tags: 2007, 2008, aeromobile, air, airbus, aircraft, airlines, arc, art, blog, cellphone, cellular, emirates, flight, gsm onboard, ia, im, King, lan, light, mobile, Mobile Communications, mobile phone, network, nomadcom.net, passengers, phone, phones, power, Travel, wifi, wp, www

This time iA (Information Architects) have taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map

An A3 printable version is available as well as an online clickable one.

Where your prefered sites are located on this map ? Are you moving by the trend ? 

Tags: 2008, arc, blog, bt, ces, ia, im, information architects, lan, map, mapping, nomadcom.net, online, PDF, release, tendancy, train, trend, web, website, wp, www

Toshiba will soon start production of 2 new interesting products which may find their way into future mobile/portable devices.

First are the new SATA SSD (Solid State Drive) drives on 1.8' and 2.5' formats. According Engadget 32, 64 and 128 GB will be available. Speed announced is read 100 MB/s while reading and 40 MB/sec writting.

With such capacity, traditional mechanical hard disk will slowly disappear from portable devices. With no moving parts, a solid state drive largely eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.

The second interesting product announced by Toshiba is the so called "Super Charge ion Battery" (SCiB) which is at this stage not intended for portable devices but for industrial systems and electric vehicles.

SCiB Major Characteristics

• Safety : SCiB adopts a new negative-electrode material that offers a high level of thermal stability and a high flash point electrolyte. Its structure is resistant to internal short circuiting and thermal runaway

• Long-life cycle : Capacity loss after 3,000 cycles of rapid charge and discharge is less than 10%. SCiB batteries are able to repeat the charge-discharge cycle over 5,000 times which is equivalent to more than 10 years with a once-a-day recharge-discharge cycle.
• Rapidly rechargeable : Safety characteristics of SCiB allow recharge with a current as large as 50 amperes (A), allowing the SCiB Cell and SCiB Standard Module to recharge to 90% of full capacity in only five minutes.
• High power (practical capacity) : The SCiB has an input-output performance equivalent to that of an electric double layer capacitor.
• Temperature : Extreme temperatures supported with sufficient discharge at temperatures as low as -30°C.

SCiB batteries will first be available on the market in March 2008 with the following specifications:

• Nominal voltage  : 24VDC
• Nominal capacity : 4.2 Ah
• Size : 10×30x5 cm
• Weight : 2 kg

Perhaps these batteries will also find other field of application,  but for portable devices they will need to become lighter and slimmer..but batteries that get charges in  five minutes are definitively very attractive for mobile users. 

What do you think ?  

Sources: Engadget Toshiba 

Tags: 2007, 2008, 24, api, arc, art, ATT, batteries, blog, capacity, ces, CTU, delay, failure, fast charge, find, flash, fon, hard disk, hdd, ia, im, lan, laptop, LED, light, minutes, mobile, nomadcom.net, portable, power, rechargeable, safe, safety, SCiB, Solid State Drive, SSD, technology, toshiba, user, vehicles, wp, www