Netbook Battery Hacked Into iPhone USB Charger

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By Chris Scott Barr

Have you ever needed to recharge your phone, or other USB gadget and wish that you could just use the USB ports on your laptop to do the trick? Sure, if you happen to be using the laptop at the time, you can plug it in, no problem. But what if you don’t want to mess with powering it on, simply to get a little juice for your phone? Well one enterprising modder decided to come up with his own solution. It’s not quite as simple as plugging into an available USB port, but it gets the job done.

This guy decided to take out the battery from his MSI Wind netbook and install a USB port directly onto it. The port is no good for data (obviously), but it allows his to plug in his iPhone and get a couple of charges off it. The best part is that he can still use the battery as normal with his netbook. Unfortunately he does have to remove the battery pack to charge his phone, which can be a bit of an inconvenience. Still very cool. This is definitely something we need to see on more laptops. I recall Toshiba having a few notebooks that charged gadgets while asleep, but I’d really like to see this sort of thing become a standard feature.

[ Prusadjs ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

2 COMMENTS

  1. My new Dell Latitude E6400 has one USB port with a lightining bolt icon next to it. If enabled in the BIOS, it will remain powered even when the laptop is off. In the BIOS, you can even configure percent-capacity thresholds at which the laptop should stop powering the port, such as 5%, 10%, 25%, etc. Great feature. In fact, I keep my Verizon/Novatel MiFi 2200 permanently connected to this port in my briefcase so that it thinks it is “plugged in” and allows up to 5 devices to connect to it via WiFi (as opposed to the single device limit when on battery power). Overall, this is such a great feature that I expect all laptops to have it within 2 years.

  2. My new Dell Latitude E6400 has one USB port with a lightining bolt icon next to it. If enabled in the BIOS, it will remain powered even when the laptop is off. In the BIOS, you can even configure percent-capacity thresholds at which the laptop should stop powering the port, such as 5%, 10%, 25%, etc. Great feature. In fact, I keep my Verizon/Novatel MiFi 2200 permanently connected to this port in my briefcase so that it thinks it is “plugged in” and allows up to 5 devices to connect to it via WiFi (as opposed to the single device limit when on battery power). Overall, this is such a great feature that I expect all laptops to have it within 2 years.

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