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Amazon has announced small enhancements to certain Kindle models.

(Credit: Amazon)

Just in time for the holidays and facing heavy competition from Barnes & Noble's upcoming Nook e-book reader, Amazon has announced that it has improved the Kindle's battery life when the wireless connection is turned on and will now be offering native PDF support for its e-book reader. Both the battery-life boost and native PDF support will be available to owners of new Kindles and some older models via a firmware upgrade.

In a press release, Amazon says the Kindle now has battery life of up to seven days with wireless turned on compared with four days previously. However, battery life with wireless turned off remains the same (around two weeks).

"Battery power management for portable wireless devices is a complex technical area, and the battery life improvement announced today is the result of a six-month firmware improvement and testing program," the release notes.

As for the native PDF support, Amazon says you can now "read professional and personal documents in their original ... Read more

(Credit: LG)

It turns out LG is working on a sequel to the X110 it released last year. Not excited? We don't blame you, but what if we tell you the new X130 is set to have arguably the longest battery life in the Netbook industry? Yes, we thought that might get your attention. For a second or two.

The X130 will come with a nine-cell battery, which according to LG will last up to 12 hours during light use, or up to 7 hours 30 minutes while watching movies. That sounds amazing--and a tad optimistic to us--but if it gets anywhere near this figure we'll be absolutely delighted.

There's not much else to write home about. Rather than building on the fairly solid foundations of its predecessor, LG's follow-up simply seems to regurgitate old ideas. The hinge now has a chrome strip, and the lid now says X-Note on it, but the X130 still packs a 10.1-inch, 1024x768-pixel display, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB... yawn... hard drive and a ... Read more

(Credit: Eyes on Tech)

I like to play tennis, especially on the Wii where I don't have to leave the couch to score an ace. But while Wii Sports tennis is a very fun game--and it uses the Wii's accelerometers well--it's not the real thing. Some people want to play real tennis in the real world. And some people like to win.

Because of this, Mans Shapshak, an avid tennis player as well as a gear hacker, has come up with a novel way to combine fake tennis with real tennis to improve his real-world game using a hacked Wiimote.

The Wiimote uses Bluetooth as its wireless connection; thus with a little work it can communicate with other Bluetooth devices, like laptops. Then, combining the wireless aspect with some open-source Wiimote libraries, some basic coding, and a bit of simple math, Shapshak was able to start tracking his toss and serve. Then he started graphing his results.

By using the data as performance feedback he can practice more efficiently and, hopefully, get ... Read more

Light for Life uses ultracapacitor technology.

(Credit: 5.11 Tactical)

Last year, 5.11 Tactical, which makes clothes and gear aimed at law enforcement officers (but sells to civilians), announced a new high-tech flashlight called Light for Life. Only recently, however, has it become available to order.

What's special about it? Well, the flashlight uses three LEDs, but its key component is Flashpoint Power technology, an ultracapacitor energy storage system from Ivus Energy Innovations.

Light for Life recharges in just 90 seconds and shines at 90 lumens for 90 minutes per charge. The flashlight has three modes: bright (270 peak lumens), standard (90 lumens), and strobe, which is good for dance parties or scaring the neighbors' dog and kids (OK, I'm kidding, but you get the picture).

According to 5.11 Tactical, the 50,000-hour LEDs never have to be replaced and the flashlight is engineered to "offer 10 years of maintenance-free service under typical conditions." (You can recharge it up 50,000 times or one time a day for 135 years.)

I got a chance to play around with the thing at a recent event, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. It's lighter (16 ounces) than it looks, and it feels very durable. The one question I asked was: what happens when the power goes out and you have to recharge the thing? Answer: it comes with a 12V DC automotive charger, so you can use your car to charge it up in the event of a power outage.

The only drawback: Light for Life costs a whopping $169.99. But 5.11 Tactical says that when you add up the cost of all those D batteries over the lifetime of a battery-powered police flashlight, it's still a deal. And then there's all that good karma you get for not chucking those batteries into the garbage or landfill. It's hard to put a price on that.

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See one more photo after the break. ... Read more

As if Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame wasn't all over the Web enough, he now wants to be in your kettle. Pirillo has partnered with Might Leaf Tea Company to invent Geekalicious, a signature tea that bears his likeness. It's a genmaicha-like tea, and like most genmaicha, it has rice puffs that combine with the other natural tea flavors to give it a refreshing character.

"I went to college for this."

(Credit: Mighty Leaf Tea Company)

How do I know so much about tea? How does Pirillo? Some are saying tea is the new coffee. I used to work in a coffee shop that was popular among the tea-elite. I can't speak for Pirillo, but with the Revision3 guys getting their own brews, it's like this geek tea thing is becoming a trend.

Geekalicious makes me wonder what other kids of things Pirillo will start licensing. If the tea is successful, will we see a breakfast cereal called Pirillo Puffs? Rice Chris Ps?

Where can I get some Cinnamon ... Read more

iHome iStand Notebook Media Bundle for Mac.

(Credit: iHome)

We've reviewed a few iHome computer speakers in the past, but the company is now making a bigger move into the computer accessories market after signing a licensing agreement with LifeWorks Technology Group.

The new line is expected to launch "this summer," and we've highlighted a couple interesting looking products, the iStand Notebook Media Bundle with an integrated iPod/iPhone dock ($299.99) and the iConnect Media Keyboard ($149.99). The Mac version of each is colored silver and white, while the Windows version is black. iHome-branded mice, headsets, and Webcams are also in the works.

For more info check out life-works.com.

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iHome iConnect Media Keyboard for PC.

(Credit: iHome)

The Acer Aspire Timeline 15.6-inch, 1.3Ghz laptop

(Credit: Acer)

Now that surfing the Net while flying is no longer new, I really want a computer that can last the entire flight from San Francisco to NYC, which is about 6 hours long.

Acer seems to have a solution for that. On Tuesday, the company announced its newest Aspire Timeline series, which it claims offers more than 8 hours of battery life on average in one charge. If this is true, it'll really set a new standard for mobility and productivity.

According to Acer, the Aspire Timeline series achieved this extended battery life thanks to a combination of factors, including a unique design, Intel's ultralow-voltage processors, advanced power management, high-capacity batteries, and LED backlit displays. The result is a series of laptops that are thinner, lighter, and much more energy-efficient than other laptops.

The best thing about the new Aspire Timeline series, however, is the price. Ranging from $598 to $899, the Timelines are among the most affordable laptops.

However, there's a catch and it's rather big: the three laptops in this series use very low-performance CPUs. ... Read more

I spent most of Friday fiddling with iPhoto '09, and you can read my first impressions here. On Saturday, I spent some major quality time with iMovie '09, and I have to say it's pretty easy to grasp. I'm no professional, and I'll admit that I preferred iMovie HD (or the '06 version) to iMovie '08, but it's not too bad. In fact, I created this short little video of the public pillow fight in San Francisco on Valentine's Day 2007 in about three hours (It could've been shorter, but I spent most of the time finding the source material).

As you might recall, when iMovie '08 first debuted, there was quite a substantial outcry in the Mac community. iMovie '08 was drastically different when compared with its predecessors, without a lot of the depth and advanced features to which most Mac users have become accustomed. So much so that Apple made it a point that you could download iMovie '06 (also known as iMovie HD) for free if you missed all the functionality you lost with iMovie '08.

Jasmine posted her brief sneak peek at iLife '09 yesterday with a slide show, and it's pretty clear that major improvements have come to Apple's suite of lifestyle applications, most notably iPhoto '09, iMovie '09, and GarageBand '09. Since I'm an amateur photography nerd with aspirations of rock stardom, I'm most interested in iPhoto and GarageBand, though the new iMovie may be enough for me to whip out my Flip camcorder and record more than just dogs riding on skateboards. Of course, iWeb '09 has a few updates, too. I have just got through the iPhoto '09 face recognition hurdle, and am just starting on the rest of the iLife suite. So here's an in-depth look at the facial recognition bit of iPhoto, with more to come later.

iPhoto '09
Lets start with the belle of the ball, iPhoto '09. Why do I say that? Because the new Faces and Places feature on iPhoto '09 was definitely one of the biggest news out of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which lets you group photos based on the dates they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing--facial recognition, geotagging, and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. However, it will only work after you do the necessary legwork to make it all happen.

Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. Me, I have about 3,500 photos sitting in my Aperture library on the laptop, and that's not even counting the more than 10,000 photos I have in my external hard drive at home. So if you're a big photography dork like me, it'll take some time for all the photos to import over. Once that happens, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you, and sometimes it won't be. If it does detect a face, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a placeholder name "unknown face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face, and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face, and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Once it does, it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.

The tiger's ear is a face? Really?

(Credit: Nicole Lee/CBS Interactive)