Nichicon lays claim to the world's smallest EV chargers with NGQ-202, NGQ-203 models

Although it'll still be hard to misplace in your pile of electronics, a company called Nichicon has launched what it says is the world's smallest chargers for electric vehicles, the NGQ-A202 and the NGQ-A302. By using what the company calls advanced module technology, it was able to shrink its EV charger down by 50 percent to around 59 x 13.8 x 23.6 inches, also reducing the weight by up to 66 percent. Compatible with the ChAdeMO standard, these 20-30kW chargers will work with electric vehicles likeMitsubishi's i-MiEV and the Nissan Leaf, taking between 35 and 60 minutes to fully power your whip. Charging doesn't come cheap, however, as the batteries are said to retail between $24,600 and $27,000 when they launch sometime in October. Next step -- cutting the cord and going wireless, perhaps? Check out the full PR after the break

What made Steve Jobs a giant among the world's greatest communicators?

Steve Jobs in his Los Angeles office in 1981, five years after he co-founded Apple. Photograph: Tony Korody/Corbis

Steve Jobs's resignation was the most discussed in corporate history. Because his illness has been public knowledge for so long, and because Wall Street and the commentariat viewed his health as being synonymous with that of his company, for years Apple share prices have fluctuated with its CEO's temperature. If all the "Whither Apple without Jobs?" articles were laid end to end, they would cover quite a distance – but they never reached a conclusion.

Still, you could understand the hysteria. After all, he's the man who rescued Apple from the near-death experience it underwent in the mid-1990s. When he came back in 1996, the company seemed headed for oblivion. Granted, it was a distinctive, quirky outfit, but one that had been run into the ground by mediocre executives who had no vision, no strategy – and no operating system to power its products into the future.

Jobs came back because Apple bought NeXT, the computer workstation company he had started after being ousted by the Apple board in 1985. By acquiring NeXT, Apple got two things: the operating system that became OS X, the software that underpinned everything Apple has made since; and Jobs as "interim CEO" at a salary of $1 a year. But it was still a corporate minnow: a BMW to Microsoft's Ford. Fifteen years later, Apple had become the most valuable company in the world.

It was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Because only an obsessive, authoritarian, visionary genius could have achieved such a transformation, it's easy to see why Wall Street has had difficulty imagining Apple without Jobs. He was, after all, the only CEO in the world with rock star status. And Apple is a corporate extension of his remarkable personality, much as Microsoft was of Bill Gates's. But Jobs has something Gates never had – a reputation so powerful as to create a reality distortion field around him.

This field has blinded people to some under-appreciated facts. While it is true, for example, that Apple – under Jobs's influence – is probably the world's best industrial design outfit, it is also a phenomenally well-run company. Proof of that comes from various sources. For example, not only does it regularly dream up beautiful, functional and fantastically complex products, but it gets them to market in working order, on time and to budget; and it has continually done so despite exploding demand. Compare that with slow-motion car crashes such as Hewlett Packard's Touchpad, RIM's BlackBerry Playbook or Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Then there's the way that Apple – in the teeth of industry scepticism – made such an astonishing success of bricks-and-mortar retailing with its high-street stores. Or ponder the fact that it became the world's most valuable corporation without incurring a single cent of debt. Instead, it sits atop a $78bn (£48bn) cash mountain: enough to buy Tesco and BT and still have loose change. Compare that with the casino capitalism practised by so many MBA-educated company leaders in the US. And finally there is the stranglehold Apple now has on a number of crucial modern markets – computers, online music, mobile devices and smartphones.

If you ask people what Steve Jobs is best remembered for, most will name a particular product. If they're from my (baby boomer) generation, it will probably be the Apple Macintosh, a computer that changed many of our lives in the 1980s. Younger generations will credit him with the iMac,iTunes and the iPod. Today's teenagers will revere him for the iPhone. But there's a good argument that Jobs's greatest creation is Apple itself in its post-1996 incarnation. If that's true, the great test of his career legacy is whether the organisation he built around his values will endure and remain faithful to them.

What are those values? He usually expressed them as aphorisms and, as news of his resignation spread , people began raking through them for clues. Many focused on what he said to John Sculley, CEO of Pepsi, when he was trying to persuade him to run Apple.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water," he asked, "or do you want to change the world?" (Sculley accepted the invitation, then presided over Jobs's expulsion.) But for Jobs it was a serious question. What he was asking, as the blogger Umair Haque put it, was: "Do you really want to spend your days slaving over work that fails to inspire, on stuff that fails to count, for reasons that fail to touch the soul of anyone?"

Jobs is famously fanatical about design. In part this is about how things look (though for him it also involves simplicity of use). When the rest of the industry was building computers as grey, rectangular metal boxes, for example, he was prowling department stores and streets looking for design metaphors. For a time he thought the Mac should be like a Porsche. At another stage he wanted it to be like the Cuisinart food-processor. When the machine finally appeared in 1984, Jack Tramiel, the grizzled macho-boss of Commodore, thought it looked like a girly device that would be best sold in boutiques. What Tramiel did not realise – and Jobs did – was that ultimately computers would be consumer products and people would pay a huge premium for classy design.

In that sense he is the polar opposite of the MBA-trained, bean-counting executive. "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting," he said in 1996, when the company was on the rocks. "The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament." At another point he said: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it."

This delight in elegant work has always been the most striking aspect of Jobs's celebrated speeches introducing new Apple products in San Francisco. As he cooed over the iMac or the iPhone or the iPad, words like "beautiful", "amazing" and "awesome" tumbled out. For once they didn't sound like cynical, manipulative corporation-speak. He spoke from the heart.

It goes without saying that he is impossible to work with; most geniuses are. Yet he has built – and retained the respect of – the most remarkable design team in living memory, a group that has been responsible for more innovation than the rest of the computer industry put together. For that reason, when the time comes to sum up Jobs's achievements, most will portray him as a seminal figure in the computing industry. But Jobs is bigger than that.

To understand why, you have to look at the major communications industries of the 20th century – the telephone, radio and movies. As Tim Wu chronicles it in his remarkable book, The Master Switch, each of these industries started out as an open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of incompatible standards, crummy technology and chancers. The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came when a charismatic entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher production values and greater ease of use.

With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system.

Jobs is from the same mould. He believes that using a computer should be delightful, not painful; that it should be easy to seamlessly transfer music from a CD on to a hard drive and thence to an elegant portable player; that mobile phones should be powerful handheld computers that happen to make voice calls; and that a tablet computer is the device that is ushering us into a post-PC world. He has offered consumers a better proposition than the rest of the industry could – and they jumped at it. That's how he built Apple into the world's most valuable company. And it's why he is really the last of the media moguls.

Flipboard to release iPhone version, integrate TV shows, movies

Everyone's favorite magazine-style news reading app for the iPad, Flipboard, has plans to expand its offerings in the near future. Namely, it is working on deals with productions studios to offer TV shows and movies along with the standard web content that is already available in Flipboard.

Flipboard Chairman and CEO Mike McCue was happy to brag to Reuters that the company is working on deals with the production studios, but he was reluctant to provide any details as to which TV and movie providers Flipboard was talking to. Another plan that Flipboard is looking to implement is to offer e-books through its app, essentially creating a one-stop portal for all entertainment needs.

Additionally, McCue revealed that and iPhone and iPod touch version of the app would be available in the next few weeks. No timeline was given for when TV shows and movies would be available in Flipboard.

97 percent of smartphones to have touchscreens by 2016 says research firm

Bad news for those who detest touchscreens, because, according to research firm ABI, 97 percent of smartphones will be equipped with a touchscreen of some form or another by the year 2016.

The research firm says that touchscreens have been as driving a factor in the explosive growth of smartphones as the proliferation of 3G data. Before the iPhone, smartphones with touchscreens made up only 7 percent of the total smartphone market in 2006. By 2010, 75 percent of the smartphones on the market were equipped with a touchscreen of some form or another.

Touchscreens today are very different than they were back in 2006, as well. Thanks to the success and influence of the iPhone, resistive touchscreens have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, with the superior, capacitive-type touchscreens taking their place. Capacitive touchscreens are more responsive to finger input than resistive screens, and do not require the use of a stylus. You can find capacitive touchscreens on the iPhone, most all Android phones, Windows Phone 7 smartphones, webOS devices, and even some BlackBerry and Symbian smartphones. ABI says that low-cost capacitive touchscreens will revolutionize the feature phone and e-reader market next.

ABI projects that by 2016, 97 percent of the smartphones available on the market will have a touchscreen, whether that is in conjunction with a physical keyboard or not. Though, even now, aside from the low-end BlackBerry models, its hard to find a smartphone that doesn't have a touchscreen today.

Samsung to unveil Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet with LTE next week too

In addition to the previously mentioned upgrade to the Galaxy S II, complete with LTE, it seems that Samsung will be rolling out the Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet with LTE next week as well. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 was originally announced way back at CTIA earlier this spring, but there has been nary a peep about it from Samsung since then.

The Galaxy Tab 8.9 with LTE is expected to be launched on August 29, and conveniently, Samsung has a press event scheduled in New York City on that date. In addition to the new LTE support, it should feature a faster, 1.5GHz, dual-core processor, likely the same one found in the upgraded Galaxy S II. The 8.9-inch display has a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, and the tablet runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb.

If Samsung does unveil this new version of the Galaxy Tab 8.9 next week, it could be headed to either Verizon Wireless or AT&T, as both have promised more LTE-equipped tablets and devices are coming. Samsung would be required to make separate versions for each carrier for 3G fallback when out of 4G LTE range, though in theory, the company could pack GSM, CDMA, and LTE support into one model. We should know more about it soon enough, provided a certain natural disaster doesn't put NYC underwater

Facebook announces easier, better, faster, cleaner Photos

Facebook has announced that it is improving its Facebook Photos product once again. The social networking giant is allowing users to upload bigger photos, is making them load faster, and is also updating the photo viewer as well. These new features will be gradually rolling out to Facebook’s 750 million users over the next few days.

The photos you share on Facebook will now be bigger (from 720 pixels to 960 pixels). Photos you’ve already uploaded to the social network will also be displayed at this higher resolution, if available. Furthermore, the company is claiming photos will now load twice as fast.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched the first version of the photo viewer (and I wrote up how to revert to the old one). The company says it has now made changes based feedback it received from its users: the new photo viewer is more streamlined, features a cleaner interface, and makes it even easier to enjoy your photos. The light box is now set against a simple white background that puts more of the focus on the photo, and less on the surrounding frame.

Facebook also took the opportunity to reveal that the social network sees over 250 million photos uploaded each day. The service is thus still the biggest photo sharing website on the Internet.