February 26 - 1:15pm EST   Abilene Christian University will be delivering an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch to all members of its incoming class in 2008. Freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances - "among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed," said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts. Roberts was asked to present ACU's creative vision for converged media devices at Apple headquarters to executives and to selected leaders from universities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and UCLA. [full story]

February 6 - 12:20pm EST   Researchers have developed a new technology, being demonstrated this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which is said to dramatically improve the battery life of cellphones and other portable electronics. MIT and Texas Instruments claim they have developed a new chip design which is up to 10 times as efficient as current ones, thanks mainly to a DC-to-DC converter which helps reduce necessary voltage. Where many chips need 1V of power, Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan of MIT notes that testing at his university has a chip running at 0.3V. [full story]