Here’s an interesting idea: what if the part of the cell phone charger that you plug into the wall doubled as a rechargeable extended battery pack? That’s actually coming in November with the $50 PowerPak from Technocel.

Whoever manipulated the above image to make this humongous iPhone battery pack look relatively manageable ought to be given a raise. Conversely, whoever wrote “It is not bulky either as it just extends a little at the bottom” in the product description ought to immediately undergo a workplace evaluation. If it happens to be the same person who handled both the photo and the product description, then God help us all.

This thing’s slim, I tell you. Slim. At just one centimeter thick, the “Ultra Slim (Card Type) Emergency Charger for iPod / iPhone” over at USB Fever might find its way into a few pockets when it’s released on August 23rd.

Wow, this is impressive. An enterprising young man from a faraway land (the Czech Republic!) took an ordinary battery from an MSI Wind netbook and added a USB charging port to it. He can charge his iPhone twice over and the battery still works like normal in his MSI Wind. They should add USB charging ports to all batteries!

If you find yourself wishing your Palm Pre had a tad more battery life, Seidio is now selling an extended life battery for $45. It’s the same size as the regular battery pack so it doesn’t require a special back cover for you to use it.

Some German researchers have conjured up a kind of battery that’s less than a millimeter thin and is made by the reactive layers onto each other like a silk screen. But the most surprising bit is that they’re planning on making them on a commercial scale within six months.

Usually we hear about this stuff and then it disappears for a couple years. Not this time, hopefully.

Nasa (NASA?) has selected Saft, a French company, to develop its next-generation batteries, batteries that will power tomorrow’s rovers, landers, and all sorts of space-related goodies. The batteries will be of the Lithium-ion type, like the kind inside your cellphone (but not the new MacBook Pro—that’s a Lithium-ion polymer.)

Holy, poop. This is a lot of batteries for only 9 bucks. How can you go wrong? The description says these batteries are “cosmetically imperfect” but no one should care about that as long as they work.

Here’s a reasonably priced iPod-compatible quick battery charger from Energizer. Buy.com is selling it for $9.99, while most similar iPod/iPhone battery backup solutions are going for more than double that amount.

Boston-Power announced earlier today that their line of Sonata Li-ion batteries for 18 HP notebooks (about 70 percent of HP’s lineup) are now available directly from HP. The Sonata batteries were the first to be Nordic Ecolabeled, which essentially means they pollute less by being high capacity, longer lasting and having the “smallest amounts of detrimental heavy metals.” They boast a three lifespan and HP is backing that up by providing a three-year warranty, which is the only one in the market to do so. It’s available now for the following models for $150.

So there are already rechargeable batteries, and there are already solar power devices to charge batteries, but what if you could make a rechargeable battery that was completely self contained, that all you had to do was put it in the window, and let it charge?

Make sure to say “I love you, honey” after hanging up on your wife today. You know why? Because if what happened to a man in China happens to you, you’ll be as dead as Colin Quinn’s career. The man was killed last week—I guess news trickles slowly out of China—when his cellphone exploded, breaking an artery in his neck. Ouch.

Get right outta town, I would actually use this. It’s a somewhat unassuming wristband (looks like it’s made of rubber) that serves double duty as an emergency charger for your small devices.

Is that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me not have to recharge your G1 every two hours?

The wait for a suitable extended battery for the G1 is finally over. I picked up the $42.95 Innocell 1400mAh battery from Seidio.com and I’m happy to report that the promise of 15% longer battery life seems to be legit.

If you own the T-Mobile G1, you might find yourself longing for an extended battery to replace the included 1150mAh battery that comes with the phone.