With all of the goofy exploitations of the Universal Serial Bus, it’s nice to see a novel use that’s actually… well… useful. A UK firm has released the USBCell, a AA battery that has a charging circuit and a USB plug under the cap. It even has a built-in indicator light that tells you when charging is complete. It takes five hours to charge batts completely, so two AAs will tie up two USB ports for that period.
So far, the batteries are only available in the UK, and at 13 GPD (just under US$25) for two, they don’t come cheap. The company website has an elist sign-up for the rest of the world to “indicate interest.”