We’re all used to it now but when the iPhone first debuted, a common criticism leveled against it was battery life. Apple’s always been aggressive with power management across its iOS devices, but compared to the feature phones that were nearly ubiquitous at the time, the iPhone is a hog, and users buying one had to switch from charging their phones once every few days to charging it one or more times per day.

Apple’s only improved the battery life of the iPhone since then, but as our gadgets become ever more power hungry, there’s always going to be an increasing demand upon lithium-ion tech. In a new patent, Cupertino seems to have identified a new way to improve battery life, and while it’s hardly as esoteric as Apple’s more wild-eyed patents, it’s plenty exciting for those who want a longer lasting iPhone or MacBook.

We start the day with some deals on iPhone and iPad applications. A new crop of iPhone app freebies includes the Talking Dragon, an interactive character. For the iPad is a new selection of applications with price reductions, including “Mad Skillz Motocross.” We also take a look at a number of iPad bargains, including a 16GB Wi-Fi tablet for $459.

Along the way, we also check out some Macs, including a 6-core Mac Pro running at 3.33GHz. The bundle also comes with 8GB of RAM and software for $4,081. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Apple reportedly has 60 percent of touch panel components under contract, potentially resulting in a “tight supply” for rivals of the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s iPad. As a result, companies such as HP, Research in Motion and HP are muscling out “second-tier” tech firms and prompting a potential 2011 shortage of glass capacitive touch panels for the tablet PC industry.

Hoping to not repeat slow iPad sales due to tight supplies, Apple is taking a new strategy to guarantee the parts are available to meet demand. “In 2011, Apple’s strategy of taking up most of the capacity should help the company quickly expand its sales, while reducing its competitors’ shipment growth,” writes industry publication DigiTimes.

A more efficient, less costly government sounds like a pretty good idea no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.

Whether devices like iPads – small, portable devices that allow lawmakers to read lengthy documents without printing them out – are a good way to do that has been open to debate.

Cult of Mac talked to a city council member in Ridgecrest, California who has been bringing his own device to work to speed things up.

Picture from EQueue

Friends, Romans, Applefans, I come to bury hard drives, not to praise them. The evil that poor technologies do live after them, and our good files are oft interred with their ashes. So let it be with hard drives.

Look at your MacBook Pro. It’s beautiful, no? Bright screen, thin body, buttonless trackpad, carefully engineered ports, MagSafe power port… it’s a master-work. Except for one thing. It carries a vestigial organ that all-too-often reveals itself to be the ruptured appendix of computing: a hard drive.

Yes, for all of our wonderful computing progress (spaghetti ports to USB; mobile dual-core processors, DDR3 DRAM, insanely fast GPUs), the lowly hard drive continues to exist based off of approximately the same technology it was back in the 1970s. Spinning magnetic platters with read/write heads, saving our entire digital lives in the process.

And while they have many wonderful qualities (massive storage capacity, more so than anything but TAPE; extremely low cost), they also have a fatal flaw, which is that they break and they break hard. Platters get warped, spindles get loose, heads get misaligned, and suddenly your computer stops working and you lose the project you’ve been slaving over for the last few months (see my wife’s recent calamity for evidence and a little solace in the iPhone).

The iPad 2 isn’t the only new Apple product that is likely to hit stores in March. For weeks now, supplies of existing MacBook Pro models have been plummeting, and given Tim Cook’s obsession with supply, that indicates a refresh across the board.

So when can you expect the new MacBook Pros? Unknown, but according to Danish Blogger Kenneth Lund, the date he’s hearing in Denmark from Apple Resellers is March 1st.

For the second year running, Apple has been named Barron’s most respected company in an annual survey of money managers.

Sorry, guys. If you want to woo that random slice of scrumptious across the cafe, making eyes at her over your iPad isn’t the way to do it: you’d be better off pulling out your MacBook Air.

So says Retrevo, who have asked consumers in time for Valentine’s Day if they notice other people’s gadgets, and how likely they are to be attracted to someone based upon that gadget.

As you can see, according to Retrevo’s results, reading a book is sexier than e-reading your iPad. An iPhone or MacBook is the most likely gadget to get you some action. As for showing an interest in the creative arts, it seems universal: artists give pretty much everyone a big rubbery one.

Notice that the results, though, are heavily skewed towards men finding a girl attractive if she’s reading, drawing or using a gadget. The fairer sex, on the other hand, seems less interested in the superficial traits implied by an iPhone 4, iPad, drawing easel or volume of Sartre.

In other words, if you’re a girl and want a guy to notice you, play the geek. Guys? As usual, you’re out of luck: women just aren’t superficial enough to be easily seduced. Or so my girlfriend keeps telling me.

Apple is among only two notebook makers in early 2011 experiencing strong demand, with the Cupertino, Calif. firm doubling orders for some “hot-selling” MacBooks, according to a Friday report. The news follows indications the Apple notebook was “flying off the shelves” during the holiday buying period.

HP was the only PC notebook brand seeing first-quarter demand amid a flaw discovered in an Intel chipset which depressed production levels. HP could ship 10 million notebooks during this year’s first quarter – down from 11.13 million units shipped last quarter. The chipmaker says its Sandy Bridge chips won’t return to full production until April. (MacBooks should see an update of the Intel chips in June, other reports indicate.)

Back in December, Adobe pushed out the first beta of version 10.2 of their notorious Flash Player for Mac… a plugin that is so notoriously demanding on battery life that merely installing it can drain the maximum capacity of a laptop battery by over an hour. now it’s available in a final version.

The big advance in Flash Player 10.2 is functionality called Stage Video that offloads almost all of the rendering of high-performance videos to the GPU, using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Stage Video should have a noticeable effect on battery life and snappiness, and if you can’t get along with Flash on your Mac notebook, Stage Video support alone makes this an easy upgrade to recommend.

Well, it will make it one, eventually. Right now, not all content providers have enabled Stage Video APIs in their system, and until they do, Flash Player needs to rely on the CPU to process their video. Also, considering that most of the battery drain attributed to Flash on the likes of a MacBook Air come from advertising and site elements as opposed to a playing YouTube video, it’s unlikely that Stage Video will really make a difference in the short term for many users.

Either way, though, Flash Player 10.2 should bring a significant performance increase to the machines of many users, with Adobe citing their two-year old test Mac Mini being able to run full 1080p content with a CPU load of under 8 percent. That’s pretty good performance for one of software’s most notoriously resource hogs.