It isn’t the only solar charging case on the market, but Novothink’s Solar Surge is the first to receive an official thumbs up from Apple, and thus noteworthy indeed.

The case features an integrated solar panel that should yield 30 minutes of talk time on a 3G network or 60 minutes on EDGE after 2 hours of sun exposure. Plus, the battery is a rechargeable 1500 mAh 3.7 V lithium-ion that offers 120% capacity of the iPhone 3G. The Solar Surge for the 2G iPod Touch will be available later this month for $70, while the iPhone 3G/3GS version will come in sometime in the 4Q of 2009 for the same price.

If you are into this sort of thing, the Solar Surge is probably the most compact and practical solar iPhone charger on the market—and the price point seems to be in line with many standard charging cases, making it an even better deal, and fits in with any “green” consumers ideals quite well too.

Apple has continued its significant investment in flash memory, with the company announcing Tuesday that it recently prepaid $500 million to Toshiba to secure long-term supply of NAND for its mobile devices, a very necessary component in its smartphones.

The half-billion dollar investment came early on in the September quarter, so it was not officially revealed in Tuesday’s Q3 results. However, Apple COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer discussed the purchase during the earnings conference call.

“We view flash as a very key component for us,” Cook said, “because as you know we use it so many

Back when Apple re-introduced Push Notification at the iPhone 3.0 Sneak Preview Event, Scott Forstall claimed that, unlike background multitasking that could cause an 80% drop in battery life, Push Notification would only cause a 20% drop. While some debated the truth (or truthiness) of his claims, it did set the expectation that users running Push Notification-enabled apps would see lower battery life, and gave an indicator of just how much less.

So, while it too a while, now that we finally have Push Notification, and some of the more popular messengers and games are implemented it, how’s your battery life doing?
Are you seeing a hit compared to your pre-Push Notification days, and if so, is it in the 20% range? Let us know which iPhone you have, how often you’re getting Push Notifications, and how your battery is holding up!