Ingress app updates - adds new item

I'll admit I got really hooked by Ingress.  It's been fun.  But as I've reached L8 and there's been no new players, my interest has kind of waned.

However I'm still intrigued by the whole thing.  And especially on hearing that the 'beta' still has another 18 months or so, there's a big long game planned for this.  And I've got a week spot for the long saga/epic stories out there (stupid wheel of time series of books).

Well, today the app had another update.  The last one was pretty great.

Today's SAID it only improved on some bugs and added a feature we had on the intel map - and I believe we could do it already.

But there seemed to be a hidden "easter egg" in this 'update' available now.

So, what does it say it updates?

• Bug fixes (better GPS)
• which is good, the last was supposed to fix it, but it still seemed cruddy
• Performance improvements
• we'll see
• @ mentioning
• I swear we could do that before...

But what they didn't mention was 2 things

First was the new options for 'notifications'.

I knew we could turn them on or off, but now we have an extra feature.  I want to hear about more info on Niantic Labs (like WHEN WILL THEY ALLOW FIELD TRIP IN CANADA!?!?!?)

Then there's this new 'power cube'.

Not a lot is really known at the moment.

There's a couple hints.  One from +Joe Philley in his status update.  The other from +Ingress themselves in a slideshow.

I'm sure by the time this gets published it'll be out there, but until then it's conjecture.  My theory is that it's a 'well' which you can load up with XM to have at the ready.  So, if you're in an unfriendly farm trying to attack, you can recharge yourself; or, if your favourite portal is getting attacked you can use it to recharge it fully.  It gets annoying that even one day's worth of drain on one of my portals takes almost half of my XM tank to refill it.

What do you think it is?