Friday, February 27, 2009

SunCat Batteries Providing Solar Charging

The new solar-powered phones like the Samsung Blue Earth are a great eco-friendly concept. You probably won’t see the sun-powered phones replacing mainstream handsets anytime soon. With many other gadgets needing to be checked on and made better. Knut Karlsen believes that integrating flexible solar cells onto rechargeable batteries could be a more immediate solution to reducing our carbon footprint.

The SunCat involves flexible solar cell strips glued to nickel metal hydride rechargeable cells. It is also named after a feline basking in the sun. A silver pen that is conductive and has flat wire recycled from a broken Canon lens Knut was able to get a little bit of charge connection. The first prototype was not ideal and he is currently working on a second model that may include a display for checking battery life and capacitors for more efficient charging.

One slight problem with this would be the battery would have to be smaller. They would be like this if the extra components were to be added into a regular cell. They are confident that the issues can be worked out along the way.

Monday, February 16, 2009

New Asus Eee 1002HA Netbook

Asus Eee 1002HAThe Eee 1002HA is the newest addition to the Asus family. This new netbook is a step up from its prdecessor, the Eee 901 and is a great laptop for use for work at home or on the road.

The Eee 1002HA has a 5400rpm 160GB standard hard drive with only 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The 1002HA also has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor which is great for running apps and programs for your job and it comes with an integrated webcam and Windows XP, Photoshop SEC 690, H.264 and Quake Live. It also has 3 USB ports, a VGA-out, audio in/out, ulticard reader, and an ethernet outport. It also comes with wireless bluetooth and weighs about 2lbs 12ounces. One particular feature that alot of peopel will be happy with is that Asus has integrated its multitouch trackpad which many people seem to like. It has a two finger dragging gesture that will totally replace the loss of your mouse wheel as well as a triple tap acting as a right click. The one thing this computer doesn't have that its predecessor, the Eee 901, is a longer battery life. The Eee 1002HA only has a three-cell battery as opposed to the 901's six cell battery. However the 1002HA does run up to 3 hours on a single charge.

But overall the Asus 1002HA is a great computer. It is very capable of doing anything you would need it to. It is a respectable recomendation to anyone who wants a hard-eorking, kong-lasting netbook and the nice brushed aluminum shell is good to look at too. This new Asus will run you around $430 which isn't a bad price.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Tired of car adapters? Get an AC inverter.

AC inverters to make travel easierIf you carry very many electronic gadgets with you in the car, you know what an annoyance it is to carry around both AC adapters for when you are at home or in the hotel, and DC adapters for using electronics in the car. Whether you need to power your PDA or laptop on the go, or just charge the kids' Game Boys, a DC power inverter in your car can save you the hassle of all those DC adapters.

Several models are available on the cheap, such as the XPOWER-175 by Xantrex, which can run electronics up to 150 watts, and has automatic protection against low car battery and overload.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Phanfare's Photon: Picture App for the iPhone

PhanfareEverybody knows about the online photo sharing services like Photobucket. But one you may not know too much about is a site called Pahnfare. Although being relativley unknown, Phanfare is a surprisingly good site and their new iPhone app is putting them back in the limelight.

This app, nicknamed Photon, could quite possibly be the best iPhone photo sharing app on the market. This is mainly due to Phanfares use of cloud storage and online gallery features which is integrated nicely into the iPhone, some new features added to the iPhone's own camera features, and the wonderful fact that this helpful app is totally free.

With the Phanfare app and plugins for your desktop, you can upload all your pictures to the service. You can get a free account with 1GB of space, or for a $55 a year account you can get unlimited accounts.

The interface for Photon is very similar to that of Apple's own photo app but comes with a few important changes. For example, you can access all your pictures from the phone and the built-in camera app comes with a picture stabalizer and a self timer. You also get the traditional greyscale, sepia, or auto scale features for your pics as well as the option to crop or add captions to your photos. A very cool feature is the ability to add music to your slideshows, though you can only do this through the site itslef.

The app caches your photos on the phone which allows you to run most of Photons features offline. Plus, you also get the option to choose how much disk space on your iPhone you want to dedicate to the cache so you only use what you want to use. The only downside, for now, is the fact that you do not have the ability to zooom in on your photos, though luckily Phanfare CEO Andrew Erlichson says that this feature will be added in the next version of the app due to apperar some time in the next 4 weeks.

Overall it appears that Phanfare's Photon is the best iPhone picture sharing app out right now for the iPhone. Its main focus is to give you easy access to all of your photos while also giving you the ability to share ttem with your friends. This is one iPhone app that will surley please anybody who uses it.

iPhone Leading the Smartphone Gaming Charge

We are now finding out from a new study that smartphone gaming is becoming popular very fast. If offers personal connectivity and productivity. The old top seller for a phone was a RAZR and from a new comScore study shows that the iPhone is leading the smartphone gaming charge.

In November of 2007 there was not one smartphone that was on the top 10 list of phones used for mobile downloads. A year later in 2008 there were 6 or the top 10 phones listed as smartphones leading by 8gb iPhone 3g. The people using smartphones nearly tripled going from 734,000 to nearly three million.

The next phone that was on the list was the 8gb iPhone then the 16 gb iPhone is number seven. The BlackBerry Curve 8330 and Curve 8310 make the appearance of a smartphone. The Samsung Instinct and the LG Voyager also make appearances among the top 10 gaming phones. The iPhone makes a great gaming platform that is continuing to grow in popularity.