GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The Octopus is an external battery-pack for the iPhone, with a neat trick. Instead of just hanging off the dock connector and sliding out just enough to disconnect, it has suction cups that stick the pack onto the back of the phone.

These suckers are just like those on an octopus’ tentacles, just not as tasty hence the name. The battery pack connects to the dock-port via a flexible cable, and takes around three hours to fully transfer its load of electricity into the iPhone.

One juiced, the iPhone will be at roughly half-power, able to play video for 10-hours or offer four hours of talk time. The Octopus itself charges via a USB-cable.

Why use this instead of a combo case and battery? Because it only needs to be used in emergencies. Those battery cases add bulk to what is a pretty slim and pocketable device, whereas an emergency battery can be kept out of the way in a bag until needed.

The Octopus is pretty cheap, too, coming in at a shade under $30.

Octopus Attachable Battery for iPod and iPhone [Chinavision]

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Source:wired.com

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The M12 is a heated jacket, powered by lithium-ion batteries, to keep you snug and warm in the winter. The blurb says that it is good for sports and outdoor activities, but surely those are exactly the things that warm you up without an in-clothing heater.

Still, for doormen, bouncers and security guards, the M12 is perfect. It has three carbon-fiber heating pads inside, and that battery will keep them going for six-hours on a charge. And if you’re really lucky, perhaps the spent battery might spark and catch alight, as li-ion batteries are so fond of doing, and keep you toasty for a little longer.

The jacket is worryingly inexpensive, at $120 (or $170 with the charger). Good outdoor jackets come in at more than that without the heating gimmick But if you’re the kind of person who loves the outdoor life, but is too lazy to do anything once you get there, then this jacket is for you.

M12 product page [Home Depot]

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Kensington’s PowerGuard Battery Case for the iPhone 4 would be just another ho-hum Mophie-alike design if it weren’t for one very clever little tweak. Around back there is a slot in the plastic, into which you slide a credit card to make an instant kickstand. It is placed smartly, too, so it will support the iPhone in either landscape or portrait orientations.

The case actually comes with a card, so you don’t have to risk your own, and the whole thing is actually rather slim and clean-looking, adopting the iPhone 4’s own squared-off lines instead of the swooping curves normal for external battery packs. It will add four hours of talk-time (or five hours of video or 22 hours audio) to the iPhone’s life, charges via microUSB and has a volume control button, just like Apple’s own bumper case. And given that simple cases can sell for $40 or more, the battery-totin’, kickstand-convertin’ Kensington’s $60 seems reasonable. Available for pre-order now.

Kensington PowerGuard Battery Case with Card Stand [Kensington via OhGizmo]

Source:wired.com

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Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

Source:wired.com

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How can you make tiny, flexible materials that conduct electricity more efficiently than today’s batteries? You can engineer expensive, high-density carbon nanotubes. Or you can use the original nanobots, made by nature itself: viruses.

An MIT group recently described an advance that brings us closer to the day when freaky, half-alive nanomachines assemble batteries you could wear.

The research comes out of Angela Belcher’sBiomolecular Materials Group at MIT, which has been working on this project since 1994. They use bacteriophages to build — really, evolve — hyperdense materials from ionic particles, the same way bone, shells, chalk, and glass were made in the Cambrian period.

This week Mark Allen, a postdoc in the group, outlined the use of a new cathode made with iron flouride. Allen also described some of thepotential applications of this technology. The high flexibility of the nanostructured material means you can weave it into any fabric or pour it into any shape, including:

• Wearable battery packs for soliders, first responders, and civilians;
• Tiny rechargable batteries for portable electronics including smart phones, laptops, and GPS;
• Unmanned aerial vehicles, which require lightweight, long-lasting power sources.

In 2008, the group published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining how this would work. Viruses create a template, assembling nanowires out of cobalt oxide. These are built on top of a synthetic electrolytic polymer, called a polyelectrolyte. (Natural polyelectrolytes include protein polypeptides and DNA.) Stamp this electrode onto a platinum current collector, and:

The resulting electrode arrays exhibit full electrochemical functionality. This versatile approach for fabricating and positioning electrodes may provide greater flexibility for implementing advanced battery designs such as those with interdigitated microelectrodes or 3D architectures.

A UAV is going to provide the first real-world test of the scaled-up batteries in action. Other applicationswe’ve seen touted for wearable electronics include wearable solar cells and electronic devices that stand up to repeat laundering. So much to look forward to.

Source:wired.com

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The iPad already has a crazy-long battery life, measuring around ten hours whatever you do with it. A good thing, too, as something this portable would suffer from being stuffed into one of those juice-pack type cases. But what of those occasions when you really can’t find a power outlet for days at a time? HyperMac has you covered with a surprisingly neat (and simple) solution.

The answer is to put a battery into a stand. Clever, right? The stand is in the slab’n’slot style, a block with two angled slits (18 and 45-degrees) to hold the iPad in either orientation. The heft of the stand is provided not by weights but by stuffing in a battery which can juice the iPad for a further 16 hours. That, if you are feeling a little slow this morning, brings the total to 26 hours of continuous use. In normal stop-start usage, that’ll probably be enough to last you for an entire weekend.

The stand comes with a USB port into which you plug your existing dock connector-cable. To charge it, you hook it up via its own mini-USB port, and it supports “charge-through” so you can just use it as a charging desk-dock and grab it when you leave the house. Ingenious, nice-looking and even fairly light (12.7oz or 360g), the only problem may be price. At $130, it seems expensive. But then, it may well be cheaper than buying a stand and battery pack separately.

HyperMac Stand [HyperMac via Brownlee]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

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What’s the first application you think of when I say the phrase “vibration-powered self-generating battery”? Me too, but let’s keep this clean.

The faux-batteries are from Brother Industries, and inside the AA and AAA-sized shells you’ll find a capacitor and an electromagnetic induction generator. Shaking them will charge the capacitor enough to juice low-power gadgets. The example given is remote control, which needs around 40 to 100mW of power. The battery can put out up to 180mW, so while you won’t be using these to power a camera-flash, a quick shake to get the TV remote going again would work just great. In fact, you could just build this in to a remote and forget the batteries altogether.

Ok, so I couldn’t stay clean for the entire post. As one commenter on the Gizmodo post about these batteries points out, pop a few of these inside a vibrator and boom! You have perpetual motion.

Vibration-powered Generators Replace AA, AAA Batteries [Tech-On via Giz]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

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Microsoft has come up with an amazingly obvious tweak to battery tech that should save us some headaches, as well as several trillion hours of head-scratching and peering into dark holes.

Named Instaload, the invention lets you stuff the batteries into a device any which-way you fancy, eliminating the need to read dark directional diagrams. The most impressive part is the low-tech way this is handled. Each contact in the battery compartment has both positive and negative terminals. If the fat, flat end of the battery is pressing against them, it touches the outside contact. If it is the pointy positive end then it makes contact with a slightly recessed inner contact. This, combined with some simple circuitry, makes sure the current is always running the right way.

Unfortunately, this being Microsoft, it wants everybody to play by Microsoft’s rules, and to pay for the privilege. Microsoft “offers fair and reasonable licensing terms” for Instaload, which is kind of like offering licensing terms on the idea of shopping with a shopping cart (wait, what?)

A shame, really, as it’s the cheap gadgets that could benefit from this the most. Thanks to this licensing short-sightedness, we see this tech coming to Microsoft mice, and pretty much nothing else anytime soon.

InstaLoad Battery Installation Technology Overview [Microsoft via Gizmag]

Source:wired.com

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