GadgetReview

There’s more than a fair share of iPhone battery backups on the market, but PhoneSuit’s latest, the Primo micro battery pack is jumping out at me.  Unlike other micro battery packs (except Griffin’s), this one has 3 LED lights to indicate charge and can provide up to 3 hours additional talk time to your iPhone or 25 additional hours of audio for your iPod touch.  It’s certified to work with all 30-pin dock infused Apple devices and sells for $35.

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I’ve been using Sanyo’s Eneloop batteries for about a year now and I’m pleased to say I have little to no qualms with the rechargeables.  The recharge time could be a bit faster, but aside from that they seem to be all that the company says they are.

And now, for folks like me, I can recharge two AA Eneloops via my laptops USB port thanks to the Sanyo Stick Booster.  The product page says that the device can charge up via the sun’s rays, but I don’t any signs of a solar panel, so I’ll leave that one to the person who orders this $34 device when it is available in December.

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The Punjab police, ladies and gentlemen, have stepped boldly into twenty-first century law enforcement technology by receiving a consignment of Tasers, the first of their kind in India.

They’ve become both ubiquitous and infamous in the United States, the devices fire a pair of darts connected to the base unit by thin cables with transmit an electrical current into the subject, thus incapacitating him.

The Punjab police have apparently ordered enough Tasers to outfit two entire battalions.

Tales of gross misuse of Tasers follow them literally everywhere, with the classic cry of “Don’t tase me, bro!” intermingling with stories of the devices being used for torture as they don’t leave marks on the body.  Considering the sheer amount of bad press these things have taken over the years, it’s a wonder any police department is actually looking at them.

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Got twenty bucks?  Easily entertained?  Then what I’ve got for you will quite literally blow your mind wide open.

It’s called the HoverDrone, and it’s a little toy hovercraft that actually hovers.

It’s not that much bigger around than a silver dollar, and it floats by generating its own cushion with a small fan on its undercarriage.  It also blinks a little blue LED.  But where this is interesting is not that it’s a tiny flight-capable toy, but rather that it’s the SMALLEST remote controlled flying device ever made.

No, really–it’s just over sixty millimeters in diameter, and it flies.  You can even control the height of the flight by remote, even if the remote is basically “up” and “down”.  And the best part is, you can have one of these for just about twenty bucks.  Even if you’re not that interested in flying a little blue toy with an LED light that blinks, well, it’s almost worth it just to have that piece of toy history in your hands.

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Here’s a device that makes Big Brother look a lot more fun and accessible–the Driving Reporter Gadget.

It’s a USB device that’s also an in-car 16 channel GPS system that stores about 100 hours of your driving.  All the data, all the activities are routed into this thing so you know exactly where you were, where you turned, and where you went.  Not to mention your speed getting there.  It’s a lot like the black box on an airplane, just for your car.  Okay, granted, the Driving Reporter Gadget is also black in color, but that’s just a funny coincidence.

The device runs on a pair of AAA lithium batteries, and secures anywhere on your car via an attached magnet (doubly odd since this seems to at least have some limited memory right next to a magnet as part of the design.), and you can even watch your trip on Google Earth, which is awesome if you have a tendency to get lost and want to watch your own highlight reel to figure out how you got so abjectly butt-lost in the first place.

I’m a bit concerned about having a device tattle on you constantly, but for parents this may be a godsend.  They cost $229.95 each, so finding out where your car’s been is pretty easy.

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Still trying to figure out how to make your iPhone a tad greener and all the while not cluttering up your desktop?  The Regen’s Renu solar panel is a modular system that charges on its own and when the time comes, can be placed in one of their two docks to charge up the iPhone.  That means you don’t have to expose your iPhone to direct sunlight, potentially harming the phone’s fragile components.

Renu currently offers an iPod dock, which just does the usual or you can opt for the more expensive but heavier featured Sound Dock, which includes a set of speakers and a slot for Regen’s Renu solar panel, providing up to 8 hours of sound or power to your iProduct of choice. The Renu solar panel takes about 3.7 hours to charge in direct sunlight outside and 7.3 hours of ‘direct sunlight indoors’. …Continue reading: Regen’s Renu iPod Dock Is My Favorite Solar Panel Gadget To Date

So remember just yesterday, when I was getting all poingy happy about the half e-reader / half netbook hybrid?  Well, I think I may have just beat that level of awesome but in a totally different direction.  Today I’m talking about the Kohjinsha PA, a combination netbook and tablet PC.

No, seriously–this sucker has a 4.8″ WSVGA touchscreen, 1.33GHz Atom CPU, 512 meg of RAM and a 32 GB SDD.  The battery is slated to run for 7.5 hours, and it even comes with an SD slot and a 1.3 MP webcam, all in a netsurfing portable tablet PC.

I am profoundly impressed by this, even though my chances of ever using such a device are so slim as to approach zero.  I draw like a cat with a pen in its mouth after ingesting large quantities of peyote, so a tablet PC to me is almost less than useless. But still, I’m impressed–and the price is pretty impressive too.

If you want one of these bad boys, you’ll have to shell out a whopping $758 in Japan.  Preorders are going on, and the prices range between $867 and $921.

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Remember when I was freaking out over the concept of cyborg combat wasps?

Well, I’ve got something even more frightening here–apparently, the crew out at Harvard are neck deep in developing an entire colony of robot bees.

No biological material involved here, folks, just an entirely artificial, entirely mechanical robot bee.  The National Science Foundation handed over a whopping ten million dollars for Harvard to start building the ersatz honeymakers.  The bees will have realistic and flight-capable flapping wings, optical flow sensors to avoid collisions and for navigation, plus “pollination and docking appendages” as well as an as-yet-unknown power source.

Considering that honeybees have been going missing for most of the last couple years, a backup source of honeybees might not be a terrible idea.  But I find it vaguely horrifying all the same that we’re attempting to replicate nature with hardware.  Something just…wrong…about that.

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The folks out at Dell have given us a pretty sweet gadget to check out.  Now, chances are, you’ve heard about a LOT of solar powered whatnot, especially right here.  And some of it is pretty strange.  Solar powered jackets, solar powered cars…well, now Dell’s going to bring you what may be the strangest solar powered device of all.

The solar powered parking lot.

I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen–Dell has put together a series of solar panel-laden paviliions in its parking lot designed to provide not only shade to the cars beneath in the hot sun, but also to take that sun and convert it into electrical energy by which employees can charge, at no cost to them, their plug-in hybrids and full-on electric vehicles.

The equivalent of free gas is a pretty nifty perk, and the crew out at Dell has to be feeling some love off of this one.

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I’m stunned to be able to even discuss this, but apparently, Toshiba’s Dynario actually represents the first ever fuel-cell gadget charger.

If you take a fuel cell filled with methanol and ambient oxygen, and inject it into a charger package about the size of your palm, the combination of methanol and oxygen interacts with a lithium-ion battery inside the charger to power the battery and discharge sufficient juice to power TWO cell phones.  This means that most of your typical portable gadgets can now, thanks to Toshiba’s Dynario, be powered by a mix of air and chemicals.

Toshiba claims it takes the battery fully twenty seconds to charge after injecting the gas mix into the charger, and the costs on this beauty aren’t too steep for what you get.  The charger itself runs roughly $325, while the fuel cells themselves go for about $35 for a pack of five.  Oh, sure, it’s not exactly Rayovac Renewal battery affordable, but for a fast and easy charge that runs on thin air?  It’s not a terrible price.

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