Remember Novothink’s Surge, the first ever Apple certified solar charging battery pack?  It’s now available.  You can score one for in black or white (other colors are coming soon) for $80 for the iPhone or $70 for the iPod Touch.  Surprisingly the iPhone version has a smaller battery (1320mAH) compared to the iPod Touch version (1500mAH), but costs more.

Novothink, in their infinite amount of wisdom, also launched a free Solar Planner App that provides you with an estimate of how much sun exposure you’ll need per day for a full charge based on weather conditions and your everyday usage.

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Batteries, batteries, batteries. Why is it every where I turn these days someone, some where is announcing a new set of battery packs to charge your portable devices. I mean, isn’t this market saturated enough?  Well, I guess that hasn’t stopped Hypermac, who last we saw intro a set of external batteries for charging your Apple laptop – now that’s something I can swallow.

Today the company introduced the HyperMac Nano, The Hypermac Micro and HyperMac Mini.  They hold an 1800mAh, 3600mAh and 7200mAh worth of juice, respectively.  All three models are encased in aluminum and are available in “Apple’s nine Nano colors (black, silver, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) plus a darker (iPhone) black color”.  They also boasts some cool features like a magnetic base for holding their caps as well as built-in cords.

Check the ‘leap’ for the complete details

New Candy Colored Pocket-Sized HyperMac Battery Packs For iPhones, iPods And iPad At Macworld 2010.
10 Hot Colors, 3 Different Capacities, Batteries Never Looked So Sexy!
02.11.2010 – MACWORLD 2010 SAN FRANCISCO, California – Sanho Corporation (Booth #948), the company behind the award-winning HyperMac External MacBook Batteries, introduces the HyperMac Nano, HyperMac Micro and HyperMac Mini – three pocket-sized, lithium-ion battery packs for charging iPhones, iPods, iPads and other USB-powered devices on-the-go.
All three models are exquisitely encased in aluminum and available in any of Apple’s nine iPod nano colors (black, silver, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) plus a darker (iPhone) black color. Users will be spoilt for choice when choosing the right battery pack to match their iPhone or iPod.
The 1800mAh HyperMac Nano is the world’s only iPhone/iPod lithium-ion battery pack with a built-in charging cable and holds enough power to fully recharge an iPhone 1.5 times. Unlike traditional battery packs with built-in rigid connectors, the HyperMac Nano features a flexible connector cable to allow the battery to move freely from the device, instead of simply sticking out of the base of the iPhone/iPod, which increases the chance of damage to the iPhone/iPod socket.
When not in use, the male iPhone/iPod 30-pin connector sits perfectly into the female 30-pin recharging socket, and with the cap closed, the HyperMac Nano is a sleek piece of metal without any exposed slots or buttons, reminiscent of a Zippo cigarette lighter. The HyperMac Nano’s patented design also features a magnetic base to hold the cap in place during charging.
The 3600mAh HyperMac Micro holds enough power to fully charge an iPhone up to three times, while the 7200mAh HyperMac Mini can fully charge an iPhone up to six times. Both output 5V/1A power through a USB port and the user can charge any iPhone, iPod, iPad or USB-powered device with the provided iPhone/iPod and USB cables. The batteries are rechargeable via USB or wall outlet with the provided USB cable and AC adapter.
Unlike most iPhone battery packs or iPhone cases cum battery in the market, HyperMac batteries works with virtually all iPhone cases, does not add bulk or affects the antenna of the iPhone.
“iPhone users have long suffered from the iPhone’s short battery life and dull utilitarian plastic battery pack solutions,” states Daniel Chin, President of Sanho Corporation. “HyperMac will no doubt breathe a fresh air to this tired industry,” he adds. “With its striking colors and attractive non-battery-like looks, for once there will be a battery pack that appeals to both women and men alike,” he concludes.
Like its big brother, the HyperMac Nano/Micro/Mini batteries uses the same “Grade A” high-end lithium ion cells that are supplied to the U.S. military, providing unsurpassed reliability, safety and longevity. It is rechargeable up to 1,000 times and comes with a ONE-year warranty – comparing to industry standards of only 300 recharges and 3 months warranty. All HyperMac batteries also support pass through charging so the user can charge both battery and device at the same time.
The HyperMac Nano, HyperMac Micro and HyperMac Mini are now available at HyperMac.com for $69.95, $89.95 and $119.95 respectively. As a launch promotion, there is currently a $20 discount on all HyperMac Nano/Micro/Mini batteries.
Specifications
Capacity: 1800mAh (Nano), 3600mAh (Micro), 7200mAh (Mini)
Battery Chemistry: Lithium Ion
Standby Time: Up to 450 hours (Nano), 900 hours (Micro), 1800 hours (Mini)
2G Talk Time: Up to 18 hours (Nano), 36 hours (Micro), 72 hours (Mini)
3G Talk Time: Up to 7.5 hours (Nano), 15 hours (Micro), 30 hours (Mini)
Wi-Fi Internet: Up to 13.5 hours (Nano), 27 hours (Micro), 54 hours (Mini)
3G Internet: Up to 7.5 hours (Nano), 15 hours (Micro), 30 hours (Mini)
Audio Playback: Up to 45 hours (Nano), 90 hours (Micro), 180 hours (Mini)
Video Playback: Up to 15 hours (Nano), 30 hours (Micro), 60 hours (Mini)
Dimensions/Weight
Nano: 3.4 x 1.5 x 0.55″ (85 x 38 x 14mm) / 2.4 oz (67 g)
Micro: 3.7 x 2.7 x 0.6″ (94 x 69 x 16mm) / 4.7oz (134g)
Mini: 5.2 x 3.1 x 0.55″ (132 x 79 x 14mm) / 8.4oz (237g)
Input Power: 5V/500mA (Nano), 5V/1A (Micro/Mini)
Output Power: 5V/1A
For more product information and specifications, please visit:
www.HyperMac.com

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When you get excited about saving energy and money you know you are a good person.  The iGo Green Power Smart Tower is a pure beast when it comes to power saving abilities.  The tower sports a total of 8 outlets with 4 at fixed positions and 4 that utilize that rotate at 360 degrees to accommodate different shaped and unruly plugs.

The iGo Green technology will automatically power down outlets that are not in use and knows when to power them back up, effectively reducing standby power up to 85%.  The Smart Tower also incorporates its vertical tower design with an integrated cable management system, dual front USB charging ports, and a 6 foot long power cord with a right angles plug.

Looks awesome for $80.

[via UnCrate]

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Sometimes I get to thinking that Hammacher Schlemmer is the Thanko of people with too much money.  Because they’ve brought out some really weird and overpriced stuff, and they’ll continue that awesome tradition with the Autonomous Saucier.

Say that out loud a couple times, let it roll on your tongue. Autonomous. Saucier.

It’d make a great name for a band, wouldn’t it?

But all kidding aside, what the Autonomous Saucier does is basically keep skin from forming on your gravy.  It’s an automated whisk that you lower into your sauce pan, rest on its feet, and let it spin and revolve around the pot, constantly stirring and keeping your sauce from scorching and sticking to the pan.

It’s powered by four AA batteries, can withstand temperatures of up to 572 degrees Fahrenheit and costs $39.95.  Yes, you’re paying forty bucks for what amounts to an automated whisk.  But if you make a lot of homemade sauces, then you just might want one of these.

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This thing is just plain whack looking.  With its giant punching bag base and its overall odd aesthetic I just want to kick it over.  What makes it “somewhat” desirable is the fact that it packs two power ports and two ethernet inputs to keep you charged and connected.

I dunno, maybe if this thing was hanging from the ceiling and I could head butt it, I would think it’d be cooler.  I could see some type of cyber cafe buying up a bunch of these but that’s about it.  No info on pricing or availability.

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Battery charging is all I can really remember about CES 2010.  Everywhere I turned I saw some new fangled “awesome” way to charge your cell phone or USB gadget.  Probably the best of what I saw first hand was the Zagg Sparq.  Encompassing two USB inputs and about the size of a MacBook charger, you can essentially charge your iPhone up to 4 times thanks to its internal 6000mAh built in battery.

Boasting orange LED’s to let you how much charge is left, the Zagg Sparq is available now on Zagg’s website for an introductory price of $99.  I have yet to see just how many charges I get out of this thing, but my only gripe so far is that it’s a bit heavy.

If you do a lot of talking or texting or just in general playing around on your cell phone, then you know that these things run out of juice at the worst possible time.  And you also know that there are a lot of other portable devices out there that also have a tendency to run out of spark.  Well, we’ve got something here today that should be a huge help with that–it’s called the ZAGGsparq.

Chances are you already know ZAGG from the invisibleSHIELD and ZAGGaudio brands, but now they’ve got a new product there that does something exciting.  It’s basically a big battery with USB ports, and will thusly recharge ANYTHING that has a USB port.  From your iPhone to your laptop, the ZAGGsparq can put a little extra jolt in most anything.

It carries sufficient charge to recharge an iPhone four times over, and can take fully two thousand charges before the battery starts to drop off.  You know how that happens–recharge a battery often enough and it doesn’t hold much of a charge.

They cost $129.99 a piece, and you can place your order for these things soon.

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If this winter you find your hands, ass or just about spot on your body cold this winter then just remember that I told you so.  Told you what you ask?  About Sanyo’s Eneloop Kairo portable hand chargers.  That’s right.  These nuggets of warmth are heading to the US this winter season and at a temperature of up to 115° F there is no reason an appendage or two shouldn’t be toasty warm while in the middle of your home town’s holiday parade.

If you’re on a budget you can opt for the Single-Sided version (KIR-SE1S), which is available in pink and white, includes a built-in rechargeable battery and has a heating range from 102° F in the low setting to 109° F in the high setting.  Battery life is about 3.5 to 4 hours depending on what setting you have it on – or should I say how cold it is. Price: $34.99

The double sided version (KIR-SL2S) is available in pink and silver and includes 2 AA Eneloop batteries.  For this and the double sided charging you’ll pay $10 more, but you’ll also score a heat ranging from 102° F in the low setting to 115° F in the high setting, and a set of batteries that are multipurpose; you can stuff them in any product.  Price: $44.99

[via iTechnews]

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Cold hands can really affect certain activities from typing to playing guitar.  The Sanyo Eneloop Kairo Rechargeable Hand Warmer is the perfect solution for those of you who hate to have cold hands.  Using a lithium-ion battery, the Eneloop Kairo (meaning Energy+Loop+Pocket Heat) is capable of up to 500 charges.

You can choose between high and low settings from 38˚C (102˚F) to 42˚C (109˚F) and the gadget completely charges in 3 hours.  No word yet on price but the hand warmer is slated for launch sometime in 2010.

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Living in North Portland or NoPo as it’s called, I just had to post on the NoPoPo Eco Water-Powered AA Batteries.  The No Pollution Power batteries use hydro-electric technology to hold a charge from almost any liquid for up to ten years!  Sounds crazy right?  From the innovative minds at Aqua Power Japan, the batteries can even use urine to charge as odd as that sounds.

Having a hard time believing that this is not a joke, you can buy these earth safe batteries in sets of 4 for $6 a pop.

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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’.

Regen’s iPod Dock and Renu Solar Panel will ship next February for $249, while the Sound Dock will ship April 2010 for $149 (that price doesn’t include the $199 Renu Solar Panel).

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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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