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Friday, July 30, 2010

A Mini Hydro Power Plant For Mobile Devices

The latest hydrogen-powered mobile charger in the market is the MiniPak from the company Horizon. It is the cheapest around and comes in handy when the sun is not shining. Solar-powered chargers can be functional only when the sun is up.
The MiniPak, first demonstrated at CES 2010, was designed for charging portable electronic devices on the go. This neat looking gadget uses fuel cell technology and comes together with two refillable cartridges called HydroStik. The whole set is priced at a dandy $100 for those busy bodies who are always on the move.
The MiniPak fuel charger has a USB port in which to connect your smartphone or other devices that need to be recharged. Each of the two HydroStik fuel cells is a 'solid-state' hydrogen storage unit in which one of them has the juice equivalent to about 1000 AA batteries. Also, each of the fuel cells can store power up to 15 W. Nowadays, a smartphone or an mp3 player only needs less than 5W electricity to be fully charged.
Horizon has another product which complements the MiniPak, the HydroFill. With the HydroFill you don't have to buy another fuel cell after your HydroStik is depleted. The small scale refilling station can recharge the HydroStik just by putting water and plugging it in your wall socket. It will create hydrogen as fuel. It cost $500.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Samsung Epic 4G, Where Now SCH-r900?

Last month I made a post that Samsung SCH-r900 would most likely be the next 4G handset after the HTC Evo. It was first announced by Samsung themselves in March at the CTIA Wireless 2010 in Las Vegas.

But last Monday, Sprint revealed that Samsung will be coming out with the Epic 4G smart phone which will run on their wimax network. The Epic should be the second 4G handset on Sprint after Evo unless Samsung changes their mind. It is also Samsung's first 4G handset, again.

So with this Monday's announcement, (after the March announcement) what will happen to the aforementioned SCH-r900? Will its début push through this summer or is it dead? Or is it really the Epic 4G disguised as SCH-r900?

I do think however that Epic 4G would be the official one because when Samsung reported about the SCH-r900 they didn't came up with neither an image nor any specs. What they only said is that it will run on LTE technology of the other carrier Metro PCs and will be available for the consumers on the second half of the year. On the Epic 4G they came up with accompanying images and a quite remarkable specs and features. Samsung should have made some clarification regarding the issue.


Anyway, what really matters is how the Epic 4G will live up to the hype. In my humble opinion, Samsung would have to do a little bit of extra effort to make a nudge on some of its strong rivals notably the iPhone 4 and the HTC Evo.