Hasta La Gadget!

This week Inhabitat geared up for the Greener Gadgets Conference by showcasing some of the most exciting gizmos from this year’s design competition. First we took a look at the IllumiCharger, a handy wall-mounted solar charger that one-ups your standard outlets with two usb ports. We also liked the Fair Energy Clock, a fool-proof adapter that vanquishes vampire power by staking out times to pull the plug. And in case you missed it, be sure to check out Corky, the kinetic mouse that generates energy with every click. Batteries be gone!

It was also another big week for solar power as technological advances produced photovoltaic cells that are smaller, more efficient, and more versatile in their applications. IBM unveiled a new breed of thin-film cells that are 40% more efficient than previous prototypes, while the University of Michigan announced the world’s smallest solar-powered sensor, which measure a scant 9 cubic millimeters.

Finally, we were flat-out wowed by Porsche’s latest supercar – a 911 hybrid that will be taking on the competition at the 24 hour Nürburgring race this May. The vehicle is based on the tried-and-true 911 platform but features some race-ready tricks under the hood: front wheel hybrid drive and a kinetic energy recovery system that stores braking energy in a flywheel that delivers a 160hp boost of speed with the press of a button.

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Illumicharger, thin solar cells, and a Porsche originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It kinda got buried beneath the X10 mini and mini pro, but Sony Ericsson went ahead and threw us a Symbian-flavored bone this evening with the Vivaz pro. The phone’s nearly a dead ringer for its non-pro doppelganger — the original Vivaz — but it adds a claimed 2 millimeters of thickness, which we found to be nearly imperceptible when you’re holding it or gazing in its direction. We’ll admit this is a better looking phone (along with the Vivaz) in person than we’d figured from the press shots, but we’re still not sure we’d buy in — the UI feels a little bit like a warmed-over S60 5th Edition, unlike the X10’s thorough reworking of Android. If anything, this could very well be an N97 mini killer, especially considering the keyboard’s decency — just check out that centered spacebar! Enjoy a few more shots of the phone in Sony Ericsson’s ridiculously under-lit venue (it’s a nightclub, in case you couldn’t tell) below.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A gaggle of higher-ups from Sony Ericsson stuck around after the conclusion of today’s event to show off the X10 mini, X10 mini pro, and Vivaz pro in person, and we seriously can’t stress this enough: the mini twins are small. Well, either that, or the men holding them were gigantic — but we’re pretty sure it’s the former since we got around to spending some quality time with the mini pro and continued to be blown away by its diminutive stature. Rikko Sakaguchi (pictured left) had two colors of the mini plus a Vivaz pro, while Lennard Hoornik was rockin’ the original X10 plus a mini pro. We’ll be honest: the company’s platform strategy is as meandering and muddled as ever, but with designs like this in the pipeline, they’ll definitely be demanding their fair share of attention over the next few months. See a bunch more shots of the execs handling the phones in the gallery below.

Sir Howard Stringer and friends show off Sony Ericsson’s new handsets originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Samsung is desperate for us and the world to focus on its very first Bada device — the Wave S8500 — we found something a bit more interesting for Google fans. Tucked away in the depths of a spec sheet is Samsung’s unannounced i8520 phone running Android 2.1. After quizzing a team of perplexed executives of increasing rank, a VP from Samsung’s mobile division finally told us that it’ll be revealed as the “Halo” tomorrow when the show floor opens. Looking at the spec sheet then, the i8520 Halo packs a 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED display (bigger than the Wave’s 3.3-incher), 8 megapixel autofocus camera with flash (VGA on the front), 720p / 30fps video encoding / decoding, DivX and Xvid playback support, Bluetooth 2.1, standard 3.5mm headphone jack, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, A-GPS, 16GB of internal storage and microSD expansion, stereo speakers, DLNA support, and — get this — a DLP pico projector integrated. The spec-sheet also lists a “Specialized Projector UI” as one of the features, suggesting it’ll look a little different when you toss it up onto the big screen. This quad-band GSM / EDGE phone with tri-band UMTS 900 / 1900 / 2100 will ship in Q3 to Europe and Asia with a chance for a US version at some point later. We’ll bring you more tomorrow just as soon as we get through all this paella.

Note: Even though the i8520 clearly seems to run the same UI as the Bada-powered Wave, we’ve been assured by multiple people in Samsung — including a VP in the Mobile division — that it is, in fact, running Android 2.1. That ties in nicely with the fact that Bada’s graphical representation comes through as a new cut of TouchWiz, so it makes sense these guys would want to port the same look and feel to other platforms. Also of note is the fact that we couldn’t confirm from the company that it’s got a projector on board, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it does: the so-called Specialized Projector UI, the fact that the 14.9mm girth is likely thick enough to swallow the necessary optics, and — of course — the big DLP logo on back. We’ll bring out the final details just as soon as we know ’em.

Update: Images confirm it, Halo is a projector phone!

Samsung i8520 ‘Halo’ Android 2.1 phone with 3.7-inch Super AMOLED and pico projector (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, we just had our first encounter with Samsung’s new Bada-sporting Wave handset. We’ll say this to start… the screen is gorgeous, and the phone itself is super fast. No hesitation almost anywhere, but it’s hard to make a judgment call at this point. A lot of the software seemed unfinished, and we saw a few crashes and weird behavior. Still, it’s clearly a device capable of handling some pretty intense work, and a Samsung rep we spoke to wanted to emphasize its ability to multitask. We were also told that the phone has more than 512MB of RAM, which is notable for a device of this type. We’re going to play with it a bit more and flesh out our impressions, but for now feast your eyes on the gallery… and check the video after the break!

A few more takeaways (with some input from senior editor Thomas Ricker):

• Overall the device feels like a glorified feature phone, and speaking to some other tech folks here, that feeling seemed to be common. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot to it that we haven’t seen in other Samsung devices, especially considering the TouchWiz integration.
• There was an issue with flipping the keyboard from portrait to landscape — as we said the phone is early, so this may change, but we had to leave an app and reopen in the other orientation to get it working. We also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be word prediction in place right now.
• The browser is redirecting to WAP pages, so it was hard to see what the results were. We also thought the buttons were in a very odd place, making it a bit hard to navigate.
• The display wasn’t always responding to touches, and at least one unit completely froze on us.
• For those asking, from the looks of things (and the press release) there is no multitouch on this device. Correction… we just tried pinching and zooming on the phone and while it did create some kind of zoom result, it also kept giving us an error! Furthermore, when we tried to load an image heavy site, it forced the phone into its task manager mode and made us close all applications before we could proceed with using the phone. Clearly there is work to be done.

Continue reading Samsung Wave first hands-on: Bada-packed and super fast (video!)

Samsung Wave first hands-on: Bada-packed and super fast (video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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