Mophie‘s juice pack air external case added some much-needed longevity to our iPhone when we tried it out last year, but most of us on staff aren’t particularly fond of making our gadgets even more chubby. If you are also not looking for a little more to love, mophie is introducing a line of external juice packs that pop into your device (courtesy of a retractable dock connector) to add a little extra life. Smallest will be the $40, 1,000mAh juice pack reserve, followed by the $60, 1,500mAh boost, both of which are compatible with the iPod and iPhone — and also offer “super-bright” LED flashlights. Last but not least is the juice pack power station, which hasn’t been given a price or specific mAh rating but is said to add in compatibility with the iPad. The first two are available now and, while it’s a shame these things don’t just offer a plain ‘ol USB port as well for charging other devices, we suppose you can’t have everything.
Update: If this is a little too rich for your blood, check out the comments for a few less expensive and more broadly compatible alternatives.
There’s a problem with the iPhone 4’s Retina displays: Some screens have a yellow tint across the surface. 55 cases and counting. In some, it’s a yellow band. In others, yellow spots. See the gallery. [Updated with Apple support feedback]More »
An English inventor has come up with an cheap, lightweight power-assist system for bicycles. It is built into a pair of modified pedals and requires no extra hardware. It also seems to be impossible.
I need your help, here, Gadget Lab readers. First, I’ll tell you what I know. The kit is called “Fast Forward” and, from the pictures, looks to be a pair of regular pedals with rechargeable batteries and motors inside. Fast Forward was designed by inventor Stephen Britt, and he is currently a finalist in the Barclays “Take One Small Step” contest. If it wins, Stephen will receive business funding.
To use them, you just swap them in for the pedals you already have. Here’s Stephen’s pitch:
These replace your standard pedals and provide you with assistance to get you up hills, or carry heavy loads. Each pedal incorporates a motor, gearbox, Li-po batteries and a control board. As you pedal the sensors detect your effort and provide assistance.
To pedal without assistance, simply flip the pedals over. They unclip and slot into a charger for charging, much like with a power tool. When fully developed they will provide a range of 10 miles and peak power of 200W. They will retail for around £200.
There’s no doubt that Stephen could build these pedals, but my question is, would they work? Surely the pedals, without toe-straps, would just spin under your feet. Even if you were to firmly cinch your feet in place, would a spinning pedal provide any assistance? It seems to me that the pedal would just try to twist your toes upwards and annoy you, and generally act like a tail wagging a dog.
But although I did just spend ten minutes with my foot in a spare pedal waving my leg around, I’m no no mechanic, let alone a physicist. So help me, readers. Could this possibly work? Answers, as always, in the comments.
We’ve seen Liquavista displays plenty of times at various trade shows, but so far they’ve always been locked up indoors. Now they’ve gone outside to enjoy the weather, and ARMdevices.net was there to capture the results. The low-power color and monochrome screens are shown looking at least as good in the wild as they do in captivity, and when placed next to a traditional LCD (in the laptop on the right) the difference is clear. Granted, the colors are a bit washed out, but the refresh rate is certainly far higher than anything we’ve seen from E Ink. While there’s still no firm word on how much this technology will cost manufacturers, converting from standard LCD production to Liquavista production is said to be relatively painless. How painless? We’ll rather disappointingly have to wait for at least another year before we find out, as these aren’t slated to go into production until the second half of 2011.
Got an iPhone 4 yet? Hold it carefully by the glass, avoiding the new steel antenna band that runs around the edges. Note the number of signal-strength bars you have. Now, touch the steel band with your other hand, preferably the left and bottom sides together. You will almost certainly see your signal disappear, or drop by three or four bars.
The problem is being so widely reported that Gizmodo has managed to add 16 videos of the phenomenon, along with many, many user reports. The problem is also repeatable, making it look like a lot more than simple coincidence.
Wired.com readers are also reporting the problem: Out of more than 40 respondents, about 35 are reporting a similar pattern of problems: If you hold the iPhone 4 in your left hand, or touch the lower-left corner of the outside steel band, the signal indicator starts losing bars within a few seconds. Many respondents indicated that this led to dropped calls, and one, “Edward,” did download speed tests that showed a dramatic drop in throughput when holding the iPhone 4 in his hand, from 2Mbps to a measly 12Kbps.
Two respondents have said that they’ve observed the same diminishing-signal problem with previous models of the iPhone.
Two people have reported that keeping the iPhone 4 in its protective “bumper” case eliminates the problem, probably because it is an electrical insulator and prevents the antenna band from contacting the conductive surface of the skin.
If you have ever touched a bare-metal loop antenna for a TV, you’ll know that the water-filled human body has an effect on the reception, although in that case it usually improves the picture. In this case, it has the opposite effect. It’s possible that the antenna band is not a continuous loop, and that touching it in the lower-left corner short-circuits the loop somehow.
This, it turns out, is not entirely unexpected. Just two weeks ago, Jens Nielsen of Danish blog ComON quoted Professor Gert Frølund Pedersen of the Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University:
[H]uman tissues will in any case have an inhibitory effect on the antenna. Touch means that a larger portion of the antenna energy turns into heat and lost. This makes the antenna less efficient to send and receive radio signals. [Translation by Google]
Simply holding the new iPhone in the hand is enough to kill the signal. Even Walt Mossberg, in his review of the iPhone 4, had an eerily similar-sounding experience:
[O]n at least six occasions during my tests, the new iPhone was either reporting “no service” or searching for a network while the old one, held in my other hand, was showing at least a couple of bars. Neither Apple nor AT&T could explain this. [Emphasis added.]
Is it possible that a problem like this would make it into the wild? You’d think that it would have been discovered in testing. On the other hand, maybe this is what caused Steve Jobs’ connection woes at the WWDC keynote where he demoed the new handset?
One possible answer is in the way the new antenna works. Instead of just picking the strongest signal, the iPhone 4 picks the highest quality signal, the frequency with the least amount of interference. In the current iPhone firmware, this is not yet reflected in the signal display, which still indicates actual strength. Apple has said that this is known bug that it plans to fix. If true, then you shouldn’t actually drop a call, even when your apparent signal-bars drop to zero.
Or perhaps it is all a sinister plot from Apple to sell more of those insulating rubber Bumper cases?
If you have an iPhone 4, please test this out for us, and post your experience in the comments. Specifically, check to see if a decrease in displayed bars corresponds with an actual drop in call quality.
What’s more annoying than spending hourslining up for a shiny new gadget? Learning that your precious phone can’t actually connect to the network. Well, depending on how you hold it — word has it that the iPhone 4’s bottom-left corner isn’t playing nice with your skin. If you recall from the keynote, that’s where the Bluetooth / WiFi / GPS antenna meets its GSM / UMTS counterpart. So we decided to test on two brand new iPhone 4 handsets purchased today in the UK.
One iPhone 4 demonstrated the issue everytime it was held in our left hand (as a right-handed person is apt to do) so that our palm was essentially bridging the two antennas. You can see that in the video after the break. Bridging the two with a finger tip, however, didn’t cause any issues with the reported reception. If we had to guess, we’d say that our conductive skin was acting to detune the antenna — in fact, we’ve already managed to slowly kill two calls that way so it’s not just an issue with the software erroneously reporting an incorrect signal strength. That said, we had no issues when Apple’s $29 rubber bumper accessory (given to us free for standing in line) was attached, creating a buffer between our palm and the antennas. Our second UK-purchased iPhone 4 was fine, showing none of these handling symptoms. See the video evidence after the break including Insanely Great Mac’s version which got us to worrying in the first place.
P.S. Don’t forget to take our poll and let us know if you’re seeing both the yellow spots / stripes and reception issues. Unfortunately, we’re suffering from both flaws which is not a good sign for quality control on this first batch of Apple handsets.
P.P.S. Since some of you are asking, our review unit showed none of these issues.
Update: Apple responds to the issue, and boy, it’s a doozy.
That right there friends, is a real life Google employee and his trusty camera capturing the internals of a fine New York City bodega. It’s all part of a pilot launched back in April to photograph the insides of businesses for Google Places. The idea here is that by seeing the actual facilities, merchandise, layout, and decor Google can help consumers make a better decision about which businesses might best suit their particular needs. First our WiFi data and now the fetid bowels of our snack shops… oh Google, is there no data left that’s sacred?
You probably already know that you can hook up a MacBook to your giant 27-inch iMac and use it as an external display. But what if you have another device that you’d like to plug into the big screen? A Blu-ray player or a games console, perhaps?
Belkin’s new white plastic brick will take any HDMI signal and squirt it into the iMac’s Mini DisplayPort. The AV360 will let you play XBox games on the iMac, and even watch DRM-crippled movies – the adapter is HDCP-compliant, and also pipes through stereo audio.
There are a couple of gotchas. One is that any 1080p source will be downgraded to 720p, a shame on the biggest iMac’s 2560 x 1440 pixel display. The other problem is one of price: The AV360 is $150. That’s $150 for an adapter, although $150 is certainly cheaper than buying a second display, and the box takes up a lot less space. Available now.
We hate wires. We can’t count the number of times that our headphones were unceremoniously yanked from our heads (or ear canals) because the wire got snagged while ordering our Brazilian man-servant about. Kleer solved this problem years ago but still haven’t broken into the mainstream thanks in no small part to the preponderance of low-cost (and low-quality) Bluetooth headphones. That could change with the visibility provided by a new partnership with Mercedes to replace line-of-site infrared technology the company had been using. The deal will equip 2010 Mercedes-Benz E-Class and S-Class models with Kleer’s proprietary, low-power, CD-quality digital wireless audio emitted from a pair of video screens on the back of the seats. Occupants wearing the Mercedes-provided Kleer headphones or any compatible pair can then select which audio stream their headphones receive without interfering with Bluetooth or WiFi connected devices. Win, win.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
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