Hasta La Gadget!

You can’t help but smile, can you? ECOtality‘s latest entrant into the rapidly expanding Blink line of EV chargers looks awfully familiar to avid motorists, and for good reason. Designed to mimic a conventional petrol pump, the DC Fast Charger should blend right in when installed in Best Buy parking lots, gas stations and beyond, with the company aiming to get these positioned in a wide variety of locations in order to ease “range anxiety.” We’re also told that motorists will eventually be able to utilize the Blink Network Smartphone Application in order to locate the nearest charging station and receive GPS directions, and an RFID-enabled payment system makes it easy to drain your wallet, rejuvenate your vehicle and get you back on the open road. There’s even a 42-inch LCD on the top, and while it’s primarily engineered for ads and information, we’re sure a few wire swaps would have your Xbox 360 displayed in no time flat. The DC Fast Charger should be hitting 16 major American cities in the near future, and there’s a video after the break to tide you over.

Continue reading DC Fast Charger joins the ECOtality EV charging station fleet, looks like a fuel pump

DC Fast Charger joins the ECOtality EV charging station fleet, looks like a fuel pump originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GM announces $490 Voltec home charger for Chevy Volt: $2,000 installed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Batteries die, and when your phone has a WiMAX antenna plus dual cameras and a gigantic screen, well, those batteries tend to meet their maker sooner than later. Enter hacker extraordinaire Ben Heck with a simple and cheap solution: a hand-powered charger. Ben took an inexpensive flashlight with a crank on it, disassembled it, and ran the leads from the internal motor to his HTC EVO 4G. The exciting (or at least excited) video below is proof that it works, but we’re wondering which would die first: the 4G’s battery, or your arm after cranking on this thing for an hour or two.

Continue reading Hand-crank flashlight +soldering + Ben Heck = man-powered HTC EVO 4G charger

Hand-crank flashlight +soldering + Ben Heck = man-powered HTC EVO 4G charger originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Oct 2010 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia’s official marketing documentation for the just-announced DT-600 says that you can “charge in style” and “enjoy the life with full battery.” After checking it out here at Nokia World, we don’t think we could say it any better ourselves. The device is basically a rubber tray for setting your battery-dependent gadgets with a squid-like array of charging cables coming out of the corners; there are very similar products to this on the market already, but Nokia’s got a couple trump cards up its sleeve. Actually, one of them is less of a trump card and more of a Wild Draw Four: although one cable is micro-USB, two of the others are permanently connected 2mm Nokia jacks, an odd decision considering that modern Nokias are moving away from those to micro-USB — as are most manufacturers — so we guess they’re expecting you to keep a few antiques juiced up.

The other differentiator, though, is that you don’t need to snake your own chargers through the mess — the fourth cable is interchangeable and connects to one of two USB ports on the side, and you can use the other port for a fifth cable that isn’t routed through one of the four corners’ holes. Nokia includes mini-USB, LG, Sony Ericsson, and two flavors of Samsung connectors for this one; Apple’s noticeably missing, but we’re sure these guys had zero interest in licensing the 20-pin design — and obviously, you can just use your own cable if you like. In a nod to Mother Nature, the DT-600 burns no power when devices aren’t connected, but if you’re in the US, tough luck — there’s no plan in place for availability there. Hit up the gallery for a few in-the-wild shots (taken at Nokia’s Experience Lounge coffee bar, by the way, so the phones weren’t the only things getting juiced up).

Nokia Charging Plate DT-600 hands-on: ‘charge in style’ is all you need to know originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There may be an increasing number of wireless charging devices available these days, but actual contact-less charging systems have so far been confined to experiments and slightly disconcerting demonstrations. It looks like Fujitsu could be set to change that, however — the company has just announced that it will unveil a new system later this week that can charge several gadgets simultaneously over a distance of “several centimeters,” and it says that it could hit cellphones and other products as soon as 2012. That system is apparently based on magnetic resonance technology, which Fujitsu notes can in theory work over distances as great as “several meters,” although the efficiency is greatly diminished — it reportedly has an efficiency of 85 percent at 15 centimeters. Details are otherwise still a bit light at the moment (including word of any actual products), but you can be sure we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Fujitsu says new wireless, contact-less charging system could hit products by 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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