Hasta La Gadget!

Vodafone debuted its Power Shorts this past weekend, which uses kinetic energy to keep your mobile device charged.

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Bosch recently released an $450 charging solution for EVs, but if you want to go wireless, it’s going to cost you a lot more. The company has formed an exclusive partnership with Evatran for the distribution and installation of its wireless chargers for the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt. Each Plugless Level 2 Electric Vehicle Charging System (now that’s a tongue-twister) costs $2,998 for the Volt and $3,098 for the Leaf, not including taxes and installation fees. It’s comprised of a wall-mounted control panel that provides electricity to the parking pad, which transmits power to your vehicle. You’ve got to admit it’s convenient when all you have to do to juice up is park on top of the pad, but would you actually shell out that much cash in the name of convenience when plugging a (cheaper) charger in is no Herculean task?

Filed under: Misc, Wireless

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Via: Plugin Cars, Autoblog

Source: Bosch

Hand-cranked emergency chargers are nothing new, but the folks behind Voltmaker managed to come up with something novel based on the same concept. Instead of having to turn the crank laboriously, you’ll only have to hold the gadget and spin it round and round to generate energy.

In effect, you’ll be spinning the part of the charger that’s usually supposed to be turned manually.

Spinning should cause less strain since it’s a more passive action. Spinning the Voltmaker for two minutes will give you enough juice to make a quick emergency call. If you want to fully charge up the Voltmaker 2,000-mAh battery, then you’ll need to spin the device for two to three hours. So really, we just recommend using this nifty gadget during emergencies only – unless you don’t mind looking like a fool spinning this thing around for three hours.

The Voltmaker is currently up for funding on Indiegogo, where a minimum pledge of $69(USD) will get you one of your very own if you’re one of the first 3,000 early bird backers.

[via C|NET]

You might think the only way malware could ever get onto your phone is if you installed an app or some piece of software that was infested with malicious code, but it turns out that modified wall chargers can be used to hack phones as well. Researchers say they’ve built a custom iPhone wall charger that can install malware when connected to a device.

During the annual Black Hat security conference later in July, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology will be showing off a prototype wall charger that they say is capable of installing malware onto iOS devices when plugged into the wall and connected to a device at the same time, which they found the results to be quite “alarming.”

The researchers aren’t saying much about the charger yet, as they reveal most of their findings next month, but they say that the charger is built around an open-source single-board computer known as a Texas Instruments BeagleBoard that costs around $45. Essentially, the researchers wanted to show just how easy and cheap it can be to cause a lot of virtual destruction in an innocent package.

However, it’s noted that a BeagleBoard is too big to fit inside an Apple 5W charger, so it’s unclear how exactly the research team has disguised the board. Perhaps they hid it in a docking station or an external battery pack. However, the team says that other hackers will most likely take their findings and advance the work to fit the necessary components into the tiny iPhone charger.

The Georgia Tech researchers say that this kind of hack could break into an iPhone running the latest firmware in less than a minute. However, this isn’t the first hack to utilize the iPhone’s Lighting/3-pin port. Most commonly, jailbreak software uses the connector to remove many of Apple’s restrictions from iOS, allowing users to install custom apps and themes that Apple would otherwise ban.

VIA: Forbes

iPhone vulnerable to hacking with malware-infested charger is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Electric vehicles still have a few obstacles that prevent them from going fully mainstream. These typically center on the price of the vehicle itself (though this is changing), and its range. One other barrier has also been the price of home-based chargers. Now, Bosch is offering a level 2 (quicker than the usually cheaper, and slower level 1) home charging system for just $450. For that price you get 16 amp charging and a 12 foot cord. There are two other options that increase the amperage to 30, with a choice of 18 or 25 foot cables — costing $593 and $749 respectively. These don’t include any additional networking features and so on, but for this price, and reduced reliance on external charging networks, it’d be worth clearing out the garage for.

Filed under: Peripherals, Transportation

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Via: The Verge, Wired

Source: Bosch