Hasta La Gadget!

Keeping your USB-powered gear powered up while camping in the woods or hiking the Appalachian Trail can prove quite a challenge. Solar chargers and backup batteries can help, sure, but when you’re already hauling dozens of pounds of gear, an integrated solution is where it’s at. Goal Zero has a pair of new products to help streamline things a bit. First up, the Lighthouse250 Lantern can provide 48 hours of 250-lumen LED output with a full charge, and it can charge up a gadget via a built-in USB port. If you don’t have a solar panel handy, you can use the hand crank to juice up the lantern in the field. The company’s also teaming up with Eddie Bauer on a solar panel-equipped tent, the 36-square-foot Katabatic 2 — you’ll need to add your own battery pack to store the energy collected from the 18-watt roof-mounted panel. Eddie Bauer has yet to announce pricing for the tent, which should ship next spring, but you can expect the lantern to retail for about 80 bucks in Q4.

Filed under: Household, Peripherals

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Electric vehicles are pretty great since you don’t need to hit the gas station and drop $50-$60 on a tank of gas every week (depending on how much you drive, of course), but charging times for electric vehicles are the trade-off to not paying for gas. For some EVs, it take all night to completely charge a dead car battery, but Tesla is aiming for much faster times than that.

Tesla CTO JB Straubel says that the company is attempting to cut down on recharging times for its cars down to “5 to 10 minutes,” which is almost unprecedented. Currently, Tesla’s Supercharger stations can charge a Tesla Model S battery halfway in only 30 minutes, but the company says that’s still too long.

Basically, Tesla wants to cut the time down so that it’s not any longer than the amount of time it usually takes to pump a full tank of gas in a traditional gas-guzzler. However, the challenge is optimizing the charger’s power of delivering juice to the battery fast enough without overheating the battery and frying it.

Of course, though, Straubel notes that it could be awhile before Supercharger stations can charge a Tesla Model S battery in as little as five minutes, but it seems the method is very much possible, and Tesla is looking for a way to make it happen. Of course, there’s also the super-quick battery swapping technique.

The battery swap only takes a couple of minutes, and Tesla is looking into that if drivers don’t want to wait for their battery to recharge. However, if the company can get charging times down to under 10 minutes, it will most likely completely change how we look at electric vehicles and could change the minds of many EV naysayers.

SOURCE: MIT Technology Review

Tesla targets 5-minute Supercharger recharges for Model S is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s been awhile since we last heard about Griffin‘s PowerDock 5 charging station — back in January at CES, in fact. However, the company finally launched the new product today and is touting it as a central place to charge all of your mobile devices, including tablets, complete with five charging bays with their own USB port.

What’s quite unique about the PowerDock 5 is that it includes clear plastic dividers that separate each of the charging bays, but they also act as a support for leaning your mobile devices against, and they’re strong enough to support a full-size iPad. Griffin is marketing the PowerDock 5 for iOS device, but we reckon it can be used with just about any other device as well.

As for specifics, each USB port is rated at 10 watts (5 volts DC @ 2.1 amps). 2.1 amps is enough to adequately charge a tablet and the extra amperage can charge a smartphone faster than the traditional 1 amp would, but if there’s anything you should know about battery health, it’s that battery life can degrade over time if you overuse amps when charging a phone, so that’s something to keep in mind for the future.

We took a gander of the charging station at CES and were surprised by how light it was. It’s essentially made entirely of plastic with a rubber base on the bottom to prevent it from sliding around on tabletops. As mentioned, the plastic dividers seemed strong enough to support even the heaviest of mobile devices.

The PowerDock 5 is priced at $99.99 and is available on Belkin’s website. We should also be seeing it pop up on retailer website as well in the next few weeks as the device becomes more ubiquitous. $100 is certainly a pretty price to pay for five USB ports, but if you’re looking for a neat solution during parties where your friends can charge up, the PowerDock 5 could make the shortlist.

Griffin PowerDock 5 arrives as five-port charging station is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We all know how a bowl of rice can save your phone after an unexpected swim, but that’s not all it can do. Before you know it, rice could be a very important ingredient inside all your devices’ batteries.

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In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

Granted, they’re lacking that ever-important rapper endorsement, but the OnBeats do have one important thing on their side: that giant atom-smashing ball in the sky. The black and orange prototypes feature a solar panel on the headphone band, with a battery in each ear cup. The panel feeds the batteries, which charge your phone via USB. For those times when solar charging isn’t an option — or you just need a full backup battery for a long day — you can also refill the battery by plugging it directly into the wall.

The headphones’ Scotland-based creator Andrew Anderson is asking the Kickstarter community for a lofty £200,000, with a little over a month to make up the £197,000 and change. If you want in, a £69 pledge will get you a discounted pair (in the Kickstarter-only black and green), with expected delivery around February of next year. Check out Anderson’s video plea after the break, along with some early OnBeat prototypes — and a sunshiney Spotify playlist to get you started.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

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Source: Kickstarter