Hasta La Gadget!

Do you have an iPhone? You wanna know how you can get your friends to gift you an external battery pack? Support the ChargeBite’s fundraiser. The ChargeBite is a charger for 30-pin iOS devices, but it doesn’t have its own battery. What it does is draw power from other 30-pin iOS devices to transfer to your own. See where I’m going with this?

Inventors Liran Elihay and Asaf Gaber call their invention “a social charger.” The advantage of course is that you don’t have to carry an external battery pack and the ChargeBite never needs to be charged. I guess I don’t know have to tell you the obvious drawbacks of the ChargeBite, but I will make this clear – as far as I can tell you need two donor iOS devices to charge one iOS device.

I don’t think the ChargeBite is utterly useless, but overall I cannot in good conscience recommend that you support its fundraiser. We can’t fit two friends and their iPhones into our pockets. But years of reading about the likes of Brando have given me a soft spot for crazy gadgets and doodads. Just the fact that this actually exists should be enough for us.

[via Geeky Gadgets]

Many people rely on headphones and earphones for music and audio playback these days. It’s just a convenient way to listen to your tunes, without bothering the people around you. Now, scientists have come up with some cool new earphone tech. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have created the first graphene-based earphones ever.

Without any optimization, a single sheet of graphene can provide a frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.

The researchers used a graphene diaphragm that’s 7mm across and 30 nm thick, which was sandwiched between two silicon dioxide electrodes which cause the diaphragm to vibrate when power is applied. The material is extremely light and very strong – roughly 100 times stronger than steel – thanks to the unique properties of Graphene’s pure carbon structure.

While this prototype pair is unoptimized for playback, with some tweaks they could be. I’m just curious to see how expensive a production version would be.

[via Technology Review via Extreme Tech]

Google presented the Glass’ funny younger brother at the 2013 SXSW multimedia festival. While the Glass was made to act like your butler, the aptly named Talking Shoe is meant to serve as your hype man. What? It’s not like everything Google does has to be useful. Remember Google Wave? Or the Nexus Q? The company has a sense of humor.

As is only appropriate for a talking shoe, its brains are mounted on its tongue. It has a pressure sensor, an accelerometer and a gyroscope to help it detect whether you’re stationary or moving about, and what kind of movement you’re doing. It also has a Bluetooth radio to help it connect to an Android phone or computer. Last, but not least it has a built-in speaker, which it does not hesitate to use. It can also broadcast its comments over the Web if you’re brave enough to allow it.

Google made the shoe in collaboration with interactive media specialists YesYesNo and the wearable tech enthusiasts of Studio 5050. Just in case you’re thinking that the video above isn’t for real, here’s a demo filmed by The Verge straight from SXSW:

Up next, Instagram’s Talking Fork.

[via Google via Inventor Spot & The Verge]

Many people have no idea what was cooking up in Apple’s labs when the company was working on the iPhone, but a prototype from 2005 has appeared, and it features a roughly 8.6-inch display with a separate motherboard consisting of USB ports, ethernet, and even a serial port. It was the basis of what iOS devices came to be a couple years later.

Ars Technica ended up getting an exclusive look at the old prototype, and it essentially looks like a miniature table. Of course, the late Steve Jobs actually thought of the iPad first before the iPhone, so this actually could be an iPad prototype that was used to eventually make the iPhone that released two years later.

The photos come from a former Apple employee who says that “at that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be.” The prototype is roughly two-inches thick, so you definitely wouldn’t be able to slide it in your pocket or bag with ease, but the former Apple employee says that it was “really impressive seeing basically a version of OS X running on it,” during that time.

It should be noted that the chip that the prototype is running is the Samsung S3C2410, which is “a distant relative of the chip the first iPhone ended up using, just older and slower.” The prototype chip was clocked at around 200-233MHz, while the first iPhone used a 620MHz chip underclocked to 412Mhz. We’ve certainly come a long way since then.

[via Ars Technica]

Early iPhone prototype from 2005 was the basis of Apple’s iOS devices is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

All the way from China we’re having a glance at a set of prototype cases for the Samsung Galaxy S4, a smartphone device that’s set to be unveiled in just a week’s time. As it is quite often with releases such as this, the Samsung Galaxy S IV (or S4, whichever you like) is said to have had its basic physical specifications leaked to case-makers so that they might create protective bits and pieces for the hardware available when the device launches. While this situation can sometimes give us a healthy dose of early understanding, it can just as easily be a completely false scent – so keep that in mind!

The cases you see above come from MobileGeeks where they’ve gotten information from the case manufacturers themselves on the origin of the design. As the folks at MyLiving have let it be known that they’ve gotten information on the build of the Galaxy S4 straight from Foxconn, there is a real possibility that they are, indeed, legitimate. Foxconn is a manufacturing chain that over the past few years has become famous for putting together some of the most high-profile gadgets in the mobile industry.

What we can glean from these cases (the two black cases, that is), is that this Galaxy S machine may be working with a slightly less organic look than the Galaxy S III had. The salmon-colored case above is made for a Galaxy S III and the blue device to the left of the whole pack is, indeed, a Galaxy S III in the flesh. The Galaxy S4 appears to be essentially the same height as the Galaxy S III with a bit more bulk around the edges and, though you can’t tell from this photo, both cases appear to be made for devices with essentially the same thickness.

Several elements wash over from the Galaxy S III like the necessity for three holes right up top of the back on the case – one for a camera lens, one for a camera flash, the third for a speaker. The appearance of a power button hole on the case in the same place and the volume button also appearing in essentially the same space on the opposite side of the phone are also really rather indicative of Samsung sticking to its guns with how they intend you to tap on this smartphone.

You’ll also notice that these case designs bear exceeding resemblance to the cases leaked last month courtesy of MobileFun. Either this is what the Galaxy S4 will be shaped like, or there’s a real trickster out there poking fun at the case manufacturers one by one – we shall see!

Have a peek at the timeline below of Samsung Galaxy S4 articles from the past week or so to make sure you’re all up to speed on everything that’s known – and what’s about to be known, too. The big event for the reveal of the Samsung Galaxy S4 takes place on the 14th of March – we’ll be there with bells on, so follow along all day!

Samsung Galaxy S4 prototype case gets fat and sharp is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.