Hasta La Gadget!

Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Now that there’s a version of the Microsoft Office suite available for the iPad, it’s a decent time to make sure your tablet’s case looks like it means business. From the makers of the much-loved Cord Tacos, This Is Ground’s Cargito iPad cases combine simple design with hidden treats. They’re loaded with mobile charging options and compartments for sidecar necessities.

The Cargito Air Charging iPad Case comes with a 7000 mAh battery in a zip-up compartment and an integrated Lightning cable that lets you give your iPad a full recharge in transit while it’s tucked inside the full-leather sleeve. There’s also a smaller and cheaper version — the Cargito Mini Charging iPad Case — made for the iPad Mini.

Both sizes include a strap that’s fitted to hold a Pencil stylus, a compartment for your business and/or credit cards, and a zip-up pocket. In the charger-equipped versions of each case, the rechargeable battery goes in that zip pocket; there are also non-charging versions of each sized case that free up that zip compartment for spare change, hard candy, or a pocketable amount of what-have-you.

These high-end cases come with some high-end price tags. The Cargito Air Charging case costs $165, and the Cargito Mini Charging case goes for $155. If you want to supply your own battery pack, you can save a little bit: $109 for the larger non-charging version, and $99 for the non-charging Mini version.

Color options abound. Each case size comes in eight colors, including various shades of brown, black, white, and gold.

Most of us charge up our smartphones and tablets when we sleep, but how many of us actually do so without having to plug in our device to a nearby power outlet, where most of the time, these power outlets would be located somewhere near the bed? Vodafone has something up their sleeves which could very well change the way we juice up our devices, and that is by doing so while you snooze the day away. At the recent Isle of Wight festival, Vodafone’s presence is clearly felt, the least of those being their ever present Recharge-Trucks that carry enough juice to power up to 2,000 phones simultaneously. This time around, the folks at Vodafone want to do better by offering wearable technology that can power up your peripherals and gizmos, relying on nothing else other than your body heat and movement.

The Power Pocket is a device that has been incorporated into a pair of Power shorts as well as the Recharge sleeping bag, where both of these have been joint developed with the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton. The Isle of Wight festival is a good place to use these as a trial run, and basically to charge up your smartphone while you sleep requires technological wizardry, and not magic. Basically, in the Recharge sleeping bag, as your body dissipates heat on the inside layer, there will obviously be a difference between that temperature and the colder one on the outside, and thanks to the Seebeck effect, this is where the power is generated.

It has been described by one of the persons behind the Recharge sleeping bag, “Eight hours in the sleeping bag, roughly speaking, will provide 24 minutes of talk time and 11 hours of standby time. That’s assuming the inside of the sleeping bag is 37 degrees – human body temperature.”

If one were to take the Power Pocket shorts into consideration, it is touted that an entire days’ worth of walking and dancing in the Power Pocket shorts will allow one to juice up a smartphone for four hours, not too shabby, eh?

Press Release
[ Vodafone allows you to charge up your smartphone as you sleep copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Hopefully, you haven’t paired up your Nissan Leaf with a GE WattStation for charging; if you have, you might want to power up with Ye Olde Wall Outlet for a short while. GE has confirmed to the New York Times that some Leaf drivers have encountered “problems” after charging up their EVs from WattStations. What problems? GE isn’t going into detail, but a Nissan regional manager claims that the the charging systems of 11 Leafs have been damaged after plugging into a WattStation. Whether or not there’s a crisis or a coincidence is still up in the air at this stage. Nissan isn’t issuing any warnings or recalls, and GE will only say that it’s “actively working” with the automaker to find the root cause. All the same, we’ll be cautious until the companies turn a new… you guessed it.

Update: GE reached out to us with the full statement, which you’ll find in the comments below. The company is mostly touching on what it mentioned earlier, but it’s adding that the WattStation meets the needed SAE and UL standards. Other EVs haven’t encountered problems to date.

Filed under: Transportation

Nissan Leaf, GE WattStation embroiled in charging damage shocker, invite other EV puns (update: full GE statement) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 05:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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