Hasta La Gadget!

There are already portable battery packs that have solar panels for recharging. The Trinity is a new kind of portable charger that uses a different renewable source of energy: the wind. It recharges its 15,000 mAh battery through its built-in wind turbine. Although it’s quite promising, I don’t think you should support it just yet.

Trinity weighs just 4lb. and when collapsed it’s just 12″ long, so it’s fairly portable. It has three aluminum legs that can either stay in a tripod arrangement or lie flat. Inside Trinity is a 15W generator and its battery. The current prototype has a 5V/1A USB charging port, although inventor Skajaquoda is considering adding an additional 5v/2A USB port for more power hungry devices like tablets. Here’s where it starts to get iffy. Skajaquoda also added a miniUSB port that’s meant to charge Trinity’s battery… via an outlet.

Why would they add a way to charge the battery that doesn’t use the built-in wind turbine? If you’re going to plug it in to charge it you might as well get a conventional battery pack that’s much smaller. The only reason I can think of for the addition of the mini-USB charging option is that Skajaquoda isn’t confident about Trinity’s charging speed through the wind turbine. Commenters on the fundraising site are asking the same question: How fast does it charge through wind power? Sadly, Skajaquoda didn’t include that vital data on their Kickstarter page and on their pitch video.

Breeze on over to Kickstarter to find out more about Trinity. The device can be yours for a pledge of at least $249 (USD), but again I don’t think you should back the project yet. I’m not saying this is vaporware or a scam. It’s an interesting and promising invention,  but at the same time there are important details about it that need to come to light before you plunk down your hard-earned cash.

[via GadgeTell]

This rather nondescript van is being powered by something much more beastly than your usual pistons: an actual airplane turbine engine. Seriously, over in Russia they crammed a real gas turbine engine inside this van (it fills up the whole van, basically) with gigantic hoses, an humongous fuel tank and a sweet control panel. It’s so powerful that it’s used to help power planes.

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If you’ve been following Technabob for any period of time, you know we’re big fans of Tokyoflash and their unusual watches. Now, here’s a Tokyoflash watch that is kind of a big fan itself. That is, it’s based on the fan blades of a turbofan engine.

The new Kisai Blade watch gets its inspiration from the blades of a turbine fan engine. When off, the face of the watch really does look like a jet engine. It’s got a stepped, smoked lens which conceals an array of LEDs arranged around a central point. The watch is based on a concept design originally submitted by Peter Fletcher to the Tokyoflash design blog.

When illuminated, the LEDs can tell time in one of two modes – one which works like traditional watch hands – and another which rapidly flashes the time by indicating each digit based on the angle of each hand. It’s also got a nifty animation mode which should be perfect for all of those raves I know you’ve been attending. If you want to see it in action, check out the demo video below:

The Blade is rechargeable via USB, and you can go about a month between charges. It’s available in black, gold, silver, or silver with a leather band, and in several different LED color choices. I think the all black with the red hands is my favorite.

If you head on over to Tokyoflash right away, you’ll be able to get in on the launch price of just $139(USD)- good until Thursday, August 29th at 11:00am Japan time.

You might want to strap on your seatbelts, as the ZTE 66 (which has already gone through the rigors at the FCC, only to get pictured afterwards) could very well be headed towards the folks over at Verizon Wireless, where it will be known as the Verizon Turbine .70. What you see above is an image that is part of a page that is residing somewhere underneath the labyrinth of pages inside Verizon’s internal system. It can be considered to be the confirmation of the ZTE V66 under the guise of the Verizon Turbine 7.0, where the latter is definitely a far more interesting name to roll off your tongue when someone asks you of the type of tablet that you are using.

Some of the rumored hardware specifications include a 7” display at 1,280 x 800 resolution, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM and a rather beefy 4,000mAh battery to keep it going. No idea on whether it will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box, or will you need to wait for an update from the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ZTE V66 could be known as “Turbine” when it arrives on Verizon’s network, Verizon’s ZTE V66 tablet gets pictured,

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