Hasta La Gadget!

Anyone who’s ever attempted to use a laptop on a sunny summer day can surely tell you that direct sunlight is not your friend — that’s why we like to ride out the season in our dark basement apartments. If only there were a way to harness the sun’s rays for good, instead of evil — like powering your PC while you’re off doing whatever it is that normal people do when it’s sunny outside. First introduced for the African market, Samsung’s NC215S will be hitting Russia in early August for 13,999 rubles ($479). The netbook sports a lid almost entirely monopolized by a solar panel, which contributes to an overall estimated battery life of 14.5 hours. The NC215S packs a 1.6GHz N570 Intel Atom dual-core processor, 250GB of storage, and 1GB of RAM into a 2.9 pound frame. It’s almost enough to make us want to venture out into the sunlight. Almost.

Update: The folks at Liliputing have been told the NC215S is heading stateside on July 3rd, with a suggested retail price of $399, so it looks like you’ll need to stay planted in your patience for just a few days more.

[Thanks, Marco]

Samsung NC215S solar netbook will see the light of day in Russia originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The army of high-speed broadband phones is actively seeking new recruits to join its rapidly-growing force, and the LG Revolution is the latest to graduate from boot camp. We’ve witnessed the emergence of three Verizon LTE handsets in as many months, beginning with the HTC Thunderbolt and the Samsung Droid Charge a few weeks later. As if this wasn’t enough choice to tempt your tastebuds already, the LG Revolution — the entertaining climax to the classic 4G trilogy — was born one full moon after that. With three options, all so close to each other in dimension and features, it’s natural to compare all of ’em and make the call on which one is the best of the bunch. Is LG’s first crack at Verizon’s LTE network truly a game-changer, as its name suggests? Or does this Revolution fail to even get its feet off the ground? Read on after the break to find out.

Continue reading LG Revolution review

LG Revolution review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To find out the best laptops of 2011 so far, we checked in with Mark Spoonauer who, as editor-in-chief of Laptop Magazine and Laptopmag.com, oversees 140+ notebook and netbook reviews every year. If you’re buying soon, buy one of these. More »

Finally, an invention John Waters can get behind. When the harbinger of filth brought the odiferous experience to screenings of Polyester, he took the scratch-and-sniff route — including scents like glue and feces — now a team of researchers at the University of California in San Diego are expanding on the smell-what-you-see concept, albeit in a much more high-tech fashion. In collaboration with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the team has developed a method for generating odors that could pack the appropriate hardware into a device “small enough to fit on the back of your TV.” Basically, scents are produced by an aqueous solution, like ammonia, which is heated by a thin metal wire, and eventually expelled, as an odorous gas, from a small hole in its silicone elastomer housing — and, bam! You’ve got Smell-O-Vision. The team has tested its method using perfumes by Jennifer Lopez and Elizabeth Taylor, but have yet to create a working prototype. For the sake of innocent noses everywhere, let’s hope Mr. Waters doesn’t get a whiff of this.

Scent generator threatens to waft Odorama into the 21st century originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After ditching USB for an iPad-like 30-pin port, Samsung will now charge you $20 to add it back

Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab Adapter adds a USB port to your ten-inch tablet. Just like Apple’s camera connection kit, it hooks into the 30-pin connector and provides a USB port. Unlike Apple’s connector, it will let you hook up pretty much any kind of USB device, including but not limited to “keyboards, mice, thumb drives,” according to Samsung’s blurb.

Mice? Yup. The pitch continues “Insert a USB mouse or keyboard to improve enterprise efficiency at the office or at home.” I did a little digging and it turns out that if you hook up a mouse to the Tab (via USB or Bluetooth), a mouse pointer will appear on the screen.

This could actually prove pretty handy. Whenever I use my iPad along with a Bluetooth keyboard, it’s jarring to have to reach up and touch the screen for editing. While I know that Apple will never, ever add a mouse pointer to iOS, I can appreciate that the feature would be useful on occasion.

The dongle is designed only for the Tab 10.1. The seven-inch Tab already has its own USB port, so you don’t need this anyway. $20.

Galaxy Tab Adapter USB [Samsung via Engadget]

See Also:

• iPad USB Camera Connector Works With Keyboards, Audio In-Out …
• New Galaxy Tab 10.1 Thinner, Lighter Than iPad 2
• Samsung Chief Calls Galaxy Tab 10.1 'Inadequate'
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Hands-On: A Plastic Toy With a Gorgeous …