4 Great iPhone Apps

Money Magazine shared a few iPhone apps that you may already be aware of. Redlaser is probably one of the best, especially when it results in an instant price match at a retailer. Read more here.

Apple's iPad

You can't have a tech blog and not mention Apple's new iPad. The Wi-Fi version starting at $499 will be out around the end of March 2010, and the Wi-Fi with 3G version will be available one month after that for about $130 more. The good news about the 3G wireless access is that there is no service contract to sign for a specific period with AT&T; you only pay per month. The two plans will be either $15/month for 250MB of data usage or $30/month for unlimited data usage. Very exciting.

For additional details that you may not find on Apple's website, Engadget has laid out all that you may need or want to know.

OLED Laptops

This may be the future, but I wonder how far off it really is. Would you buy one?
Rollup Laptop Concept

USB 3.0 Coming Soon

It's time for an upgrade. USB 2.0 was a nice upgrade to increase data transfer rates, but USB 3.0 increases that data transfer by ten times. The other great thing about this upgrade is that it will be backwards compatible with other cables. Of course, to get the fastest speeds, you'll need the upgraded USB 3.0 port as well as the cable. More here.

The Future of Batteries

Popular Science Magazine has an interesting post on its site regarding a project to harness radio waves and convert them into enough power to keep handheld devices powered without having to plug them in.

Details here and below.

Nokia Working On Infinite Cellphone Battery
Nokia looks to device that harvests energy from ambient radiation
By Stuart Fox Posted 06.11.2009 at 4:02 pm 7 Comments

Infinite Power:

Who hasn't missed an important call or woke up at the wrong time because you forgot to charge your cellphone over night? Well, Nokia hopes to make that a thing of the past by developing a technology that would use ambient radio radiation to perpetually charge a phone's battery.

According to a report by Technology Review, the Nokia Research Center (NRC) has already developed a prototype that converts radio waves into electrical energy. RFID tags and crystal radios work on a similar principle, but the Nokia team hopes to develop a wave catcher 10 times more power than the current technology.

The NRC team aims to develop a power harvester that could store up 50 milliwatts of energy, up from the prototype's five milliwatt capacity. The article mentions that 50 milliwatts opens up a range of electronic devices to a life without a plug, as most MP3 players only use 100 milliwatts to operate.

Of course, the technology faces serious technical challenges relating to the efficiency of the harvester, but one of the NRC researchers says that this technology could be ready in three or four years. That lead should give us all plenty of time to come up with new excuses for not answering our phone, as "it was out of juice" clearly won't cut it anymore.

iPhone vs. LG Arena

We all know that the iPhone is the best smart phone out there, especially if you are into portable media. LG has announced it's new iPhone killer smart phone with a pretty slick touch-screen user interface. LG's new operating system is surprising similar to the OS used by the iPhone, but what is most impressive is in a couple of features that put the iPhone to shame.

First is the still camera. With a 5MP camera it dwarfs the iPhone's, wait, how many mega-pixels is the iPhone's camera resolution?

Second is sound quality. The LG integrates Dolby Mobile technology into the handset, improving sound altogether for video and music. Sure, music on an iPhone or iPod sounds good, but not this good.

The main question I have for LG is when will this be available in the US? I'm not sure why, but other than the iPhone, all the cool phones seem to be available outside of the US. Can anyone tell me why that is? So for the time being, I'll just have to wait and watch for the Arena to break into the US market. From there, it will be interesting to see if this really becomes the first true competition for the iPhone.

Free Up Some Hard Drive Space

If you are hurting for a little extra hard drive space, first of all, I'd be a little surprised due to the large size of hard drives these days. This may be more of an issue on a laptop. On a Windows machine, a nice little file called "hiberfil.sys" allows you to put your computer into "hibernation" when it's not being used. Supposedly this is to allow for a quicker restart from what you were previously working on without having to wait for a complete boot. It also saves the state of your computer so you don't have to re-open everything you were working on. There may be advantages to this, but that file can take up significant space. My laptop was using around 4GB simply to allow me that convenience. By going into the power settings and un-checking the "Enable hibernation" box, that file will be removed and will no longer be taking up space, no matter how precious that space may be.