Cool Tech Reviews

If you have a Blu-ray DVD player and want to pick up some films at a bargain price, check out Amazon’s summer 50% off sale on what appears to be 116 different movies.

On May 24th Panasonic held a publicity stunt for their Evolta alkaline batteries involving a toy robot powered by two AA Evoltas climbing a 530 meter rope hung off a cliff at the Grand Canyon. Since it took 6 hours and 45 minutes, I don’t think robot rope climbing is going to become a spectator sport anytime soon, but it made me curious as to what Evolta batteries really are good for.

Looking at the specs from when Evoltas were announced in January, one claim is that they store more power than prior batteries which was apparently the point of the robot rope climbing.

The new battery cell has a discharge performance almost 1.3-2 times higher than that of the company’s existing alkaline battery cell. When compared, based on the discharge modes set by JIS and ANSI, it is the longest-lasting AA battery cell in the world, the company said.

In a comparative test conducted by the company using two AA cells, EVOLTA could flash a strobe light 277 times, while the existing alkaline and oxyride battery cells could set off 203 and 255 flashes, respectively.

Oxyride batteries are a variant of alkaline also from Panasonic designed for high-drain digital devices. However, even compared to ordinary alkalines, the numbers are closer to 1.3 than 2 in discharge performance although as always your mileage may vary. As for cost:

There is no manufacturer’s suggested retail price, but the expected market price for both a pack of four AA cells and a pack of four AAA cells will be about ¥590 (US$5.57). A pack of two D cells and a pack of two C cells are expected to be about ¥570 and ¥420, respectively. The prices will be approximately 15% higher compared with the existing alkaline battery cells, the company said.

So nominally you would be getting somewhat more power for your buck from Evoltas. Still, I find that these days a much more economical alternative to alkaline batteries for most of my gadgets is Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargeables. You have to recharge them yourself, of course, and you have to rotate your spares since the shelf life isn’t great (although they are working on that problem), but you more than make up for their initially higher cost with the repeated reuse.

However, the real advantage to Evoltas may well be in shelf life:

The recommended use period for all models of EVOLTA was prolonged from 5 to 10 years because the battery life was extended.

I recently had a number of Ray-O-Vac alkalines that I bought cheaply at a local store start to leak after about 3 years on my shelf. If Evoltas really do last approximately 10 years, then they would be perfect for stashing away for emergencies or whatever, and that sounds like the best argument for paying extra. For frequently replaced batteries, I would still recommend rechargeable NiMH.

I see that I haven’t mentioned solid state drives in nearly two years, but it is one area where technical advances are coming hot and heavy as indicated by yesterday’s announcement by Samsung of a 256GB SSD which could be shipping in products by the end of 2008:

Samsung late on Sunday promised what it says is a breakthrough in solid-state drives with the launch of its first 256GB SSD. The drive offers twice the capacity of the Korean firm’s previous 128GB SSD but is also much faster. The 256GB edition reads sequential data at 200MB per second, twice the rate of the original model, while also seeing an even greater increase in write speeds: where the earlier drive writes at 70MB per second, the new SSD writes at 160MB per second.

The big question of course is the cost and while Samsung isn’t quoting prices yet, there is some good news:

Rather than use costly single-level cell (SLC) technology, the company has managed to develop a multi-level cell (MLC) storage drive that transfers as quickly as the best SLC storage while costing much less to produce than past SSDs. Improvements to the storage controller have also extended the longevity to as long as SLC drives, giving the 256GB drive longevity as good or better than some rotating hard disks.

SLC and MLC refer to how much information can be stored in one flash memory cell. A multi-level cell stores more than the single bit in a single-level cell providing a greater areal density and lower cost per bit.

Samsung expects its new drive to be sampling for computer manufacturers by September and shipping to those clients by the end of the year; this applies to both a 2.5-inch drive for more traditional notebooks and a 1.8-inch drive for ultraportables and other much smaller devices.

No customers have been announced, but it will be interesting to see who jumps on board and how inexpensive these beauties really are.

Adam Pash at Lifehacker makes some interesting suggestions on how to Get Vista’s Best Features in XP. The sad part is that there is so little there beyond eye candy of dubious utility or applications for very specialized niches. In the latter category, I liked:

Take Quick and Easy Screenshots: PrtScrn has been around forever, but it’s never been the most user-friendly way to get a screenshot. In Vista, Microsoft threw in a screenshot utility called the Snipping Tool. Fact is, if better screenshots are important to you, there are gobs of excellent free screenshot apps available for XP like Screenshot Captor (original post), Clip2Net (original post), and Jing (original post), among many others.

Choose Clip2Net or Jing if you want to share your captures on the Web or Jing if you want to grab a screencast, but for my usual chore of taking screenshots and saving them on my PC, Screenshot Captor does the job and more. Screenshot Captor is for Windows only and is donationware.

The NY Times’ Laura Holson reports on the latest battleground with spammers as they have figured out how to hit cellphone users with unsolicited and unwanted text messages, which depending on your service plan, you may well have to pay for.

American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006.

Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one is too many.

“The reason this really burns people up is because they have to pay for messages they don’t want, and they shouldn’t have to,” said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a nonprofit group.

There’s some discussion of fighting with your carrier to get refunds, but more interesting is cutting off the spam before it arrives:

Most phone spam is actually e-mail that comes through gateways linking the Internet and cellphone networks, industry executives said.

Most wireless phones have a dedicated e-mail address. At AT&T, for example, it is a customer’s cellphone number followed by @text.att.net. Using computers, spammers create millions of possible number combinations, then send messages to those addresses.
…
All major communications companies give consumers the ability to thwart spam by changing the easily guessed e-mail addresses for their phones, or completely blocking messages coming from the Internet. They can do this by logging onto the company’s Web site and changing their preferences.

“I did that six months ago and I have not received any spam,” Mr. Melone of Verizon said. “No one, not even me, wants their cellphone to ring at 2 in the morning.”

The utility of blocking all messages from the Internet depends on how you use your phone, but changing the default email address is a precaution that everyone should take. And there’s more danger on the horizon:

But inconvenience is not the only downside; there is also the threat of viruses as phones become more like personal computers. Some companies are already preparing for this.

Last winter, Symantec, a maker of security software, introduced a product for smartphones that connect with the Internet to detect mobile threats, check for viruses and automatically delete spam or corral suspect texts in a folder.

Khoi Nguyen, a product manager for mobile security at Symantec, said the company developed the software mainly for Asia and Europe, where creative spammers try to steal credit card information or banking data through phones. He said he expected to see the same trend here in the next 6 to 12 months.

What percentage of mobile phone users do you think will install and correctly operate a mobile security package?