We’ve all had it happen to us. You’re out running errands and the battery in your Motorola RIZR dies. You’re at work with no charger and your Nokia N95 is chirping its low battery alert pathetically. You swear to the deity of your choice when you just can’t find the right charger for your Samsung M300. Or the worst of them all, you’re in a power outage and need to charge your cell phone.

The folks over at the Gadgetshop offers up the Wind Up Phone Charger. It is a great gadget that will provide power to your cell phone after a few minutes of turning the fishing reel-like hand crank. After those few minutes, you will have 25-30 minutes of charge restored to your cell phone. Read the rest of this entry »

While Apple goes to extreme lengths to keep the vastly overpriced iPhone locked down so as to protect their lucrative deal with AT&T, Google has gone the other way in announcing their Open Handset Alliance. The alliance joins 34 companies which will accept the Google Phone and it’s open source mobile platform called Android.

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Losing a cellphone can be quite the pain in the wallet, especially when you’ve picked up a newfangled device that costs a better chunk of your monthly salary. What’s even more tedious is the fact that you’ve got to key in all your contacts once again, but the Videotex SIM Card Backup Device 801A negates this need as it can restore data quickly onto a SIM card within moments, and is capable of displaying up to 1,000 contact details on its LCD display. Unfortunately, it currently works with GSM and CDMA SIM cards plus UK 3G SIM cards only. Interested folks will be able to pick up the Datopal Brand Videotex SIM Card Backup Device 801A for $16.

Source: Gizmag

Where the nicotine patch fails, perhaps a simple text message could do it. Any self-respecting smoker who have tried to quit before will definitely be able to understand the feeling of despair and tension they feel as they battle their inner demons, but hopefully the advancement of technology will be able to help them kick the habit without causing too much harm or stress.

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• Sprint with plans to unlock its phones

An unexpected move made by one of the big US cellphone carriers - Sprint - is the possible plan to unlock its phones so customers can use them with other networks. At the moment, the buy-a-cellphone scene with carriers in mind is pretty valuable because devices are much cheaper that way, but the scenario can change if Sprint decides so.

Sadly, there is a trick in this announcement made by Sprint - since they use a technology named CDMA, it means that the phones getting unlocked must support this technology in order to be used in other networks.
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Google have recently released a native version of Google Maps, for Symbian.

Compared to the older Java version of the program, this has lots of advantages, the most obvious being start-up speed and runtime speed. Every animation is smooth, loading times are blazing if you have a good connection.

An added feature would be the GPS support. This is really cool as long as you have an always-on connection, especially when on foot. It’s got all of the search features you know from the online version of Google Maps.

Read on for some hands-on reports and screenshots.

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While you might scoff at the idea of a battery-powered cellphone (aren’t they all anyway), Sanyo’s prototype is different since it uses a single AA Sanyo Eneloop battery instead. It eschews the traditional candybar format in favor of a cylindrical cannister design, sporting braille-like keys. Since an AA battery can’t do much, features such as an LCD display, SMS, 3G connectivity, camera, and even MP3 playback has been removed, making this a purely conversation-only handset. This Sanyo cellphone will run only on Willcom’s PHS network in Japan so those residing elsewhere are out of luck.

Source: CNet Asia

AT&T and Napster work together

The biggest mobile service available on the US - AT&T - and another giant of the digital music service - Napster - will be working together again in the near future to provide wireless downloads of songs from the Napster catalog.

The prices at AT&T can be considered expensive when comparing to iTunes and Sprint Nextel, both sell songs at $0.99 each. In case you are wondering, on AT&T there is a bundle offer that lets you download five songs for $7.49, and single songs cost $1.99 - twice the price of iTunes/Sprint.

For the AT&T director - Rob Hyatt - the high price is suppose to be attractive to “young music fans” that want to make instant purchases, but I have my doubts about that.

On the other hand, if you are more interested in not having limitations on the number of song-downloads per month, Napster offers a monthly subscription fee of $15 for mobile devices (cellphones, PDAs, etc) and $10 for computers.

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