Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

It is important that we all do our part to help the environment.  Our normal, daily activities are soon becoming more and more energy efficient.  Recently, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has issued a new guideline for all TV manufacturers to follow.  This new guideline is set to reduce the amount of energy each TV uses by 30% in efforts to help save the environment and will save you some money on the monthly electric bill.

With the holiday season approaching quickly, many consumers will be shopping for brand new HDTVs, whether it be for themselves or a gift for a loved one.  These TVs, as you can imagine, use up an enormous amount of electricity - some TVs can use up to 500 kWh annually.  Continued after the break.

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With the number of home-based entertainment and productivity applications that are running over home networks growing by leaps and bounds, some Wireless-G routers just can’t handle users’ demands.

Netgear saw this problem, and as a result, developed a new Wireless-N technology, which they feel is leaps and bounds above anything out there now.  The “Green” crowd will also appreciate Netgear’s new products since they are eco-friendly. 

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Imagine being able to power your smoke alarm in your house without ever needing to change your batteries. It would get it’s energy simply from the energy and vibrations from everything around it. That is the goal of Texas Instruments. They call it “energy scavenging”, and they say the reality is not that far away.

Employing the inventor of the original microchip Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments, currently the world’s third largest chip maker, is busy trying to break another electronic frontier.  This time by creating a chip that uses an infinitesimally small amount of energy to operate.  They actually did a demonstration showing a clock being run on…get this…grapes.

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Tired of all those chargers for all of your gadgets?  Cameras, cell phones, PSPs, laptops, everything has a power cord even if it’s portable.  In a few years that may be a thing of the past (well, maybe more than a few years).  Intel has been researching wireless charging technology and has shown it off for the first time.

Intel’s system uses two metal rings connected by to a power amplifier.  The two rings transmit power to any device close to it.  Sure, it’s not entirely efficient (the numbers seem to say it’s only about 75 percent efficient when transmitting 60 watts two feet), but it given time that could improve.  The Wired article assures that the technology is safe for humans, so that’s a plus.

Imagining the day when all our gadgets could be charged wirelessly, when laptops aren’t bound to the wall when the battery runs out makes me quite happy.  I doubt that day will come very soon, but it’d be nice if it did.

Read [Wired]

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We’ve all seen it happen time and time again. What was hot and happening even six months ago, is suddenly a dinosaur. It’s the nature of the ever-evolving technology game. Which is why industry giant Intel may just be well served by sitting up and taking note that the maker of cell-phone chips Qualcomm, just may be a major force to be reckoned with these days. 

With a latest innovation, the Snapdragon, Qualcomm packs a rather mighty punch in a tiny package. An engineer for the company demonstrated a palm-sized circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. While a fairly high quality video image is nothing new to write home about, what did make it pretty special was it’s microprocessor chip, the Snapdragon. This micro-chip drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers further sweeten the deal by saying that it will also cost less.

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