Gadgets Archives - Page 18 of 33

Jul 26

Anker releases faster, smarter GaN chargers

Charging up your power-hungry devices is about to get faster and more convenient. Anker, manufacturer of our best portable charger pick, has announced a new, third generation of Gallium Nitride (GaN) chargers that promise a smarter and more efficient charging experience in an even smaller form factor. Until recently, silicon was the preferred charging technology used in most laptops and mobile devices.

GaN technology more efficiently converts energy into power, producing less heat so internal components can be placed closer together. This means that even those huge laptop power bricks can now be replaced by more diminutive chargers. Anker already makes a ton of popular USB-C chargers, many of which include a previous generation of GaN.

With its latest products, Anker adds PowerIQ 4.0 technology, which not only tells the charger exactly how much power is needed for each connected device, but constantly adjusts the distribution to make sure each USB port is getting what it needs. Previously, if you had two devices plugged into a multiple port charger, I said a laptop that requires 65W of power and a phone that uses 15W, and you disconnect the phone, your laptop wouldn’t get the extra charge.

With GaNPrime, the charger will recognize that the phone has been disconnected and cleverly redistribute and reallocate the available resources. It also determines which device has the lowest battery level and prioritizes that device. That way, if you need to quickly charge up your laptop before heading out and it’s only at 20%, it will get powered up before a phone that’s already reached 80%.

In addition to reducing the size of the chargers (for example, the Anker 737 GaNPrime 65W charger is 53% smaller than the Apple 61W charger), Anker says GaNPrime saves energy use since more efficient charging takes less time overall. And because the new chargers are compatible with over a thousand mobile devices, you’ll likely need to carry just one. Hallelujah!

To take advantage of this new technology you need one of the new GaNPrime multi-device chargers, which range from 65W to 150W of power output, and a USB-C cable. Here’s what to look forward to.

Anker

At 150W this charger has the highest power output of the GaNPrime series. It has three USB-C ports and a USB-A port to distribute that power to, making it capable of fully charging a 16inch MacBook Pro in 1.7 hours.

Anker

This 120W charger distributes the power output between two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, so you can simultaneously charge a laptop, smartphone and a smartwatch. It can charge an iPhone 13 up to 3 times faster than an original 5W charger can.

Anker

This is the smallest GaNPrime charger with two USB-C ports and one USB-A port outputting 65W of power.

Anker

This power bank does double duty. Use it as a wall charger and you’ll get 65W of output, enough to charge a MacBook Pro in 50 minutes. Take it on the go and the 30W output can charge your

Jul 25

Smartphones, other gadgets in China: Will the decline end in 2nd half?

China has a huge consumer electronics market. /CFP

Smartphones and other gadgets – or consumer electronics as some call them – have witnessed a decline in sales in the first half of 2022 in China. The reason behind that is not only related to COVID-19 control measures, as some may think. And the future seems to be getting better but is still not clear.

A 10-week decline in smartphone sales took place in China from late January to April, according to data from market researcher Counterpoint.

Many media outlets said this signified that the once rapture market has finally calmed down after years of tumbling. But the latest data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a government research institute, showed that shipments bounced back by one-third in June compared to that in May. The June data also beat last year’s numbers by 9.2 percent.

It seems like the decline in the smartphone market is coming to a stop. But the sales data during the “618” shopping season told us another story.

Source: Counterpoint Weekly Tracking Service

During the season, the only major brand that saw year-on-year growth was Honor, which separated from Huawei in 2020 to become a standalone. Other brands, including Apple, performed strongly in China with the iPhone 13 series, all saw a sizable decline in sales.

Many Chinese smartphone reviewers expressed their complaints about the heating problems in Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon chips, which power many flagship smartphones in China. Like many of Apple’s A-series products, the chips get too hot under heavy use that they have to “throttle” – run slower – to prevent breaking.

“It seems that the chip’s design is great, but it was ruined by Samsung’s problematic manufacturing tech,” one reviewer concluded after testing dozens of recent Snapdragon-powered phones. “Newer chips may be built by TSMC so expect them to be a bit better.”

The Snapdragon 888 and 8 Gen 1 chips are not so welcomed like many of their previous products in China. /CFP

People’s will to upgrade their smartphones also seems to be fading, as the recent devices have become so powerful that many light users no longer need to get a new one – they just replace the aged batteries instead, as the hardware is still fast enough to keep WeChat running.

A similar thing is happening to TVs as well. One of the most important upgrades in recent years – HDR – is not even understood by a lot of Chinese buyers. Most people just go for larger sizes without looking at other features. After all, most Chinese people can only watch less than a handful of 4K channels and a few dozens of 1080i ones, and the mainstream streaming services only provide content at a pathetically low bitrate with which many

Jul 23

This tiny portable wearable mouse lets you universally control all your gadgets with gestures

One wearable to rule them all…

What VANZY offers is best described as the future of Human Interface. Conventionally, we used keyboards and mice, then we used touch-sensitive displays. However, now, VANZY lets you control all your devices with their hand gestures, sort of like Tony Stark. Designed to sit on your finger like a ring, VANZY is an Air Mouse and a motion-sensing controller that gives you advanced controls over all your devices. You could swipe or perform gestures to move slides in a presentation, increase or decrease volume while listening to music, skip the intro on Netflix shows, play games, or do a variety of other things. VANZY’s ring also works like a computer mouse or trackpad that allows you to use it as a conventional cursor controller on your laptop or tablet, sort of like a wearable mouse. You can even control elements in VR, and potentially even use the VANZY to keymap some words, making it quite literally the ultimate input device for any gadget you have… and it’s small enough to fit around your finger.

Designer: CoX Space

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $129 (31% off). Hurry, for a limited time only.

About as small as a ring, VANZY comes with a 9DoF sensor that allows it to perform high-quality 3D spatial recognition and an advanced chipset that allows it to recognize as many as 7 different gestures across multiple software and on Windows, Macintosh, Android, and iOS devices. The premise behind the VANZY is simple – in a world with multiple devices that you control by touching and tapping with your fingers, why can’t your finger just be a mouse instead, working like a wand to operate any device it’s connected to? To that end, VANZY works with phones, tablets, and even laptops via Bluetooth, letting you operate them intuitively by waving your hands, or use the trackpad on the VANZY to control them more precisely.

The finger-worn ring works in two ways – either by recognizing movements and gestures, or by allowing you to navigate your device via the trackpad on top of the VANZY. The trackpad works just like the touch surface on your TWS earbuds does. You can keep the mouse functions by touching and dragging your thumb; left touch to left-click, right touch to right-click, and swiping for scroll-down/up on the VANZY. As far as gestures go, VANZY recognizes common gestures like swiping left, right, up, down, circling clockwise, anti-clockwise, and moving forward (like you’re pointing in the air).

Morning Routine – Turn your finger clockwise or counterclockwise to adjust the volume on your earbuds without taking your phone out first.

Move the Desk to your Fingers – Thumb control over an air mouse for all of your devices.

At Work – Perfect companion for lectures, presentations, and meetings. VANZY gives you precise control, even from a distance.

For Content Creators – Makes the discomfort of swapping between devices a thing of the past. Just use your finger.

Watching

Jul 22

Guardians Gadgets and Goodies by Gregg Jacobs

Whenever Disney opens up a new attraction, particularly an E-ticket, there will invariably be an avalanche of related merchandise available. Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind, which opened this past Memorial Day Weekend at Walt Disney World’s Epcot, is no exception.

The items range from standard to cool to quirky (Star Lord helmet, anyone?). Today we’re going to take a look at some of the standouts, and I’ll give a tip on how to buy them without waiting in a long line.

Without further ado, here are a few of the items that grabbed my attention.

Let’s start with clothing. Anyone of my generation remembers having a Members Only jacket in the 1980s, and I believe that style is back, at least in the form of the bomber jacket worn by Peter Quill/Star Lord in the Marvel movies.

You can be 80's cool with this Star Lord faux leather jacket. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.
You can be ’80s cool with this Star Lord faux leather jacket. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

You can have your own version of the jacket, made from faux leather, as per Disney. I know I’m an old ’80s geek, but this one is actually kind of cool. Adults can have one for $99. There’s also a children’s version for $79.

As usual, there are also several variations of T-shirts available. The one that stood out to me is kind of simple.

T-shirt with logos you see all over the ride. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

It features symbols of the ships from the ride with the heading, “Spaceships,” and says Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s yours for the somewhat steep price of $36.99.

For our limited edition merch collectors, there are a few things for you, too.

Pin collecting and trading isn’t at the fever pitch it was a few years ago, but some, like me, still like to grab a few that remind them of something special. For annual passholders, you can again get your ’80s geek on by buying this limited edition pin.

There's a limited pin to honor the ride opening date. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.
There’s a limited pin to honor the ride opening date.

It looks like the cassette mix tape you know you all made in 1984, and on the front, it says “Launched 5-27-22” in honor of the ride opening date. It doesn’t have an edition number that will be sold, but grab it soon, because Disney could pull it at any time.

Also in the limited time only category is the Guardians Magic Band.

The Guardians magic band is available for a limited time. Photo by Gregg Jacobs.

The band is black with a star field that reminds you of the ride, the Guardians logo and images of the spaceships. It’s, again, available for a limited time and costs $39.99, in line with other “specialty” bands.

Getting back to basics for a moment, there are of course the normal assortment of T-shirts, mugs, and key chains. Nothing wrong with that and in this particular case, will give Disney props for making them interesting. For example, there’s a mug with funky design.

This mug could have been used in

Jul 22

The 7 coolest artifacts & gadgets stored away inside ‘Warehouse 13’

Without a history-spanning treasure trove of artifacts to line its musty, dusty shelves, Warehouse 13 (streaming all month long on Fridays as part of July’s nostalgia-bound SYFY Rewind) would feel like a pretty barren and boring place. It’s the artifacts, after all, that give the magic-sleuthing series its raison d’être; the stuff that makes an unassuming giant metal shed in windswept South Dakota far, far more than the sum of its rusted, rickety parts.

We’re not gonna lie: There’s really no way to rank the relative greatness of all the (sometimes literally) killer artifacts that crossed our fearless agents’ paths over the course of five seasons and 64 insanely imaginative episodes. Artifacts are the show’s sci-fi lifeblood, and nearly every Warehouse 13 episode comes packed to the gills with magical relics both important and insignificant. Some of them — like Ferdinand Magellan’s Astrolabe — are seriously high profile, serving as season-spanning plot devices; while others appear only in fleeting moments as comic-relief afterthoughts…usually just to mess up the workflow for Artie (Saul Rubinek) and the gang, who have a bad habit of casually leaving them lying around.

But in a show that’s all about whipping the unexplained into safe, securely-stored shape, a handful of artifacts still stands out in our memories — even nearly a decade on from Warehouse 13‘s 2014 series sign-off. Here’s how we rate our favorites, with a friendly reminder from Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) about how to listen to your vibes whenever something in the immediate vicinity feels just a little bit off: “When something has no explanation, then the explanation is there’s an artifact involved!”

7: Harriet Tubman’s Thimble

In series lore, Harriet Tubman’s thimble once belonged to the famous Civl War-era activist, imbued from the start with the power to infuse light-bending qualities into the garments she sewed for escaped slaves fleeing oppression via the Underground Railroad. But a pinky-sized device that can fool people into thinking you’re someone else can come in pretty handy in the present day, too — especially if you’re up to no good. Helena G. Wells (Jaime Murray) had exactly that in mind when she debuted the magic-infused thimble early in Season 2, though it would go on to pop up in later episodes, after HG was on friendlier terms with the gang, as a useful good-guy tool.

6: The Tesla

Eddie McClintock as Pete Lattimer with the Tesla gun in WAREHOUSE 13 Episode 410 “We All Fall Down” . Photo: Steve Wilkie/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Our heroes wouldn’t get very far without wearing a standard-issue enemy neutralizer at their hip, and when you’re up against specters, spirits, and mad scientists from the restless past, no ordinary weapon will do. Carrying the prestige of a Nikola Tesla pedigree, the Tesla serves as one part stun gun and one part Men In Black-style memory eraser, wiping the minds of hapless