Intel have just announced their brand new 310 Series of Solid State Drives (SSDs), and they’re happy to show off the ridiculously small size. Best of all, though, is that the company managed to pack in all of the same features and power of the x25-class of SSDs that these are meant to replace.

As Intel puts it, the new 310 Series of SSDs are able to deliver Intel x25-based performance, all in a package that comes in at one eighth the size of its predecessor. The ultra-compact design makes it possible for the SSD to have accelerated performance with higher-capacity hard drives in dual-drive notebooks. And Intel is quick to point out that the new SSDs are perfect for tablets, as well as military-grade or low-power, rugged, embedded apps. Not surprisingly, Intel is already showcasing the SSDs to potential buyers, pricing the 40GB model at $99, and $179 for the 80GB version. Check out the full press release below for more information. And check out the video below to see what Lenovo thinks of the new 310 Series.

Hybrid Batteries Last Twice as Long, Charge in Seconds

Some new batteries have been created by a company called ioxus that are capable of running a gadget for twice as long as a regular battery on a single charge. To add to that, the batteries have a charge time of just 90 seconds allowing you to easily charge them minutes before you need to go out somewhere.

If you charge the batteries for 20 seconds you get a partial charge when compared to the full 90 seconds.
It is expected that when launched, these particular batteries could power household gadgets such as kids toys, drills and other items around the house that use smaller types of batteries.

There is a trade-off though as the batteries last around 20,000 cycles which is a lot less than the "millions" of cycles possible with rechargeable batteries. But, with this being a different step in how batteries work, we are confident the company will up the number of cycles over the coming years.

Nokia Terminal Mode Demoed by Volkswagen [Video]

Volkswagen, the car maker released a video demo earlier today, showing how simple Nokia's Terminal Mode is to use.
With a vehicle supporting the technology, simply connect your Nokia device to your in-dash terminal, and navigate your phones screen, and menus via your car's inbuilt monitor. Enjoy!

Intel Working on Black Box for Your Car

At a series of press events last month, Intel demonstrated some of its auto-oriented technologies, including an event recorder, or so-called black box, which Congress is pushing as part of a piece of auto safety legislation inspired by the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. Intel sees such a black box as a natural part of its Connected Car research.


To show off how it works, Intel outfitted a Smart Fortwo with WiMax, the 4G wireless system that can provide high-speed data and Internet connections to anything that moves. As part of the system, Intel’s event recorder would be able to record basic telemetry of the vehicle and information like whether the seat belts were being used at the time of an accident, and a whole lot more.

“With new vehicles, there will very likely be video cameras inside and outside,” said Intel’s chief technology office, Justin Rattner, in an interview. “It’s not particularly new or stunning, but when you combine the cameras with GPS, you’re geo-tagging the video.” Essentially, the Intel event recorder would record 30 seconds or more of video and know exactly where and when an accident occurred.

While Mr. Rattner doesn’t expect the videos to be sent directly to insurance companies, they do make it easier for the police and insurance investigators to reconcile discrepancies in eyewitness accounts.

The event recorder would also be tied directly into a car’s existing computer control modules, so that investigators would know when or if the brakes were applied, for example, or if there was some mechanical malfunction. With sophisticated computer vision systems, the event recorder would also be possible to see what a traffic signal indicated at the time of impact or whether the driver ignored an important road sign, like driving the wrong way on an exit ramp.

Other applications could also be tied to the connected car, including remote start, the ability to report the position of potholes to local road crews and the ability to send a video of a car thief directly to the owner’s cellphone.

But just how much would such a fancy black box cost? Mr. Rattner said reports of such a device increasing a car’s cost by thousands of dollars were unrealistic, even though car event recorders could potentially be more sophisticated than airplane black boxes (which do not record video, for example).

“Most of the hardware costs will already be in these vehicles,” said Mr. Rattner, pointing out that drowsy driver warning systems and parking assist packages in luxury cars already deploy several video cameras. Within a few years these are likely to be standard features, with lower costs.

“Even in the aftermarket, I would be surprised if it cost more than a decent security system or navigation system in a few years,” he said. And we all know what’s happened to the price of navigation systems.

Mouseless – An Invisible Mouse

The computer mouse has advanced over the years by trimming down a little, becoming optical, becoming more responsive and becoming wireless to name a few advances. The next step is to get rid of the mouse altogether and have an invisible mouse, also known as Mouseless.

The concept was created by Pranav Mistry along with Patti Maes and Liyan Chang and basically gets rid of the mouse completely.

By using an IR sensor with some custom software, the movements of a hand on a desk can be interpreted in to mouse and finger movement allowing users to simple glide their hand on a desk and tap the desk with their finger.

The IR sensor sits on the back of a laptop and detects movement to the side of the laptop. By skimming the IR beam across the desk the software can pick up where the signal is cut off and calculate where your hand is and move the mouse pointer appropriately.

The system costs just $20 to build which is interesting and would allow laptop users to more comfortably work as well as carry less around when out and about.

The video below shows a demonstration of how the software works and how accurate it is. It's fairly impressive stuff and would be good for companies to adopt in the future.

ED Lights serve for an Energy Efficient Planet

We all want to cool our planet, we all wanna be a part of “Global Cooling” and fight “Warming”. Nowadays more products are released which is eco friendly than its previous version. Most of the electronics gadgets now use “Green” components which can be recycled later and serves the purpose without any harm to our environment. One such product is “LED Lamps”. An LED lamp is glorified for its energy conservation compared to its predecessors CFL and Incandescent.   A study by Carnegie  Mellon and Osram gives us a good insight into this and it helps us to defend the controversies.

First point is 98% of energy consumed by LED is emitted out as light and only 2% is used for light production. Next point is lifetime, an LED lamp is observed to have a lifetime of 25,000 hrs, where as a CFL has only 10,000 hrs. An incandescent lamp serves the humans for only 1000 hrs, so it needs 25 incandescent lamps to equate 1 LED lamp. This clarifies LED’s are more energy efficient and we can cut down energy consumption by 25 times (old days @ incandescent times). At present an LED may produce upto 30lumens/watt and research shows that in near future upto 150lumens/watt is possible. A comparison of energy consumption in KWH shows that an incandescent lamp consumes 24 times that of an LED and a CFL consumes 3 times of an LED. So LED proves its efficiency again here and underlines its stand to serve an energy efficient planet. AS of now LED’s are much efficient as CFL’s and we hope LED will overtake this position as LED lighting technology is still on its way to full realisation and a lot of promising research is going on in this area.

Note: This article is written by Mr. Sam Mathew who is an author of Circuits Today