It works like this – the “piezoelectric kinetic energy harvester” – that means the thing that captures the kinetic movements of the phone – will turn the kinetic energy from moving your phone about and regenerate it into electricity – to charge the smaller-than-usual battery.

Not only should this theoretically make the phone a lot lighter, but understandably it’d make the phone charge by going for a jog or running around. Of course, there’s no possible way it could ever overtake charging – it’d never generate quite enough electricity. But it’s an interesting idea to charge your phone for when you’re out of battery in an emergency.

Maybe there’ll be a positive side to putting your phone in a washing machine.

[Nokia Piezoelectric via Engadget]

I don’t know if you’ve ever written solo for a blog, or run a personal blog, but writing for yourself is hard, and when you’re under the weather that becomes even harder, keeping on top of tech-disconnected work as well as the website.

So yeah, like I said, being ill plain sucks for solo writers. Because you’re the only one writing, I guess it’s just painful, and my advice is get some backup writers – something I’ve tried and failed miserably at. (If you’re interested…)

Still, on the mend, so see a lot more from me soon.

The iPad is preparing for a nice launch after much anticipation later this month. But so much has risen up since its announcement, so here’s a compilation of stuff about the iPad, in short, digestible chunks.

iPad to Support Emergency Calls?

The iPad has an interesting feature – the ability to support emergency calls. Check the video below.

So yeah, the iPad may be able to make emergency calls, in order to comply with the FCC.

Wall Street Journal is Coming to iPad

Murdoch states that Wall Street Journal will be coming to the iPad. Celebrate. Quote below:

Mr. Murdoch said the Journal planned to be on Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet computer. “In fact, we’ve been allowed to work on one, and it’s under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night,” he said in response to a question. “under padlock and key.”

A move to monetize and help control the quickly dying newspaper industry?

AT&T CEO states iPad will be ‘WiFi-driven, not 3G.’

Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, states:

“When you think of the iPad and how that correlates with pricing, the iPad — it is going to be interesting to see the customer reaction to the iPad. Our expectation is that it is — there’s not going to be a lot of people out there looking for one more subscription revenue stream to put on our network, as a result of an iPad. We think it is going to be a largely Wi-Fi driven product. And that is why you see the pricing of the model to be one that is prepaid in nature.

We are going to be anxious to see what the customer response to this is and how customers use it. How much Wi-Fi versus wide area network, and what will have to happen with prices over time, I don’t know. It is going to be an interesting one to watch. We think it will be mainly a Wi-Fi driven product.”

Til later.

Anyway, like said, the lawsuit is going ahead for 20 patent infringements, these vary from patents in mobile processing technology right down to UI infringement. It could be a stab at the Android operating system, but this seems highly unlikely – although HTC is the largest Android phone developer.

However, it is interesting to note that the case was filed with a local court as well as with the U.S. International Trade Commission – which don’t offer money for damages, but instead they can place a ban on imports of the product, which could seriously damage things for Google as HTC is based in Asia.

Apples complaint against HTC is embedded below.

[TechCrunch]

Plants vs. Zombies – it doesn’t get much better than this.

And now that it’s for iPhone, the fun gets better. It’s essentially a tower defense game – you have your house, and your lawn, back garden, or roof. You’ve got an an arsenal of strange and useful (or in some cases, useless) plants to fight for you – pea shooters that fire peas at the zombies, corn launchers that throw butter and kernels, and even coffee beans to wake up sleeping mushrooms.

The yard is divided into six rows and 9 columns in which zombies run and plants attack. Plant in strategic areas and plot your missions out – you get to see what kinds of zombies attack your house in the level before it starts. If the zombies reach your house, your brains are eaten and you must restart the level.

It’s cutesy fun that’s definitely worth checking out, especially for your iPhone.

Home is a virtual world for PS3 users that allows for interaction behind 'avatars'.

The suspect, Annamay Alexander.

Annamay Alexander, 43, mother of three, is currently wanted by the Oklahoma City Police Department, for seducing a 14-year-old child on Playstation Home. She met the child via the Home service, and began to message him, even sending him photographs of her partially clothed or in her underwear. It doesn’t stop there, though. She travelled to Oklahoma to see him and his mother, saying she was there to discuss the child’s desire to engage her daughter.

The mother of the child reprimanded Miss Alexander, yet she still messaged the child saying “I love you, we are going to get married” and “My body is yours, to do whatever you want with it.”

I mean, not only is this downright creepy, disturbing and immoral in every sense of the term, but it’s just a shocker at the kind of creeps you get chilling in virtual rooms like Second Life, Habbo Hotel and Playstation Home. And maybe this could bring to light a serious complication with the Playstation Home system – but it boils down to stupidity on the child’s half. I’m sixteen, and I wouldn’t exactly accept for a woman old enough to be my own mother to try and seduce me.

Whatever. Sicko.

[Gizmodo]

The Dell Desktop range at the moment boasts a refreshed Inspiron, coming in multiple colors, an XPS tower, and an iMac-style XPS all-in-one monitor PC. Their laptop range on the other hand, boasts Minis, Inspirons, also multicolored, Studios and XPS laptops. All of which very attractive.

So yeah, check out Dell’s new range. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[Dell]

Macbooks such as these were supplied to the students, unaware of the remote webcam feature.

A school in the US has been using their supplied laptop cameras to spy on students, theoretically. The Lower Merion school district, in Pennsylvania, recently reprimanded one of their students for ‘illicit activities in the home’. When asked how they knew what he was doing in his home, they supplied photographs – taken from the child’s webcam.

The school told students that the green light turning on and off on their webcams was simply a glitch and it was nothing to note about. Female students disclose that they’d be listening to music from the laptops while changing or taking a shower, and now worry if they have been watched by the school administration doing so.

There’s a Federal investigation into this, involving the FBI – if something goes badly, someone’s gonna land their ass in jail for a long time. What’s more, the school have admitted to activating said webcams fourty-two times. In two years!

We’ll just have to see how this all folds out

[Eye photo (front page) from Flickr]

It’s something that people can argue relentlessly in frequent and repetitive tirades and pointless banter – what’s the future of technology going to be like? Unless you’ve got some good idea behind it, claims that are farfetched (i.e. “tablet computing will replace laptop use”, “standard search is not necessary anymore”) are nowhere to begin. (If I’d like to add, the very possibility of standard search becoming useless is a silly thing to suggest – I search for everything, I almost never use ’social search’, which will apparently replace Google in the next 2 years.)

But hell, maybe it’s necessary for my own little selection of view for 2010. And I’m not talking anything fantastical, but perhaps something glaringly obvious.

‘Social Media’ Boom Won’t Last Forever

I’m not saying that Facebook will lose members, nor Twitter, but it seems to the way that these massive social networking sites will stop growing so exponentially soon – there’s a limit to how many people own a computer and how many people there are on the Earth – and surely Facebook can’t keep growing so fast – else it’d 6 billion people using it ‘weekly’ soon – and yeah, that’s completely impossible (unless we’re in some kind of utopia). But there’s a trend zipping about and it’s that of the social media bubble declining. We have Facebook, for connecting with friends, requiring very little to set up a page (unfortunately leading to a ton of little kids running around on the site). MySpace served that purpose for a while, but a clumsy interface and difficult-to-use system makes it less popular for younger and older audiences. Bebo, too, before that, yet a strange decline for little explicable reason. We have Twitter, for sharing short little quips to audiences that are beyond our friends, beyond people we even know – sharing everything with the public domain, making news heard (or retweeting useless crap from celebrities).

The thing is, I doubt that the Social media bubble will grow any further than the build-your-own website trend (Freewebs, Geocities, Google Sites, etc.) or even the vast expanse of rip-off search engines (mostly using Google tech). Or even the .com bubble, and remember the crash that caused when it burst. Doing business in social media, unless for the giants Twitter, Digg, Facebook and MySpace, is pretty silly. But remember – innovation is key. An innovative product causes a huge audience – Twitter was remarkable in the sense of its simplicity, an idea that’d actually never been done before.

"It's super fast because it hasn't got Flash slowing it down."

On a serious note though, I’ve gotta hand it to Gizmodo, this is the kinda stuff that makes people read it. Humour, and stuff no-one else would have ever thought of.

[Gizmodo]