Nissan has joined the race to create and sell the first practical electric car, and they plan to do it come 2010 - approximately 1 year from now. The Nissan Leaf, as they call it, is expected to achieve up to 100 miles per battery charge with a top speed of 75 mph. The leaf is a pure electric car that runs on lithium-ion batteries and can hold up to 5 passengers. This battery is estimated to fully recharge within 8-16 hours, depending on the wattage of the outlet.
The target economies for this new future electric car are the United States, Europe, and Japan. The starting price for this innovative sedan will be somewhere between $25-30,000, a price that is much less than its prestige rival, the Tesla Model S which costs $58,000 and debuts in 2012. Hopefully these new electric cars pave way for making future cars less expensive and less oil-dependent.
Sony, one of the world’s top companies in cool gadgets and technology, has announced a new, advanced lithium-ion battery that will last almost 4 times as long as the standard lithium ion battery. This future battery is also said to be able to charge to maximum capacity in just 30 minutes, not to mention that it can be fully recharged over 2,000 times. These batteries use lithium iron phosphate for the outer material, which allows for the enhanced lifespan as well as a faster recharge.
No word yet on pricing details or an exact release date, but it looks to be in the near future. Speculators say that the batteries will start out being used only in portable power tools, and then soon after in regular electronic devices, such as cellphones, cameras, & flashlights.
The company Live Wire has recently come out with an electrical circuit test that can be used to detect intermittent fault conditions, or in other words, detect electrical components that aren’t working properly. This cutting-edge technology works by transmitting small signals into high-noise environments, such as power grids and telecom networks, and monitoring even the slightest changes in current. These arc fault breakers are capable of determining when electrical components are at risk for failure and help determine which components need to be fixed or replaced.
So how could this ever affect me, you ask? Well, if you plan to fly on an airplane anytime soon, you are at risk for any number of electrical failures on board, which could ultimately lead to the plane crashing. What this technology does is to help prevent these disasters from ever occurring. By simply monitoring the electrical circuits of heavy machinery, such as airplanes and heavy machinery, you can easily detect any type of mechanical failure before tragedy strikes. Hopefully, most airlines already use this type of technology, because you never know what could happen with some of those 20+ year old airplanes.
Rumor has it that Sony has designed a newer, slimmer play station 3 in hopes of boosting console sales. No one really knows if there will be any additional modifications to the system and most believe that just the design will be different. The previous version, Play Station II, has outsold the newer one by a couple hundred thousand, and Sony hopes to change that, hence the need for a new design.
Some of the reasons for this speculation are that countries have been noticing significant price drops in the PS3 consoles (perhaps in hopes of clearing out inventory and making way for the new ones) and there have also been a few leaked pictures of the device, as you can see here. Some believe it will be released within the next couple of months, just in time for the holidays.
Seeing as how there are over 2,000,000 burglaries committed each year (an average of 1 every 15 seconds), it’s no wonder security companies have been focusing on state-of-the-art technologies that will help reduce such an astounding figure, especially since that number has continued to rise each year. So what exactly is being offered to combat burglaries to homes and businesses?
One of the latest video security devices out there (which is quite mobile, in a sense that you can move it to different locations periodically) features some pretty innovative specs such as the following: starlight/infrared cameras, audio announcement (when someone enters the premise), hidden wireless cameras with motion detection, and the ability to watch it live from far away. Another cool aspect of this security gadget is that it records all of the videos to a hard-drive, which can be easily stored and don’t require changing video tapes.
Typical prices for such security devices run at about $500 a month, which isn’t bad, especially if you have valuables worth a lot more than that. Check out the video security link to learn more.
The new Scion iQ, Toyota’s next highly anticipated car is hoping to make its way to the U.S. come the end of 2010/early 2011. This new mini car is supposed to be more eco-friendly, able to achieve almost 55 miles per gallon. The best part of this new Scion is most definitely the new look. The previous Scions have always been quite boxy looking with not as much appeal, but this one seems to turn the tides.
The iQ will be able to sit 3 people, 2 in the front and 1 smaller individual in the back. The price is estimated to be about $15,000 and over 25,000 orders have already been fulfilled. This car will also be taking over much of Europe and Japan, as those two markets will be Scion’s area of focus.
Blizzard recently announced that they will proceed to make a movie out of the world’s most popular computer game, World of Warcraft. Sam Raimi, director of the Spiderman and Evil Dead series will be the director, and the same people who produced the box-office smash The Dark Knight will be working together.
Since previous video games that were made into movies have been notorious for doing poorly at the box office, it’s normal for people to expect the same with this upcoming movie. However, Blizzard hopes to break such expectations by using these prominent cinema characters mentioned above. No exact release date has yet been made but many suspect that this movie will be released sometime near the end of 2010, if not later.
The Tesla Roadster, first unveiled in 2006 at a California car show, is one of the most coveted electric cars available in today’s market. Some of the impressive specs of this electric beauty are that it can travel approximately 250 miles on a single charge from its lithium-ion battery pack, accelerate from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds (faster than a corvette), and can fully recharge in less than 3.5 hours.
Some of the downers of this car include a hefty price tag at around $100,000, a $1,000 delivery fee, a battery pack that only lasts 100,000 miles and costs a whopping $36,000 to replace it, and the inability to travel long distances. Surely, this is a car for the rich and famous. Hopefully, one day it will become more practical for the every day driver.
Remember in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise is using some state-of-the-art computer where he controlled pretty much everything just by moving his hands? Well, according to Microsoft’s head guru, Bill Gates, this technology has been in the works for quite some time and in as little as 1 year from now such technology could be released.
How this technology would work is by using built-in motion sensors on TVs and computer screens that would mimic human movements and integrate them into the system. This could mean that the function of a mouse and keyboard may be rendered obsolete in the near future, although, I doubt most people will be able to afford such future technology for quite some time. The nice thing about these future gadgets (besides being exciting) is that technology continues to improve and 2nd generation stuff will become even more affordable.
Apparently Nokia has a cool and unique phone in the works that will be able to charge itself without any wires. The phone accomplishes this by harvesting radio waves found in the air and coverts that energy into power for the phone. Such waves are derived from a number of different places, including TVs, radios, computers, and other mobile phones.
Since this phone is still in the development process, it is currently only capable of havesting 5 mw (milliwatts) at a time, which is just not enough to make the phone efficient. Nokia hopes to increase that number to 20 mw in the near future, making it more practicable to the typical cell phone user. While this type of phone does not have any kind of scheduled release date, the hope is that it will be ready within the next 3-4 years.