When I talk to people about how mobile is changing the world, especially the developing world they often ask me how people who don’t have electricity charge their phones. I’ve got some nice pictures of places in Africa where one can pay to get their phone charged. Often it is from a car battery hooked up to an inverter, with a power strip and chargers attached. Nokia is far and away the most dominant phone manufacturer in the developing world and they aim to maintain that dominance. I think their new bicycle powered charger will help. It generates power to charge phones, much like the lights that are bike charged work.
Team that up with the newly announced Nokia C1 and it’s an amazing combination. The C1 battery is reported to last on a single charge up to 6 weeks. It also has a built in flashlight, FM radio and it can have 2 sim cards in at the same time. At $35 it is going to be popular I think.
That’s the lowest end of the new C Series phones. The C2 has some great features and 2 sim cards as well, but in the C2 they can both be active at the same time. I think I’m going to need one of these for traveling. The world is getting smaller every day and mobile technology is a huge part of it.
Browsing Posts in Hardware
My new Acer Aspire came in to work. It’s a compact machine that has what I consider to be very good specs for its size and price. Most importantly it’s pretty Linux friendly. The first thing I did was blow out Windows 7 with a Fedora 12 install. Here are a couple pics of it on my desk.
This system replaces a rather old and rather large HP machine that sat below my desk. My feet are happy with the new room that they get. I picked this machine up via Tiger Direct. Their customer service was solid in helping me get the order done and it arrived very quickly.
This was my first 64 bit Fedora install. Everything was pretty normal. The only issue I’ve run into is Adobe does not have a version of Air available for 64 bit Linux. They have instructions to install the 32 bit version but they are very out of date and I’m not comfortable with what they want done anyway. So I will be foregoing Air for the time being. Maybe this will motivate to get back to work on the twitter client I was trying to get done. I think we all agree the world needs more Twitter clients.
Folks from iRobot and the University of Chicago have been working on the DARPA chembots project. IEEE Spectrum has video and a short article on the progress thus far. The robots have soft elastic bodies and the articles author calls it, “…one of the coolest and weirdest robot prototypes we at IEEE Spectrum have ever seen.”
My work gave me an HTC Shadow to use. Not great, not bad. It is an acceptable phone which makes it much better than my last phone. (Sprint ppc 6700- worst phone I’ve ever used.)
Somehow I broke the LCD in the phone. I called t-mobile and since we didn’t have insurance on the phone we were out of luck. A replacement would cost over $300. That didn’t make anyone happy. While I figured out what to do, I was given a G1 as a loaner. I used that for the last couple weeks and really liked it. But what I decided to do in the mean time was order a replacement LCD and try to fix it myself.
I got a new LCD from RepairsUniverse.com for $45, including shipping. It included a little pry tool for helping with disassembly. They also have a video on youtube that shows the Shadow LCD removal process. The part arrived, I followed the video and my phone is all better. $45 and an hour or so of fun pulling apart my phone vs. over $300 to replace it. Not a bad deal. So – I recommend RepairsUniverse.com based on this experience. They would have also fixed the phone for me for an additional $25. Which might be worth it for some folks. But I really had fun doing it myself.
I do think the video, they have taken that particular phone apart a few times because getting some of the clips undone wasn’t nearly as easy at it looked in the video. I also saved because I found someone who had a nice set of Torx screwdrivers that I could use. They aren’t hard to find on the web and repair sites sell them, but I didn’t want to if I could avoid it as I don’t know that I’ll ever need them again.
I was sorry to give the G1 back, it’s a lot nicer than the shadow. Though it is quite a bit bigger, so I guess there is that. But I feel pretty confident that my next phone will be an Android based phone.
Canonical (the maintainers for Ubuntu Linux, based in South Africa) and IBM are planning on selling netbooks in Africa running their software. This looks to be an inexpensive option compared to full powered hardware with MS licensing on top.
I’ve mentioned this project earlier. (Should just be a couple posts down in fact.) Erik is on his way back to the U.S. from Africa now, I believe. But this post on what local tailors designed for the equipment is pretty darn cool. I wouldn’t mind having the backpack version myself. I love the AfriGadget logo bag too. The Ghanaian bags aren’t so much my style – but I bet they’d go over well with a lot of people. I know Ingrid would totally dig them. She lived in Ghana and has a real fondness for the country, people, art, etc.
The FLAP bag (Flexible Light And Power) is an interesting idea to bring a piece of usable tech to the developing world. I don’t know how one gets their hands on a kit but right now a friend of mine has taken 10 of them to Africa to have them tried out. As many say – if it works in Africa, it should work anywhere. That second link has videos of Erik unpacking the kits and checking them out before he left Florida for Africa.
Erik grew up in Kenya and last we talked he told me he has plans to return with some amazing ideas and dreams that he is going to try and implement in Nairobi. Cool stuff. You can follow Erik on twitter @whiteafrican or his blog. If you are interested in tech, Africa or development stuff (or all 3 like me) he’s a great resource for ideas and news.
