| Hand-cranked vending machine offers products sans power, refreshments during emergencies (video) Mar 15th 2012, 01:15 Ever needed to grab a bottle of water only to find the vending machine you've spotted is without power? The folks in Japan have, especially in the period immediately following natural disasters. The solution? Easy. A hand-cranked vending machine that still affords you the option of your desired food or beverage even during an emergency when the power is down. Sanden, a Japanese vending outfit, has developed the system that would allow the country's 5.5 million machines to run sans electricity or solar power and rely on good ol' fashioned muscle. You'll just need to dish out 70 cranks, in addition to the cost of your selection, and in about 20 seconds the kit powers on. The machine shown here will dispense around seven bottles before needing a full re-crank and there's no word on what the additional cost per vending unit will be. For look at the tech in action, hit the video above and prepare for a bicep workout. Hand-cranked vending machine offers products sans power, refreshments during emergencies (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink  CNET, BoingBoing |  CScout Japan | Email this | Comments | | RIM gets funky, patents fuel cell manufacture for mobile devices Mar 15th 2012, 00:26 If the engineers in Waterloo have their way, your future mobile handset may be able to recharge itself on-the-go with the help of fuel cells. A new patent from RIM describes a method of manufacture that sandwiches a fuel cell assembly between the keyboard and printed circuit board, wherein the fuel cell ventilates through the keyboard (and likely, channels in the keys themselves). The claims describe the PCB as being formed on the fuel cell -- perhaps in effort to reduce size -- to which a fuel tank is then located beneath the printed circuit board. It seems that users will be able to initiate the fuel cell assembly in some manner, as the claims also describe a conductive, metallic plunger on at least one of the keys that's able to fit through a hole within the fuel cell. One omission we've spotted right off the bat is a lack of description of how the fuel tank is filled, so perhaps we'll learn that tidbit another day. RIM gets funky, patents fuel cell manufacture for mobile devices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | USPTO | Email this | Comments | | Prestigio's Multi 9.7 Android 4.0 tablet has an IPS display, arrives in May for 199 Euros Mar 14th 2012, 23:38 We were so busy fondling gaming machines and touchscreen Ultrabooks at CeBIT last week that we missed that tablet you see up there. That would be the Prestigio Multi 9.7, which -- surprise, surprise -- sports a 9.7-inch display. What's intriguing to us (besides the fact that we're generally obsessed with this sort of thing), is that we don't see nearly as many budget 10-inch tablets as we do 7-inchers. As you can see in the video below, it has a nice, fingerprint-resistant rubber back, along with an IPS display and Ice Cream Sandwich as an OS -- not too shabby for what's clearly a low-end device. Then again, the specs are appropriately modest: it has 8GB of built-in storage (expandable via microSD) and runs on a single-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 chip, bolstered by 1GB of RAM. According to Notebook Italia, it'll hit Italy in May for €199, though it's unclear if it will be available in other countries as well. Head past the break to find a video of it in action (skip to about 1:30 in), and hit that source link for more pics. Continue reading Prestigio's Multi 9.7 Android 4.0 tablet has an IPS display, arrives in May for 199 Euros Prestigio's Multi 9.7 Android 4.0 tablet has an IPS display, arrives in May for 199 Euros originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments | |
