Belkin Surge Protector: Saves Energy Too!
CES proved the green movement is here and chugging along as countless products aimed at being eco-friendly were exhibited. Most of those products cost a bit more for assuaging your conscious about the environment. But what if you wanted to be green and save some green? Enter the lowly surge protector.
Belkin’s new Conserve Surge Protector, which is on display at CES, allows you to shut down six of the eight outlets with the flick of the giant remote control switch. This translates into the simple fact that with this surge protector you can now shut down all of your plugged in devices at once instead of one at a time. This is important when considering that devices left on that aren’t being used are a big and completely unnecessary drain of energy.
By simply turning things off that aren’t in use, we can all save as much as 20 percent on our energy bills!
That is nothing to sneeze at despite its somewhat hefty $50 price tag.
The Belkin Surge Protector is due out in May of this year.
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Includes iPhone cardboard cutout.
Perhaps they lacked a crackshot marketing team, the URL they wanted was camped by someone unreasonable, or — sadly — they just thought it was a good idea at the time. For whatever reason, these products and companies actually made it to fruition for our sheer enjoyment.
You know you’ve done it - you’ve been sitting at your desk and your coffee is cold. Or you think “wow…I would love to heat up my lunch but I know there’s a line for the microwave in the kitchen”. You wish you had your own microwave. What if you had your own a personal, portable microwave? Forget all those trips to the kitchen or treks to the cafeteria — now you can reheat coffee right at your desk or nuke some soup for your brown-bag lunch.
Wirelessinfo reviews the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and writes, “The Pearl has digital zoom. Digital zoom is only worth a single point because in virtually every case you’re better off not using it. What happens when it’s used is the picture is enlarged and cropped, which can be done much more gracefully and accurately with even basic image editing software…The Pearl has a fixed-focus lens. This translates into faster image capturing than auto-focus lenses, but worse quality overall…The Pearl has a flash, which is atypical for phone cameras. Further, it’s an actual flash as opposed to an LED that just stays on when flash is enabled. The flash is only good for a close range picture; when you get more than four feet away, captures will look dark and muddy. Even so, the Pearl’s flash puts it head and shoulders other over camera phones.”
Yeah, yeah, we know — another iP** dock — but this is actually one of the first docking audio speakers approved to work with the iPhone without either dropping into airplane mode or assaulting your ears with janky GSM signal noise (it also docks regular old iPods, of course). To boot, it charges the thing and has incoming call support — more than slightly mitigated by the fact that you still have to actually remove the phone from the dock to take the call, a drawback the Altec Lansing rep said was because Apple neglected to include support for passing call audio across the docking interface. Still, if you happen to use your iPhone as jukebox at home or work, you can pick up this quite decent-sounding speaker system in February if it’s worth $200 to you.
It’s just been a short two days since Apple rolled out its latest Mac Pro update, but that was apparently more than enough time for the folks at Primate Labs to get their hands on one and put it through its paces. They only got the 2.8GHz model, however, so they weren’t quite able to fully back up Apple’s claims that it’s the “fastest Mac ever,” but that’s not to say they didn’t find plenty to be impressed with. In particular, while the new system trailed the older, 3.0GHz model in floating point performance, it edged it out in integer, memory and stream performance — a feat all the more impressive considering the new 2.8GHz Penryn system is a fair bit cheaper than its speedier predecessor. Of course, those less concerned with saving a few bucks can opt for the new, top-end 3.2GHz model, which should give you plenty of benchmark bragging rights until Apple dishes out its next update.
