Portable hydroelectric plant can charge your smartphone

Michael Franco/Gizmag

South Korean company Enomad made news a couple of years back when it placed mobile phone charging stations along the country's manmade Cheonggyecheon River. What was special was these stations used the force of the river to turn turbines and generate electricity. Enomad has been able to shrink that concept to fit it into a backpack. The company demonstrated it at SXSW and its also called Enomad. The bullet-shaped device is as large as a thermos and comes with a white translucent cover that hides four propellers you can place into flowing water to charge it up. You can also have it be towed by your kayak or other water vessels. You just need to get the propellers to spin and turn the internal turbine that'll charge the 5,200mAh battery. It supposedly takes about two hours to charge the device in a normally flowing stream.  

When you're finished charging you can take out the rotor section to get to the USB charging ports. It can supposedly charge an iPhone 6 roughly twice. The other use for it is you can put the cover back on and press a button to turn it into a lantern, making it the perfect companion for your outdoor adventures. Enomad plans to launch a Kickstarter project for this in early July with an expected retail price of $180 USD (around $230 CAD). 

Source: Gizmag 

New charging cable can top up your Android smartphone and iPhone

via GIPHY

A new Kickstarter project just might be the answer to all your cross platform woes. The LMcable is a charging cable that works for both Lightning and microUSB ports, which the iPhone and Android phones use, respectively. It has a reversible male end that has two differently designed sides. One of the sides connects to the iPhone’s Lightning port and the other connects to the microUSB port of Android devices. And then its other end is a standard USB male connector. It’s a rather stylish-looking cable as it’s wrapped in leather and comes with a brass buckle to make storing it away a bit easier. It also comes in four different colors: white, brown, black, and blue. Unfortunately, it won’t do data transfers so make sure to hold on to your respective Lightning cables and microUSB cables. 

The Kickstarter goal has already surpassed its $5,000 AUD goal over tenfold in 10 days. Currently the pre-orders you can still back include $21 AUD (about $20 CAD) for one LMcable, $45 (about $43) for three cables, and $1,400 (about $1,350) for the distributor pack which has 100 pieces. It’s expected to ship in April.

Source: Mashable

Kickstarter comes to Android

Kickstarter has finally come to Android, making it easier for you to discover new projects to crowdfund. It also has Kickstarter's activity feed so you can see updates from your favorite crowdfunders and projects your friends are interested in. The app gets the Material Design treatment so it doesn't stray too far from familiar Android apps. Kickstarter says they also plan on eventually adding tools for creators to manage their projects.

Source: Kickstarter | Via: Engadget

Nextbit Robin to start shipping on February 16th

Bucking the usual trend of gadgets taking too long to ship on crowdfunded sites, Nextbit has just announced they plan on starting shipment for its Robin handsets on February 16^th. The Robin is touted as the first “cloud-first” smartphone, meaning it’ll offload apps and data to a free 100GB cloud storage bucket when not in use. These bits of information will then be restored when you need it. Of course, we can’t say how smoothly this could work in real life just yet.

Early backers get first dibs, of course, so the first 1,000 should get their phones first. These are the GSM versions though. The CDMA models will come out at a later, unspecified date.

Source: Kickstarter | Via: Android Police