NovoThink Solar Surge charger for iPhones and iPods

We got used to see solar chargers appearing all around especially before summer. We’ve seen and reviewed a good slag of them. Mostly, solar chargers require a bit of compromise in day-to-day usage – freedom they offer can be bogged down by taking care of them like leaving the thing in the sun and carrying extra weight. Anyway, here is a one more solar power gadget, the one for iPhone and iPod this time.

NovoThink, the company which designed and is selling Solar Surge solar charger for iPhone/iPod has done an amazing thing. First, NovoThink has approved their solar cell case at Apple, which means it will actually work. Second, it’s specs are really impressive. Solar panel distributes 5.5V at 100 mAh if there is no clouds whatsoever, then, after two hours you will have 30 minutes talk time on 3G and double that on 2G. Solar Surge inbuilt battery is 20% bigger than the iPhone’s and can be charged via USB 2.0 while synchronizing data. Approximate dimensions are: 4.9" x 2.7" x 0.9", weight is 7 oz. In addition you can choose from a vast variety of colors. The only problem about the Surge I can imagine is that high temperatures may cause problems for lithium ion batteries which is kind of worrying if it’s meant to stay in the sun.

Crysis on iPhone thanks to OTOY and AMD next-gen GPU

This isn't a prank really. Crysis on iPhone does mean exactly the same game by which performance gamers have been measuring desktop abilities for the last couple of years now and a standard Apple smartphone. We don't even say you'll need a latest iPhone 3GS or even 3.0 firmware to pull that out. All you need is an OTOY 780KB app and that's it. But there sure is a lot behind the scenes in which we are also interested, so let's have a look at how on Earth it is possible.

Hardcore desktop 3D gaming on a smartphone has a lot to do with AMD's recently unveiled next-gen GPUs. Features like DirectX 11 support and 2.5 teraFLOPS floating point made OTOY think of using these enormous powers for "remote" gaming. Yep, no foolies, you haven't seriously suggested that someone shoved an AMD GPU into a poor iPhone, right? Game rendering is done on OTOY servers and then pushed to the phone. The above named name app copes only with I/O. And it's not just Crysis I should say. Demos of GTA 4, WOW and Bioshock have already been qualified as gameable.

Basically, the idea is great, especially for MMO games. The trouble is though, how are they going to license remote gaming? Because the end result is almost as a good as a purchased version of the game delivers.