I tried out the new solar panel charger for my iPhone. Sadly, it has already been returned to Walmart. But another one, same brand but different device, is on its way to me. The first device that I purchased charged itself in the sun for about 6 hours. I then plugged it in to my dead phone to see how much of a charge it actually gave me. It only gave me about a 30% charge. That just wasn't enough. I learned that the model that I bought was only 800 mAH. I also learned that for a little over a dollar more I could have one that is 1900 mAH. So, Friday afternoon, I packaged up the first one,returned it to Walmart, and purchased the larger device. I am greatly in hopes that it is better. I will find out shortly.
On a different note... Amazon.com has launched an Android App Store. It seems very similar to other app stores, except for one very noticeable improvement. Amazon has a button called "Test Drive". It gives you a taste of a bona fide cloud based cell phone. It is not just a single program, but a "virtual Android smartphone" with working mouse controls. You can play with a program and even delete it. You can also browse its photo gallery, listen to its music, and surf the web using its browser. Here is what Amazon says about it.
Clicking the "Test drive now" button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 - just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.
Right now, this technology is being used to just sell apps. What if, one day this technology could be used to access your own smartphone? You could access your music, pictures, movies, games and apps from a computer terminal. Sorry, Apple lovers, but I am giving this round to Amazon and Android.
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