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Sunday, January 23, 2011

HANDS ON: Wireless Charger for iPhone 4


Tired of dealing with wires to charge your mobile device? The Energizer Inductive Charger lets you place your iPhone or Blackberry on its shiny black surface, where it immediately begins charging wirelessly.
Energizer’s $89 inductive charging station has been available for a few months, and the company’s been working on the various sleeves that must be placed on devices so they can work with it. So far, there’s a sleeve for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, a replacement door for the BlackBerry Curve 8900, and now, Energizer’s finally finished its iPhone 4 sleeve and sent it to us for review.
The charging station is a wedge-shaped piece of piano-black plastic that’s a little larger than a paperback book. It has two spots where you can place your mobile devices for wireless charging, and can accommodate both at once. There’s a USB port in the back to connect an additional device, letting you charge a total of three at the same time.
This inductive charger is compatible with the Qi (pronounced “chee”) wireless charging standard adopted by theWireless Power Consortium. Qi shows great promise — in fact, we’re so impressed, we named it one of the 8 Gadgets to Watch in 2011. The consortium members include Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, HTC, Verizon, Duracell, Energizer, Black & Decker and a few others — but notably missing so far is Apple. The idea is for all the products made by consortium members to be interoperable with each other.
Here’s a diagram showing how it works:
Does it work? Yes, and it seems like magic. The Qi system uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy instead of wires. When I plugged my iPhone 4 into its sleeve, all I needed to do was place it onto one of the targets on the charger, and its blue light began to glow, indicating that charging had begun. I like the way each of the two lights turn off, indicating the associated device is fully charged. When all are fully charged, the charging station goes into its energy-saving standby mode.
The plan for the Qi system is to build this wireless capability into devices, eliminating the need for an external sleeve, or in the case of the BlackBerry Curve 8900, a replacement door. Energizer says that according to iSuppli, there could be 234.9 million units with built-in wireless charging by 2014.
Whether that happens or not, for now, we have samples of the iPhone 4 sleeve and the BlackBerry Curve 8900 replacement door, and both are relatively unobtrusive. We also have the sleeve for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, and it’s slightly bulkier, more like a case than a 3/4 sleeve like that of the iPhone 4. See the gallery below for pictures of all.
The iPhone 4′s sleeve is nowhere near as bulky as even the thinnest add-on external battery extenders such as the Mophie Juice Pack Plus. It’s thin, light at 1.6 oz, and only makes the 5.1 oz iPhone feel only slightly larger and heavier. In the case of the BlackBerry, look at the gallery below you’ll see that the door only adds a tolerable amount of depth to the current handset.
Using the charger in these sleeves couldn’t be easier. The iPhone 4 sleeve has a snug fit, so you won’t be leaving it in your pocket as you pull out your phone. The target area where you place the device on the charger is big enough so that it’s easy to get the device to start charging, even if you don’t place it exactly on the circular graphic.
There’s an added advantage to that sleeve — if you’re one who holds your iPhone with a finger underneath, covering up its tiny speaker, the sleeve redirects the speaker’s sound toward the front. It does the inverse for the iPhone 4′s microphone, directing its sound from the front rather than the bottom. I couldn’t tell a difference with the microphone, but I noticed the speaker sounds better with the sleeve on, an unexpected benefit.
So is it worth it? Are we so lazy that we can’t bother to plug in our phones to charge them? Probably. Maybe it’s not laziness, but the desire for convenience that makes wireless charging so appealing. I found myself much more likely to lay my iPhone onto this charger than to plug it in. And, it’s good to know this charger will still be able to accommodate any device that’s compliant with the Qi standard in the coming years. That’s when this will really pay off — when many devices have this wireless charging capability built in, and no sleeves required. Until then, even with the sleeves, I enjoyed using the system and highly recommend it.
Here’s a video showing how easy it is to charge your device by just placing it on the inductive charging station:

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Google’s Plan to Combat Search Spam


Google admitted today that search spam has increased in recent months, and the search giant has outlined its plan to combat spam and the rise of “content farms.”
Google search quality and SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed piece on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. He starts off admitting what we’ve been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.
“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,” Cutts said. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”
Cutts makes it clear that webspam refers to the junk that appears in search results when websites try to cheat their way to a higher position. With the launch of the new version of its search engine, Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing more content than before, including spam.
“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well,” Cutts explained. “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”
Google’s new classifier is designed to detect spam on individual web pages by identifying spammy words and phrases. Cutts says that the company has also improved its ability to detect hacked sites and is testing new changes, including one that penalizes websites for copying the content of others without having original content of its own.
At the same time, Google is adding a new measure to combat “content farms.” These controversial organizations, Demand Media being the best known, utilize cheap, contracted labor to write articles of questionable quality. Cutts says that Google has implemented two algorithmic changes to stop these low-quality sites from rising to the top.
Today’s news can’t be good for the spammers, but it could be especially painful for Demand Media, whose IPOis just around the corner. Google isn’t going to let anything stand between it and search quality, even if that means taking down thousands of spammers and content farms in the process.
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