Update:  USB Car Adapter Charger Review

We recently did a write up about the Brando 3-in-1 USB car adapter, but they had it all wrong. Three cigarette plugs and only one USB port. Today we found a USB adapter better suited for our needs.

The car adapter is small, light and provides two useful USB ports. Not much to report on specs - you get what you see. LEDs for port activity and power output is DC5.0V / 1000mA +/- 5%.

Roger of USB Fever put together a special deal for GetUSB.info readers, free shipping any where in the world (about 7 day transit time). At just $13.95 and free shipping, it’s an excellent deal.

Roger also has a universal charger that is a cut above the rest. Typically chargers only support three markets, the UK, US and EU. However, Roger’s charger includes support for Australia and China. ($16.99)

With the iPhone coming out this Friday we figured to address the “more” in USB Powered Gadgets and more… this week for GetUSB. DLO introduced this lack-luster iPhone case. Available in black, silver, pink and blue.

Here’s the link

A start-up firm in the French Alps put together one Pretty Hot And Tempting USB stick. This one only has 256MB of memory, but IS a full working computer.

Based off an Atmel processor this SoC (System-On-Chip) design has a 190MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 256MB of memory, USB connectivity and a 10/100 Ethernet port.

The company, Calao, didn’t give a price tag but did mention some useful applications like GPS and image processing.

I for one saw that lovely USB connector and immediately thought of the new Samsung USB monitors and wondered if this is our future of computing.

Not only is the Calao Linux computer PHAT it’s also fat. Measuring at 3.3 inches long and 1.4 inches wide it is much larger then your average UFD…but also clear there is nothing average about this concept. (more…)

It’s a goocher. From the latest GetUSB poll, “How Many USB Ports Do You Need?” a whopping 40% said the standard 4 USB ports is good enough.

What is more interesting is that over 50% of the voters indicated even with 8 USB ports they could still use more. This means most users have at least two USB Hubs hanging from their system. What a mess. You may ask yourself, why don’t they make bigger USB hubs? One answer might be this:

Chip manufacturers make either a 4 port or 7 port USB hub chip. You run into power problems after 7 ports. Companies who build USB Hubs are limited by this chip design. Placing two hub chips inside a hub box doesn’t make much sense because your host computer already has several USB ports - they just figure you’ll buy two units if you need more (4 or 7) USB ports.

With these poll results I think it’s safe to say USB is the majority leader in peripheral connectivity.

It’s a little slow today on the USB front so we’ll take a closer look at a new flash technology from Toshiba. Yesterday Toshiba announced a hybrid flash memory technology which should be a great boost for the mobile phone industry.

Going along the concept of Readyboost, where by you have two memory sources working together to enhance performance, the break through Toshiba made is a hybrid of two current memory technologies, SLC and MLC memory.

So here are the nuts.

Single Level Cell (SLC) memory is best suited for storing information like programs and applications. SLC memory is designed to be a fast performer for such ’stored’ data.

Multi Level Cell (MLC) memory is best suited for data being used by programs and applications. The MLC memory has a better physical space ratio compared to SLC and is thus better for storing video, images and music.

Up until now, phone designers have had to factor the cost and the space to have two separate chips of both kinds in their designs, which has led to bigger phones.

With Toshiba’s new chip, mobile phone designers now have a choice about how much of each kind of memory they need incorporate into their phones.

Toshiba claims its latest memory-chip architecture will offer higher memory capacity, while allowing more compact mobile phone designs. Great - I don’t know about you but there definitely is a size limitation to how small a phone should be…although on the flip side the mobileLBA-NAND technology will give at least 8GB of storage. Available later this summer to mobile phone manufacturers, which means another six months it’ll hit the streets.

With the iPhone launch just days away - already the iPhone accessory crap begins. Here we have a cheezy leather case which hardly protects the iPhone while making it all the uglier. Are those feature buttons hidden at top? (more…)

The New Look NuLOOQ from LogiTech is a beautifully designed spin wheel mouse. This type of design has been around for years, yet hasn’t taken off in popularity. Maybe it’s design - maybe it’s an odd device to use - either way LogiTech is making a crack at it. (more…)