power

For the fourth consecutive time, J.D. Power and Associates has named Verizon Wireless as the leader in customer care among full-service wireless providers.

The semiannual report is based on feedback from thousands of consumers, scoring carriers based on three contact channels: telephone; walk-in (retail store); and online.

Verizon leads all full-service providers with a score of 766, just ahead of AT&T's 759, however both were above the industry average. Verizon credits social networking efforts for the high marks, touting the active and light-hearted online personality.

J.D. Power also found the carrier to do particularly well … Read more

The U.S. Patent and Trademark office published a patent application from Apple today for solar-paneled technology designed for devices with small screens, such as iPhones or iPods.

This "integrated touch sensor and solar assembly" would involve integrating social cells into a touch screen by using electrodes that can pull double duty as a solar cell and a touch sensor. Apple envisions this technology for handheld devices, like "a media player or phone," according to the patent application. In addition to images of different size iPods, the patent application also comes with an image of a screen that's sized for an iPad. … Read more

Where was I when the lights went out?

I was at my post for the game in the CBS operations center inside the Superdome, sitting next to our head of NFL sales and our director of operations. As with every Super Bowl, we stayed in constant communication with the production truck to make sure all the commercials and promo spots played as scheduled. There are formats, rules, and procedures, and our job is to oversee them. We are there for quality control, and usually it all goes right.

Nothing prepared us for what we heard over the director's intercom: &… Read more

While it's been circulating around at trade shows for a while, including Mobile World Congress 2011 and CES 2012, the PowerTrekk phone charger is slated to finally come to the U.S. at the end of this quarter.

Although the $229 device is peddled as a charger that can simply juice up your phone on water alone, it's not quite that simple.

To use the PowerTrekk, you also have to purchase a $4 PowerTrekk Pukk. Once you add a small amount of water (about half a shot), and add a one-time-use Pukk, the latter will immediately begin separating … Read more

Google has made a $200 million equity investment in a wind farm in West Texas that it says produces enough juice to power more than 60,000 homes in the U.S.

In a blog post today, the company said that the 161-megawatt Spinning Spur Wind Project in Oldham County boasts 70 Siemens wind turbines of 2.3 megawatts each, which started operating on a full-time basis just before the end of the year.

Built by developer EDF Renewable Energy, the facility has contracted its output to SPS, a utility serving Texas and New Mexico.

Google said in the post: &… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Amped Wireless, maker of extra-long-range, high-power Wi-Fi products, showed off at CES 2013 the upcoming RTA15 High Power Dual Band AC 700mW Wi-Fi Router, the company's first that supports the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.

Like previous routers from Amped Wireless, such as the 600mW Gigabit Dual Band R20000G, the new RTA15 promises to offer incredible Wi-Fi coverage.

According to Amped Wireless, the new router features three high-gain, dual-band antennas and 10 total power amplifiers: four 5GHz 700mW, two-stage amplifiers, two 2.4GHz amplifiers, and four low-noise amplifiers. As the result, Amped Wireless claims it can cover up … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Intel came clean today about the power efficiency for the new Ivy Bridge chips announced at CES on Monday.

At its CES event, Intel claimed that new power-frugal Y series Ivy Bridge processors were rated at 7 watts -- a remarkable feat on its face, as that's 10 watts less than standard low-power Ivy Bridge chips rated at 17 watts.

It turns out, Intel did some fancy marketing footwork in order to claim the 7-watt rating, as Ars Technica pointed out.

Below is Intel's statement provided to CNET. The operative phrase is: "The TDP of the … Read more

The yardstick used for Intel's new power-frugal chips is being questioned in article posted by Ars Technica.

The article, titled "Power saving through marketing: Intel's '7 watt' Ivy Bridge CPUs," asserts that Intel may have been over-aggressive with its power-efficiency claims.

More specifically, the 7-watt Ivy Bridge processors Intel announced on Monday at CES are actually specified by Intel on its site as 13 watts, the article says.

"The 7-watt number advertised during Intel's keynote yesterday is actually from a new metric, 'scenario design power' (SDP), which purports to measure how much power the … Read more

At a street price of around $50 for a kit of two units, the Actiontec 500 Mbps Powerline Network Adapter Kit is a bargain. And that's not the only good thing about it.

The kit, retail model number PWR511K01, comes with two identical adapters, currently the smallest of their type, that offered very good performance in my testing.

The only real complaint I have is that these adapters don't support Gigabit Ethernet, hence offering the limited data rate of the regular Ethernet standard at most. However, the affordable price and the supercompact design still make the kit an … Read more