We’ve all encountered this problem. You want to plug in your iPhone to charge, but it’s dark and you can’t see the port. The CordLite fixes that, because it is an illuminated charger cable for your preferred iDevice. No more fumbling in your dark bedroom or in the dark confines of your car at night.

The concept is actually really simple. The CordLite replaces your OEM charging cable and it contains forward-facing LEDs at the port connector part. There are two smaller indicator lights to let you know which way is up. There are no buttons for turning the lights on and off either, as they are touch-activated. It might have been nice to have the lights on the USB end of the cable too, but I’m sure that would have significantly increased the cost and complexity.

You can back this project by hitting up the Kickstarter page. They need the money to start mass production and a pledge of $30 or more will land you one of the first units. If you pledge $45 or more, you get a special laser-etched version.

For now, they’re focusing solely on the CordLite for Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod, but they have already prototyped a microUSB version that will follow if this initial launch works out well. If everything goes according to plan, the first batch of CordLites for iDevices will ship this fall.

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A few years ago invisibility cloaks were just confined to fiction. Now, it is a reality with research going on in a number of countries. But most of the experiments are being done for making something invisible. But the scientists from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology decided to do something different, create an invisibility cloak for sound.

As you might know, all the current invisibility cloaks play with light. A light ray from behind an object is curved around it and then it reaches the eyes of the observer. This makes the object invisible as the viewer will only be seeing what’s behind the object.

For developing the “silence cloak” the scientists, obviously, experimented with sound waves. The experiment was done using a 1mm-thick plate which was built by Dr. Nicolas Stenger.

As the plate is made of both soft and hard carbon polymers, each ring within the plate was found to be resonating on a different frequency over a range of 100 Hertz. This resulted in the sound waves traveling around a central circular region within the plate. Sound was not absorbed or deflected.

Prof. Martin Wegener, Stenger’s colleague, has this to say on the experiment: “Contrary to other known noise protection measures, the sound waves are neither absorbed nor reflected. It is as if nothing was there”.

The experiment appears to be a success and we believe the concept might become big in the very near future. And we will be covering it when that happens, so stay tuned to this space.

The post Scientists Develop Invisibility Cloak For Sound appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Just because you want a skinny laptop doesn’t mean that you have no choice but to buy a MacBook Air. The latest PC alternative in this realm is the Samsung Series 9, joining the ranks of laptops like the Dell Adamo.

Except, I think, it looks better. I had the opportunity to see this laptop, along with the Slider PC7, in person while at CESand it’s about as skinny as it gets. Think of it as a MacBook Air, only with Windows and a black exterior. The Series 9 measures 0.64-inches at its thickest point. It’s also a hair lighter than the MBA.

I’m not completely convinced that these super thin notebooks are worth their premium, but there is a market for them. The Series 9 has a 13.3-inch HD LED backlit display (only 1366×768, though), Core i5 processor, HD GT2 integrated graphics, 1.5W subwoofer, and up to 128GB SSD and 4GB DDR3 RAM.

Pricing starts at $1,599 and goes up with upgrades. Considering that, with the exception of the SSD, you can get an equivalently equipped laptop for less than a third of that price, it’s clear that the Series 9 is a niche product.

The choices seem to come down to the MacBook Air running Mac OS X or a Samsung 9 Series with Windows 7, which one do you choose?

The post The skinny on the slim Samsung Series 9 notebook appeared first on Mobile Magazine.