It’s the zBoost YX545 SOHO from Wireless Extenderz and it looks sort of like a small wireless router. The difference is that it works as a dual-band cell phone signal booster, taking that cell phone signal and reblasting it to provide you with up to 2,500 square foot of coverage in your home or office.

What’s great is that the zBoost YX545 SOHO is mostly universal for most American cell phone carriers. It operates on both the 800MHz and 1900MHz bands, so it should be able to boost the signal from such providers as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Alltel, Cricket and more. It also has an omnidirectional antenna to receive signals from multiple cell towers. There’s also the added benefit of extending your cell phone battery life, because your phone uses less power when it has plenty of bars and isn’t hunting for a signal.

Pick up this dual-band cell phone signal booster for $179.99 on Amazon, which is 55% off the regular price of $399.99. There’s also a higher-end SOHO Xtreme model on sale for $329.99 (regular price $549.99) that provides up to 5,500 square feet of coverage. Both include free shipping.

The post Daily Deals: Wireless Extenderz Cell Phone Signal Booster for $220 Off appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Can you hear me now? We’ve all had the experience of dropped calls and loss of signal, but it looks like one way to get better cell phone reception is to open a special umbrella. Originally conceived as the Voda-brella, the since renamed Vodafone Booster Brolly is an umbrella filled with gadgetry that boosts your signal strength. And it can charge your phone too.

Somehow, this seems like a quintessentially Londoner thing to do, but inventor Kenneth Tong actually grew up in Hong Kong. In any case, the umbrella has a built-in high-gain umbrella that is able to catch the radio waves from a Vodafone transmitter. There’s also a low power signal repeater, so what you get in effect is a small “signal shower” above your head.

Yes, there may be some health concerns here, but you can’t deny how useful this could be. Of course, it’s really only useful on a rainy day (which never happens in the UK), though I suppose the Booster Brolly can turn into a Booster Parasol on a sunny day. What’s more, the Booster Brolly is also lined with a dozen 2V solar panels, giving you a source of power to juice up your handset. It can be used to power a flashlight too, in case you get lost in the dark.

Of course, this is just a mad scientist’s concept at the moment, so there’s no saying when and if it’ll ever reach a commercial release.

[Source]

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When talking about boosting the performance of Verizon Wireless 4G/LTE service, we mentioned the Verizon JetPack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi 4510L as a good supplement to the Sleek 4G signal booster .  Here, at CES 2012, Verizon Wireless and ZTE  have now announced the Verizon Jetpack  EuFi890 model. Developed by ZTE, the Jetpack is a 4G /LTE Mobile Hotspot allowing 4G/ LTE – customers to get download speeds of 5 to 12 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 2 to 5 Mbps in 4G/LTE Mobile Broadband coverage areas.  The global ready device will work in 205 different countries, and 125 more with 3G too.

Other key features:

• Support for up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices
• OLED display with interactive keypad
• Backward-compatible with the Verizon Wireless 3G network
• Data usage alerts via text message displayed on the Jetpack
• Wireless Connectivity: 802.11 b/g/n
• Supports Windows®, Macintosh® and Linux operating systems
• Security: WEP/WPA/WPA2 and VPN pass-through support
• Dimensions: 3.49″ x 3.49″ x .70″
• Weight: 4.7 oz

Looking like a 3.49-inch rounded compact plastic square with an OLED display, this particular Jetpack has 3 buttons that let you manage connections, settings and display data usage alerts.  Pricing for the device is not released yet. $269 is the price for Verizon’s Jetpack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi 4510L if that’s any indication to you.

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