By Evan Ackerman

The problem with solar powered cell phones is that despite the fact that the sun is really big and all, most of the time, your phone is not anywhere near it. Most of the time, your phone is probably in one of your pockets. Shame on you, why do you have to hate the environment and use pockets?

Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin has designed a cell phone called “Chairman” that incorporates a kinetic charger, which is the same kind of thing that you find in self-winding watches. It harvests energy from motion to charge itself. Of course, you can’t get something for nothing… Carrying this phone around is just gonna make it that much harder to walk. And if you’re as lazy as I am, a phone like this is probably never going to get charged anyway. But that’s okay, because it’s only available in a limited edition of 1846 and from the looks of it, if you can afford one of these watches, you can most likely also afford to hire someone to take it on walks for you. No specifics on pricing or release date yet, although we should find out more later this month.

If you don’t mind wasting a little extra time, I ran across some really cool clocks that can theoretically run forever, extracting all the energy they need from daily temperature changes of only a few degrees. You can read more about them here.

[ Ulysee Nardin ] VIA [ Born Rich ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Corsair unveiled their new Flash Voyager Port at CeBIT this year, and it’s basically a USB dock with a single button that can be used to launch a piece of automated backup software on your PC. While the Voyager Port is obviously color coordinated and styled to match the company’s Flash Voyager USB drives, the dock can apparently be used with any drive of your choosing, which is perfect given the propensity of flash drives to wander off and disappear on their own.

Now I’ll leave it up to you to decide if the ease-of-use of a single button is worth having another dock or cradle cluttering up your desk, but it should be hitting the market in a few weeks for around $20 for those of you who are interested.

[ Les Numeriques - CeBIT : Corsair Flash Voyager Port et autres détails sur les SSD ] VIA [ Everything USB ]

By Evan Ackerman

Hey. You. You know what? You’re wasting electricity right now. And you could be harvesting all of that energy and pumping it back into your house. The Inlet Outlet concept is designed to be mounted next to your existing outlets, but instead of taking electricity out of them, you put electricity into them. The outlets will come with a variety of different adapter kits that let you convert waste energy emitted by things around your house into electricity generators, things like door hinges. Or a Wii Fit. Or a hamster wheel. Or bed springs: “hey babe, want to go generate some electricity?”

Realistically, that’s why this is only a concept, though… If it was that cheap and easy to turn everyday objects into electricity generators, wouldn’t we be doing it already? The sad fact is that for the near future, it’s almost always going to be less efficient to produce things like this than it’s going to be to use them. It’s still a cool idea, though.

VIA [ Core77 ]

By Andrew Liszewski

A Minneapolis-based company called Zivix has developed a real guitar with special fingertip sensors allowing it to be used with games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. The idea is that players who’ve spent countless hours mastering the games might actually be able to learn to play a real guitar at the same time, since the Headliner features strings and is the same size as a standard electric guitar.

There’s no official release date for the Headliner just yet, but according to an anonymous submission on Slashdot, Zivix has managed raise about $800,000 and hopes to have the guitar on store shelves sometime this year. But convincing gamers they should shell out $249 for the ‘real’ experience provided by the Headliner, as opposed to the not-so-real experience of a $40 Guitar Hero ax will probably be the company’s biggest hurdle.

[ Zivix Headliner Digital Guitar ] VIA [ StarTribune.com ]

By Luke Anderson

[ The following concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

Friday is here, which means another week has gone by. Another week full of answers over at the Laptop Experts site. I’m still churning out 6 per day, which means 30 more people had their questions answered by me this week, and countless more by the other Experts. Lets take a look at some of the ones that came in this week.

One person’s network card was showing unplugged, when it clearly wasn’t, another’s trackpad wasn’t moving, while someone else couldn’t get their screen to come on. I was asked what size screen a person should get for traveling, and where one could find a Windows 7 driver for a specific Realtek device.

If you haven’t gotten your question answered by one of the experts, you’re always more than welcome to send one in over at the Laptop Experts site. If you’re feeling particularly helpful, you can answer a question or two while you’re over there as well.

[ Laptop Experts ]

By David Ponce… and Joel Johnson

[ It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Joel Johnson was the inspiration and the seed of life behind OhGizmo! This site would not exist were it not for his influence on me, simple as that. He was the sole, slightly masochist editor of Gizmodo back in 2004. He has enjoyed a stellar writing career at places like BoingBoing Gadgets (where he currently works), Playboy (I think I read that somewhere) and countless others. After meeting him at CES this year, I figured I'd try my luck and ask him to guest post here, on OG. Worse that could happens was... nothing. Below is what came out. -Ed. ]

I’ve known David Ponce since he started OhGizmo!, but I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting him and the rest of the team until this year’s CES. They’re good eggs.

David asked me if I’d have time to write a column here at OhG!, which would be great…but I don’t. (I sort of run my own gadget site, which shall remain linkless.) But I started thinking about the sort of thing I would write about on OhGizmo! that I wouldn’t write on my own site, and it didn’t take long before I knew exactly what to say.

So here goes.

I really like OhGizmo!. Always have. I’ve seen dozens of gadget sites come and go. Very few have both the tenacity to do the work of proper curation and dedicate themselves to trying to write good, interesting summaries every single day. But the OhGizmo! team puts in the effort every single day and remains one of the few gadget sites that I go to every single day. In fact, it’s difficult for me to not link them more than once or twice a day, but then people might find out that all I really do is let other people find the good stuff and then reblog it with a candy shell of obnoxiousness.

It’s hard to run a little business like OhGizmo! right now. Something about the economy or something—I’m no money science mechanic, but I think maybe we need to check the country’s oil or something? I don’t know. But the point is: It’s not any easier for the little companies like OhGizmo! than it is the great big media organizations that are crashing into each other like old trees in the rain forest.

Well, actually, it sort of is. Because while media big and small are struggling, boutique sites like OhGizmo! rely more directly on the interaction and patronage of real fans, people who make a connection with the writers and come back every day to see what’s been uncovered today. And that means you readers can make a real difference to David and the rest of the team by telling your friends and coworkers about OhGizmo!. Send them a link to an OhG! story. Change their homepage to OhGizmo! and then blame it on a virus. (Don’t do this.) Hell, just send David and Evan and the Liszewski clan a note saying you appreciate their work.

We little sites live and breathe on traffic, which is a gauche way of saying “We need people to enjoy our work.” So if you like OhGizmo! as much as I do, don’t be shy about spreading it around.

[ This article concnerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. -Ed. ]

By David Ponce

For the last few weeks, HP has been running a campaign called “What Are Your 3?”, which is centered around the idea of sharing the media content that’s the most dear to you. This makes sense for them of course because the conversation swirls around their MediaSmart Server, a piece of hardware that would make it much easier for you to store and share a panoply of digital content with just about anyone you want. It’s a smart campaign that includes many facets. One of them is a contest: you can win your own HP MediaSmart Server just by participating!

Simply visit this page and submit three digital items you think are cool. It can be a picture, a video or some music. Here’s the link to my submission. These can be voted on, and for some reason, I got a paltry six votes… So if nothing else, you guys can get me some votes, right? I’m not entirely sure how a winner is selected, but I can assure you that you can’t win if you don’t participate.

Finally, they’ve asked me to write an article loosely related to sharing digital content. So if you’re interested, you can read that here. Let me know what you think…

[ Win an HP MediaSmart Server ]

By Andrew Liszewski

These Magnetic Photo Boards from meninos might not provide much inspiration at your next design meeting, but they come with a set of either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator palette magnets to at least put you in the right mindset. And even though it just doesn’t feel right to pay for either PS or AI, a 30-inch version of the white board with either set of magnets runs $80, while a 20-inch version is a bit more affordable at $65. And if you’d rather just use them on your fridge, the palette magnets are also sold separately at $25 per application.

[ meninos - Magnetic Photo Boards ] VIA [ Geekologie ]

By Andrew Liszewski

This seems like an obvious upgrade now that the U.S. and eventually Canada are converting to DTV broadcasts, but Intel is apparently the first company to develop a balanced antenna for digital TV that can be embedded inside a laptop. So down the line if you find yourself stuck in an airport or anywhere without a wireless internet connection, you’ll at least be able to enjoy the boob tube (can we still call it that with tube-less flat screen displays?) without the need for an annoying external TV antenna.

[ Innovation@Intel - World's First Embedded Balanced Antenna for Digital TV on Your Laptop ] VIA [ SlashGear ]