I feel like a castaway in a sea of glossy black plastic, chrome, and glowing blue buttons. Do we really need every piece of electronics to look the same, sandwiched in this shiny ebony that is the 21st Century beige? More »
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If you suspect you've been cursing a bit too much in your inter-office emails, Father's Day e-cards, and Giz comments, set a port aside for the Pepper Mouth, a concept peripheral that makes a stink when you swear. More »
Business - Shopping - Transportation - Home and Garden - San Antonio
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We’ve known for quite some time that AT&T was planning to step up its 3G network in a big way over the coming months, but we didn’t exactly think it would be as big of an improvement as Engadget and Gizmodo are reporting. Apparently AT&T’s Operations CEO John Stankey was at a Reuters event in New York City and mentioned AT&T is going to more than double the speeds of its current 7.2Mbps 3G network by the time we’re all chucking out our 2010 calendars. AT&T’s made great strides in fixing its network in the past few months, and while we don’t expect it to be anything like T-Mobile’s 21Mbps network, but we’d be pretty happy if it meant that all of the 250 million people Stankey had a network with theoretical speeds hovering around 14.4Mbps.
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Decent iPad RTS games were somewhere between numbers one and four for on the Giz staff's various wishlists, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert is one of the all time greats of the genre. More »
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If you buy a 3G iPad, you'll be able to purchase data, month by month, from AT&T. Neat! But you already pay for unlimited data access on your iPhone, also from AT&T. So why not have one plan, for everything? More »
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Well, that didn't take long. Already analysts are crawling out of the woodwork to put the seemingly miraculous Bloom Box fuel cell in its place as yet another energy saving technology that won't perform as advertised.
This week it was IDC Energy Insights analyst Sam Jaffe, who said that while the fuel cell developed by Bloom Energy CEO K.R Sridhar and his team was definitely "not bogus," it just doesn't differentiate itself well enough from already available fuel cell technologies—especially as it pertains to price.
And the device's supposedly unique "fuel-switching" ability? Not unique at all, Jaffe claimed on his Energy Insight blog, in a post titled "Four Things Bloom Energy Forgot to Tell the World":
"Any high-temperature fuel cell should be able to do that. The fact that it's solid oxide and it's primarily ceramic opens up the possibility of making it much more cheaply, but every start-up in the energy field has an expensive product that they claim one day will be cheap. There is no reason to believe that Bloom has the ability to make it that much more cheaply. I'm pretty pessimistic about it."
Indeed. Further...fueling Jaffe's pessimism is the belief that a Bloom Box isn't really all that green if you're comparing it to the way we traditionally get power from the grid. At a cost of $7-$8/watt, he contends, the miracle box is no less expensive than photovoltaics that have been purchased at a rate of 100 kW at a time.
Another miracle energy tech bites the dust? Unless Bloom Energy can curb costs and green things up a bit, the answer for now is "maybe." Unless the unicorns get involved, anyway.
Still confused about fuel cells and the Bloom Box? Be sure to check out our regular Giz Explains column on this very topic! [IDC via CNET]
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In this week's porn-free app roundup: Expensive instant messaging apps, humbled! Cars, leered at! Zombies, organically defeated! Enigmatic Japanese game developers, being enigmatic! The sun, closely monitored! Malls, fearlessly navigated! And more...
If you'd like to view the following gallery as a single page, click here
• This Is Why I Want Photoshop 1.0 on My iPhone Right Now
• A Better Way to Passcode Lock Your iPhone (At Your Own Risk)
• You Can Now Download iPhone Apps Up to 20MB Over 3G
• Google Buys iPhone Email Search App reMail and Pulls It From the App Store
• SlingPlayer Mobile 1.2 With 3G Streaming Now Available
• Street Fighter IV on iPhone Brings New Definition to Sore Thumbs
• Apple Removes An Innocent Boob-Jiggling App From the App Store
• Opera Mini On iPhone Is "Fast," Though There's No Pinch To Zoom
• Here's What Final Fantasy For iPhone Will Look Like
This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!
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Wayne Coyne, frontman of the acclaimed rock band The Flaming Lips, recently renovated his Oklahoma compound, and the new space gives the group's music a run for its money in terms of psychedelic flair, playful construction, and sheer imagination.
The last we saw of Coyne, he was, naturally, sitting in a bathtub on Google Street View. If you thought that was the weirdest place he bathes, wait until you see his bathroom. Its Gaudiesque drip-castle design—Coyne refers to it as the "drug damaged, artist element of [his] home"—is certainly one of the highlights of his new pad, realized by FitzSimmons Architects.
An adjoining alcove, accessed by a glittering circular passageway, scores serious bonus points for including the Giz-featured world's most beautiful object: the Gyrofocus fireplace.
Having seen Coyne's appropriately trippy poop cave, it's got me wondering if other musicians' homes reflect their sensibilities as closely. Is John Mayer's house ordinary and forgettable on the outside but chaotically and impenetrably decorated on the inside? Does Prince's Minneapolis home have a bunch of sex swings? Yes, yes, I'm sure it does. [Fitzsimmons Architects via Design Milk via Geekosystem]
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It looks as though Gizmodo Brazil got their hands on a yet-to-be-announced Android handset from device manufacturer Motorola. The full touch-screen device, which is being described as a Motorola BACKFLIP without the keyboard, is running Android 1.5 and is cloaked in the MOTOBLUR UI. Giz Brazil didn’t report on any specifications, however we can tell from the images the phone is SIM based, has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, micro-SD slot, and camera with flash. The phone is rumored to be released in March, although the chances of this little number Stateside appear to be pretty slim, and go after feature phone users looking to upgrade to their first semi-smart phone. Hit the link for the translated article and image gallery.
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For a quick primer on why multiple drivers (usually) matters, check out our Giz Explains on the subject—but suffice to say, more drivers often equals more better, and six is freaking crazy for earbuds.
Ultimate Ears, recently bought by Logitech, scored pretty highly on our Cut-the-Crap Earbud Battlemodo in the mid-range categories, but the 18 Pro buds are pure high-end: It's got two drivers each for bass, mids, and highs, in each bud. It's not a sure thing that that'll translate to better sound, and for the $1,350 asking price, it'd better—but given UE's track record, these could be pretty ultimate indeed. [Engadget]
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It's truly the best time of year to buy an HDTV, and well, here's every confusing TV term you might encounter, everything you need, explained in one place.
Resolution aka 720p vs. 1080i vs. 1080p
Resolution is pretty simple—it's the number of individual dots (pixels) that make up a display, arranged in a grid. However, when it comes to TVs, we tend talk about it in a slightly weird way, as lines of resolution (think of a FourSquare board), and we tend to do it in shorthand. So, for instance, a standard definition set has a resolution of 640 x 480, which refers to 640 vertical lines, and 480 horizontal lines, of resolution. A 720p TV has 720 horizontal lines of resolution, and most typically 1280 horizontal ones. A 1080i or 1080p TV is 1920 x 1080. And the whole 1080i vs. 1080p thing—i stands for interlaced, where only every other line of resolution is displayed, while p is for progressive scan, where the whole picture's displayed at once. Really, since even the cheapest sets are progressive now, you don't have to worry about it.
An important thing to consider, however, is the Lechner Distance, or the distance at which your eye can actually process all of the detail in a 1080i/p resolution image. While you should consult the chart, basically, if you're sitting further back than 7 feet from a 52-inch TV, your eyeballs can't actually resolve the difference between 720p and 1080p, so you might as well save the cash.
Motion Resolution
A somewhat trickier spec that some TV experts swear by, it refers to how well a set's resolution holds up when stuff's actually moving on the screen, like a baseball player running down a field. Plasmas tend to have better native motion resolution than LCD, but LCD has been fixing this problem. (See "hertz," below.)
Viewing Angle
Basically, it's how far to each side of the TV you can be and still see the picture, measured in an angle that is, naturally, less than 180º. Again, traditionally this was more of an LCD problem than a plasma one, but all TV technologies have had some issues in the past, and the worst offenders used to be DLP and other microdisplays.
To see viewing angle at work, start where the picture on a TV looks best, and move to one side—now note where the picture starts looking weird, with the colors changing, washing out and getting hard to see. Nicer sets reach nearly 180º, so plenty of people can take part in the HD glory.
Hertz, or What 120Hz and 240Hz Mean
Hertz is basically just the number of times the image onscreen refreshes a second. Because of broadcast standards, TVs in the US need to be 60Hz, meaning they refresh the image onscreen 60 times a second. (In Europe, the standard is 50Hz.) Video sources are generally 30 or 60 frames per second, because of this, and a regular video camera shoots at 60fps a second. So typically, 60Hz sets are the norm.
Lately, though you have 120Hz, and even 240Hz sets, all of them LCDs. They do this to increase motion resolution—see above. A 120Hz TV refreshes 120 times a second, and it comes up with those extra frames by making them up—either duping the frames that are there and putting black spaces in between, or by splicing in intermediary frames that are basically realtime morphs of the two frames they come between. Stuff looks really smooth—sometimes too smooth, true—but the point's to fight LCD's motion blur disadvantage against plasma.
240Hz is another ball of sticky still, promising less motion blur, but with a tradeoff. but there are two different ways to achieve it. One way's kind of cheating, in that it's a 120Hz that uses a flashing backlight to simulate 240 frames a second. The other, more "legit" 240Hz is genuinely faster, with images staying up on the screen for just 4ms before moving to the next. There's no real way to tell which kind of 240Hz a TV uses (though a "scanning backlight" is a tip off it's not the "real" 240Hz). There is a law of diminishing returns in reducing motion blur as you climb past 240Hz, but for some serious AV nerds, like Home Entertainment's Geoff Morrison, it does make LCD TVs more watchable.
Plasma TV brands sometimes boast "600Hz," but that's mostly to show off to LCD shoppers that these kinds of motion-blur refresh problems are really specific to LCD. It's not so much a spec as a declaration of the tech's superiority in this department.
To make things just a tad weirder for you, films have been shot since ancient times at 24 frames per second, so many TVs have a 24P mode, meaning the screen refreshes 24 frames per second, or in multiples thereof. (Any mathmagician can tell you that both 120 and 240 are divisible by 24.)
Plasma
The basic way plasmas work is that there's a party of noble gases trapped between two glass panels that are zapped and light up all pretty. More practically, what plasmas offer over LCDs is superior color (often), better motion (typically) and deeper blacks (always and forever, with a couple of exceptions). The tradeoff is that they're more power hungry, and generally heavier.
The life-or-death questions people have about plasmas are almost mythical now: Burn-in, where an image is permanently etched into the panel after being left up on screen too long isn't really problem anymore (unless you're sadistic to your TV). The "Denver problem," where high altitudes affect sets, is less of an issue, but it exists: If you live at 6,000 feet or higher, you should read this summary by our friend David Katzmaier at CNet. Panel half-life is a very long time, now, about the same as LCD's backlight (which, of course, could be replaced, but we're talking like 10 year out). When it comes to the cheapest TVs, 720p plasmas are hands-down the safest bet for best picture quality.
LCD
The people's HDTV technology, LCD, stands for liquid crystal display. The liquid crystal part is a gel that sits in front of a backlight, which is divided up into pixels. There are two main kinds of backlights used, CCFL (pictured, via Home Theater Mag) which are like the lights in your high school cafeteria), and LED, which we talk a bit more about below. There are two major kinds of LCD displays. There's the traditional twisted nematic kind (TNT), which is cheaper and known for faster response times, and then there's in-panel switching (IPS), which is more expensive and usually slower response times, buuut it's got a wider viewing angle and better colors.
On a broader level, the stuff to consider with LCD when it comes to actually buying a TV, is that, on the cheap side, LCDs tend to have worse motion and less excellent contrast ratios than plasma. You step up a bit, and it starts to even out. Especially if you pony up for the best of the best LCD TVs, typically lit up by LEDs. LCDs in general are way more eco-friendly, slimmer, and—because of their backlights—better to watch in environments where you're gonna have a ton of light spilling in.
DLP
DLP is a rear-projection technology made by Texas Instruments that creates the image onscreen using a whole bunch of tiny mirrors that reflect light through a lens. The big thing about DLP sets is that they're, um, big and for cheap—a 65-inch DLP set is just $1500. But you're probably not gonna be mounting this sucker either.
DLP is the last survivor of the "microdisplay" projection TVs, that also included LCD and LCOS techologies. They are great on contrast, but they got killed by flat panel because you can't make them an inch thick.
Laser TVs
Mitsubishi's LaserVue TV is a microdisplay projection set (with a DLP chip) that is lit up by lasers instead of just focused light. Thanks to this, it delivers some of the most amazing colors and deepest blacks possible, as good as plasma sets, but at a ridiculously low power consumption. Sadly, you'll probably never buy one, and not just because it's $5000 for a 65-inch set.
Contrast Ratio
So, technically, contrast ratio is just the ratio between the brightest and darkest images a display is capable of showing, which sounds like an objective enough specification. But like many specifications, this one has been turned into a marketing tool, and subverted to a point where it is not helpful. In the lab, there are several kinds of contrast ratios: Static, which is the ratio between the brightest and darkest a screen can display simultaneously, and dynamic, which is the darkest and lightest a screen can ever be at any given time. Sadly, it's this latter figure that most TV makers brazenly display on their boxes, to the tune of ridiculous numbers like 1,000,000:1 (or more). It's utterly meaningless, and you're better off ignoring it.
OLED
It's the beautiful future of television, but vastly too expensive for anyone but CEOs to own right now because OLED displays are really hard (read: expensive) to make at large sizes. "OLED" stands for organic light-emitting diode, and what's special is that the individual pixels light up by themselves, like plasma, but can be laid out on a single sheet of glass (or plastic), like LCD, so they get the best of both: They're super thin, they don't need a backlight, they have higher contrast, and they're energy efficient too. Also, they may one day—soon—be bendy!
LED TVs or LED Backlighting
While a standard LCD set is lit up by a cold-cathode fluorescent lamp (think dreary lighting from high school), the best LCD sets use LEDs (light-emitting diodes). They can be configured a few different ways: Edge-lit, where the LEDs are arranged in strips along the sides of the TV, and allow it to be super-thin; and backlit, where a grid array of hundreds of LEDs sits behind the screen and, with local dimming, where clusters of lights turn on and off individually, offers the best LCD money can buy. Three of the five best TVs you can buy are LED-lit, if that tells you anything. And no, they're not cheap.
3D
If you thought you heard a metric shitton about 3D this year, just wait for 2010. We have a giant primer on 3D tech right here, but there's just a couple you really need to know. Polarized 3D glasses are the cheap 3D for the masses—i.e., IMAX—where two synced projectors throw out two different images are slightly different polarizations that can only be seen by one eye at a time, making your brain see stuff in 3D without that annoying red/blue thing.
And while we kinda made fun of them, shutter glasses are actually the way 3D is moving in nicer implementations, from Panasonic and Nvidia, among others. Essentially, the glasses are battery powered, and shutters blink rapidly over each eye timed to the refresh rate of the display, so each eye sees a slightly different image as the shutter opens. It works better on plasma than LCD (even 120Hz models), in our experience.
Anti-Glare vs. Anti-Reflective
Anti-glare and anti-reflective displays, surprisingly are not the same thing. Anti-glare displays often try to diffuse light coming at a display with a treated or textured surface, almost like a "matte" finish. It's about cutting back external light hitting the display, but the tradeoff is that the picture coming through may not be as clear. Anti-reflective deals with light that comes from the display itself, as well as external light, and handles this with special coatings or films that minimize reflections from all angles to make the picture clearer. (Just think about eyeglasses, with that greenish coating. Same idea.)
HDMI
Honestly, the only thing you really need to know about but the High-Definition Multimedia Interface—you know, HDMI—is that the cables in most retail stores cost waaaaaay too much. If you pay anything over $10 for an HDMI cable, you are getting suckered. Order cheaper cables from Monoprice.com and other retailers—they do just fine as long as you're not installing them inside your walls. (If you're doing that, you should pick something heavily coated and insulated, and built to last a few generations of TV.) Oh, and there's a new version coming out—HDMI 1.4—that supports higher resolutions and internet. Not only will that require brand new HDMI cables, it will require new TVs and new content too, so it's a ways off.
• 5 Best HDTVs Under $1000
• 5 Best HDTVs Period
• The Difference Between a $600 and a $6000 TV
• How to Buy an HDTV Today (or Any Day)
• Picking an HDTV Like a Pro
• How to Set Up Your New HDTV
• How to Calibrate Your New TV
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about HD, VD, and KFC here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.
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The possibility that Microsoft might pay Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp to delist from Google (in favor of Bing) caused a lot of outrage, Giz included. Now we've got a statement from Microsoft in response.
Here's a quote from Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior vice president in charge of online audiences:
What I would say is, our focus is on improving the user experience and driving our differentiation of user intent and decision-making. It's not to necessarily pay people to de-index our competition. That's not our focus. So, I wouldn't think of it that way. It's more about how do we build a better experience for people. If there's a way to share in the economics of search in that, then we're game to do that.
Note that this isn't exactly a denial, nor is it exactly a confirmation. Mehdi says paying people to delist from Google is "not our focus," but that doesn't mean they won't do it. It doesn't mean they will, either—matter of fact, it doesn't mean much of anything. Hopefully we get a clarification soon so we know exactly what "not our focus" means. [TechFlash]
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Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who's ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!
The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won't be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that's cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn't support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.
And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.
I'd hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country's culture, because they're plugs—they don't really mean anything. But in the sense that they're probably not going to change until they're forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it's kind of what they are.
Click for larger
There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we're going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don't actually mandate anything. They're not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.
And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It's not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they're attached to probably are.
The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you've probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison's early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison's technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.
Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla's patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It's an old beef.
For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house's wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell's "Separable Attachment Plug"—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:
My invention has for its object to...do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.
Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it's pretty much the type Americans use now.
Here's the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell's plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.
Take the British plug. Today, it's a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who's had a chance to use one. But it isn't Britain's first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles' cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, "we need a new plug, stat!"
Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and '50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.
Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That's how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters' voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.
You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn't introduced until 1946, and didn't see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.
No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn't great. "There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone's invested in their own system. It's difficult to get away from that."
When Holland's International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee's spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were "limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe)." It'd be expensive to tear out everyone's sockets, and the need didn't feel that urgent, I guess.
Plus, the IEC can't force anyone to do anything—they're sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn't the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?
But the IEC didn't quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there's that.
I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:
Maybe in the future you'll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.
Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we'll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let's say, 2050?
She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we'll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: "We have to move forward into plugs we can really control," Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone'll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.
In the meantime, this means that things really aren't going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.
In other words, sorry.
Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the EIC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi's illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle
Still something you wanna know? Still can't figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.
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Sir James Dyson is more than a guy who makes unusually interesting vacuums. He makes unusually interesting fans, too! We got a (very brief) chance to talk to the man about his tech allegiances, his design philosophy, and more.
In all seriousness, Dyson's legacy is about more than a few home appliances—though they're no doubt impressive. He's a brilliant designer and inventor in an industry starved for brilliant designers and inventors; he's got a clear enthusiasm for what he does, and he's become a sort of evangelist for engineering and inventing; also he's a nerd. I had, like, three minutes with the man, but managed to blurt out a couple questions.
We started on tech:
Giz: PC or Mac?
Sir James: (Emphatically) Mac! Since 1984. I bought the first Macintosh.
Giz: What kind of phone do you carry?
Sir James: Well, I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone.
Giz: Are there any unlikely companies or designers that you see doing really interesting stuff right now?
Sir James: There's my son, who does lights where he varies the angle of the light in quite an interesting manner.
Giz: So they're not lasers?
Sir James: No, they're regular lights. They're floor lights where the shade goes up and down to create a wide or narrow beam. There are wall and ceiling lights which have barn doors as a shade; you get an amazing effect on the wall. I don't know if nepotism is allowed on Gizmodo. [Ed. note: It is! So here's how they work:]
We also run a student competition around the world, and there are some really interesting ideas that come out of that.
Giz: You're fond of removing requisite parts from things—bags from vacuums, blades from fans—is there any particular part in another device that you just want to get rid of?
Sir James: Well, I'm sure there will be, but I don't think we should talk about it now. But yes, it is quite a nice approach to minimalism, removing things—well, removing things that cause problems; that's the point.
Giz: Have you thought about directing your talents away from domestic inventions, and toward something more altruistic? Do you have any projects or dreams outside the world of Dyson?
Sir James: (Laughs) I'd like to do a better vacuum cleaner, but there's all sorts of things I want to do. We're very interested in encouraging people to get into design. In the West, we're training far too few engineers and scientists. Schoolchildren love science and love technology, but somehow their parents, teachers and society tells them that other things are going to be far more interesting, so I'm on a bit of a mission to try and change that.
And as quickly as he stepped into my mic range, he stepped back out. Later, James!
You can read Mark's review on Dyson's $300 bladeless Air Multiplier fan here, as well as the rest of our Dyson coverage.
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