Last week, I wrote about live streaming video from your car and in doing so, I mentioned something that helped my iPhone 3G keep powered up for the ride. That device is the Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 3G from a company called mStation.
No, you can’t drink it
The Juice Pack for iPhone 3G is a device, not an actual juice pack that you can drink. A few people had to ask when I said things like “One second, I need to grab my Juice Pack”. The Juice Pack is actually a pretty sleek device and I had heard of it before, but hadn’t thought much about the need for it. When I got it, I also noticed that it looked like it could be a bit bulky. Basically, it’s a battery that your iPhone 3G slides into and it more than double’s the battery life of your phone.
The Juice Pack is very elegant in its design. If I had a decent budget to design a wrap-around style battery, this is pretty much the ideal. The added height is minimal, as is the thickness (for the capacity). It’s not very heavy, but the thickness is definitely noticeable. If keeping your pocket weight down to a minimum is a high priority, you might have to just talk and play less on your iPhone. It’s black on the outside, which matched my phone, but won’t match all phones. The color inside (which is hidden while in use) is a bright green, which just screams “energy” to me. The bottom contains the pass-through USB connection to charge and sync and on the back is a power indicator with four LEDs. When you press the button on the back, anywhere from one to four LEDs will light up depending on how much juice is left in your pack. If the aesthetics are important to you, I’m not sure you’ll find a better-looking battery supplement. I should add that they make Juice Packs for both generations of the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch and have a $79 Juice Pack Air coming soon.
How well does it work?
In my test, I didn’t notice it. That is to say that I mostly forgot it was wrapped around my iPhone, feeding it power. One of the things that I’ve noticed draining my battery quickly is prolonged video recording and playing or anything that constantly updates the screen like video. This is why the streaming video experiment was a good test. When I started out from my house, the iPhone battery and the Juice Pack were both about 100% charged up. I recorded (and streamed via 3G) audio and video of my drive to work which took about 20 minutes. When I had arrived at my office, I removed the Juice Pack and checked both it and the iPhone. My iPhone was at 100% still because, as I used it, the Juice Pack was constantly recharging it. The Juice Pack was about half full. At this rate, I could probably stream video for an hour with a fully charged iPhone and Juice Pack.
Conclusion
With a price tag of $99, you’re not going to get away with one of these cheap, but if you’re like me and you’re on your iPhone every ten minutes checking email, playing games, updating Twitter, etc., it is a very attractive option to keep you running while on the go. Compared to other devices that don’t integrate anywhere near as smoothly as the Juice Pack and that cost about $50-$80 for similar battery life, this is a nice upgrade for a little more money.
On a side note, if you buy from the Mophie web site, you might be able to tack on a good deal on another accessory. At the time of this writing, I noticed a clearance section of the site with a bunch of stuff for $0.99.
Some of you already know about things I do aside from this blog, and one of those things is a radio station I run called GotBlack Radio. The station plays gothic, industrial and electronic music and is mostly automated. I won’t get into all the details here, but the station is essentially just an ever-changing one-song playlist that is randomly re-generated via a PHP script that grabs a random track. I had a colleague modify an existing flash music player to my tastes and built the rest on my own.
Previously, I had gone with a couple different community-based platforms, but they either wanted to run ads or I had to run the station from a PC in my house or they just didn’t offer the level of control I wanted. Because of this series of cons I experiences, I decided to build my own radio platform, as simple as it is, giving me all the control and making it easy for me to add any feature I wanted. The best examples of this new-feature control have come recently in integrating the station with Twitter.
Why I integrated with Twitter
Some people still don’t know what Twitter is, and that’s understandable because people seem to have a hard time trying to explain it. Technically, it’s a micro-blogging platform. What that means is that a user writes just a snippet rather than a whole post like this. It’s like telling a whole bunch of people all at once what’s going on in one or two sentences. This seemed to me like the perfect place to let existing listeners know about radio updates while letting new people know about the station.
A little birdie told me
Every five minutes or so, GB Radio plays another track. While people could always sit and listen 24 hours a day to know what’s playing, most people don’t have the time. I took a little of the code I use in TwitterTech.com and plugged it into the custom PHP radio server code and in about 15 minutes, @gbradio was serving up updates on what was playing live. Now, instead of having to visit the site to see what’s playing, anyone on Twitter can simply follow the station for live updates.
More than 40,000 updates later, it’s still running on its own without me having to even check up on it. Sadly, I hadn’t even logged into the Twitter account in months or told many people about it, but the account seems to be working for me. The updates have created searchable content for Twitter. This means that when someone searches for an artist’s name or a song title on Twitter and it’s an artist or track that I have in the music database, there’s a decent chance that person will come across a tweet from gbradio, finding a new station to listen to.
Tweet your request and hear it played
Sometimes you want to hear a particular piece of music and you just don’t want to wait. Before, I didn’t really have a request system in place because I just haven’t built the whole web interface for requests. Luckily, the Twitter API is dead simple, so I slapped together a request system in about 15 minutes and after another half hour of debugging (oops!), the request system was live.
The station doesn’t have a ton of followers yet, but as more and more join, it becomes clear that not only will my listeners benefit from the added functionality, but so will my follower (and listener) numbers.
Will code for followers
What happens when you add useful functionality to the web? Sometimes people notice and you reap the rewards. While my gbradio Twitter account isn’t exactly swimming in followers, it’s clear that the live updates are helping get it there.
Just to put things in perspective, when I created the account, I searched for and followed maybe 100 people who showed some interest in the music that’s played on the station. Like I noted above, though, I hadn’t even logged into the account in months. Looking at the graph above tells me that followers didn’t come in when I went looking for them, but with the new functionality, they’re just coming in on their own.
What’s next?
If you want to succeed at something you need to not only recognize your failures, but you must also pay attention to what works. What works here is programming to the wants and needs of the people who listen to the station and are also on Twitter. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I’m open to ideas, especially since the API makes everything so terribly easy.
Today’s Friday, so that means I have a bunch of cool links for you. However, today is also Friday the 13th. In honor of the occasion, my first link is to a domain name I have for sale: FridayTheThirteenth.com. I have the bidding starting at only $2,000. Now let’s get on to the rest of the links.
Electric beauty – “Koenigsegg’s Solar Car Is Like an Electric Batmobile” You got that right, Giz.
Real F1 car driven by phone – At first, I thought this was just an RC car driven by a Blackberry Storm, and it was until a little ways into the video where they show it redone on a larger scale, in a real F1. Seriously cool tech.
Crowd Media – I can see more of this stuff coming down the pipe. These guys used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to have thousands of people contribute independently to a final production they had no knowledge of. The song results are cool, but the $100 bill results are more rewarding, I think.
Peoplebrowsr – It’s like Twitter on crack or maybe it’s just crack for Twitter. Whatever it is, assume some form of crack reference.
Photoshop Fun – Valentine’s day may have come and gone, but this tutorial can be applied to any graphics, really, so bust out those shamrocks and a green pallet and make some really cool imagery.
iamnews.com – iamnews.com is “the world’s first open news agency”. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but it makes me think of BloggersBase.com (crowd-contributed articles) and NowPublic.com (crowd-contributed media for their news articles). I wonder if this is where news media is headed as more and more people are writing blogs and putting media online.
FairShare – I recently dumped my blog information into this site and added the RSS feed to my reader and although it does turn up a couple blog community results, it showed me a content scraper today who had scraped one of my posts. The ability to quickly jump on a scraper is nice, so I like that FairShare is doing all the hard work and finding them for me.
Recesstion investment strategies – Those who have any money left in these tough times need to be careful about where it’s invested and this some pretty good advice on the topic.
St Patrick’s Day – Like wearing the green? Wanna take the day off? Get one step closer by voting to make it a national holiday. Why not?
Since the release of the original Robosapien, WowWee has been well known for making cool robots that won’t cost an arm and a leg. Always working on new robots to entertain kids and adults alike, they came out with the Tri-Bot some time ago and they put one in my hands last week to review.
A fun design
Whenever I buy a robot that you expect to act like a robot, I’m of the opinion that it should look the part. I think WowWee has accomplished this with the Tri-Bot. He certainly looks like a robot, but he also looks like a fun robot. His eyes and grin are always wide, hinting at his excitement, his face in general makes me think he’s about to tell a joke, and he’s bright red, which is a bold step away from the white, grey and other subtle colors normally found on robots.
His three-wheel design is also a nice switch, too, apart from being functional. It’s another reminder that while he has personality, he’s still a robot and can zip around pretty quickly. On the back, he bears a large handle which seems a bit out of place like when you see those over-sized spoilers on little suped-up cars. Maybe that’s the point, or maybe it’s just because it’s really handy, but that was the only visual aspect of this little guy I didn’t find appealing.
Programming, mobility and accelerometer-base controls
The first thing you notice about Tri-Bot is his three big omniwheels. An omniwheel is a wheel that includes smaller wheels around its edges that are perpendicular to the larger wheel’s rolling direction. This gives Tri-Bot a lot more directional mobility than any other wheeled robot I’ve experienced. I hate that these wheels are a magnet for carpet lint and cat hair, but they operate well on carpet, wood, and tile, so it’s a fair trade-off.
Another new feature is the remote, itself. It makes good use of an internal accelerometer. If you’ve ever seen how a Wii remote works, this is nothing new… except that it’s in a robot’s remote control. Like any other accelerometer-controlled device, it takes some practice. To move Tri-Bot forward, you just lean the remote forward while holding the trigger on the bottom and to make him back up, lean it back. Leaning the remote to either side makes him move sideways in that direction. It’s about time we see this is a recreational robot, and the timing is perfect with all the iPhone games that work in the same way.
For those not yet comfortable with this new-fangled control system, this remote still has the expected front/back/left/right directional buttons as well as buttons in between those to accommodate forward-right, left-reverse and similar diagonal movements. The omniwheels allow him to spin around, too, so they’ve thrown in a couple spin buttons. He spins fast, too. So fast, that it’s a little hard to be precise with it. Above the cluster of directional buttons is the HOME button. When the HOME button is pressed, Tri-Bot searches for his beacon (the remote) and will try to return to it, which seems to work pretty well. Below the directional buttons are the program record and playback buttons which let you, you guessed it, record and play back a series of movements. Following those is the little brain button. Really, that’s his roaming button. When you press it, you’re telling Tri-Bot to wander around on his own, exploring and making comments.
The bottom half of the remote has four buttons: DEMO, GAME, GUARD, and ALARM. The DEMO button should be pretty obvious. It tells him to perform a demonstration for you, which you can see in the video below. The GAME button lets you enter game mode and choose a game. The GUARD button activates his guard mode, which mostly meant he sat there waiting for something to happen and the ALARM button activates his alarm mode and allows you to set his alarm. The alarm mode (also demonstrated in the video below) is a neat idea, but I don’t know when I would realistically use it. The reason for this is that you can set the alarm to go off anywhere from one to twelve minutes after setting it, but not more. When it goes off, Tri-Bot runs around randomly, flashing and making all kinds of noise. If Tri-Bot had a little digital clock and I could set the alarm for an actual time, it would be a great feature. All three games are driving games where you have to complete a series of navigational actions to complete a game and are good for getting real practice moving Tri-Bot around.
Before reading my final thoughts on this little guy, take a look at the video below of him in action. You can also see the full photo set here.
The final verdict
While my Robosapien 2 is still my favorite, the Tri-Bot comes packed with everything a toy robot should. It’s designed to be appealing to any age group, gets around quickly, is funny, smart, and seems pretty durable. Aside from the alarm, Tri-Bot is a near-flawless, well thought out winner, smartly priced around $50. As an adult, I get more excited about things like web-based control over wi-fi and a built in camera, but for any child, this would be the gift that could help re-validate your “World’s Greatest _____” mug in that child’s eyes.
