Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

Kensington Power Booster

Add as a preferred source on Google


Kensington Power BoosterPerhaps you’re in love with the idea of charging gadgets on the go with Callpod’s Fuel Tank, but the idea of carrying around a hulking lithium-ion battery “just in case” doesn’t sit so well with you. If you’re just looking for an emergency shot in the arm for your all-important Blackberry, the smaller Rechargeable Pocket Booster for mobile phones might be just the ticket.

Like the Fuel Tank, the Pocket Booster will juice up your mobile phone without an outlet, but it feeds off two standard AAA batteries rather than an internal lithium-ion version. This design allows you to remove the charged cells to power other portable devices like wireless mice and cameras, and even carry spares in case of extended runs away from an outlet.

Recommended Videos

Kensington says the Booster will deliver up to three hours of extended talk time on a mobile phone, but that figure will vary with different types of phones (for the geeks out there who want tocompare it with their cell phone batteries, it stores 800 mAh of charge.) The unit includes a mini-USB cable to charge many common types of phones, and it also has a standard USB connector forcharging off of larger devices, like your notebook computer. The Kensington Pocket Booster for mobile phones is available immediately for a rather reasonable $25, which includes the NiMH batteries.More information can be found on Kensington’s product page.

Nick Mokey
As Digital Trends’ Editor in Chief, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team covering every gadget under the sun, along with…
Robot dogs were supposed to help humans. Now humans are being asked to babysit them
One startup offered $20 an hour to walk its robots, with some heavy lifting required when the dogs overheat
GO2 robot dog

San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.

Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.

Read more
Forget smartwatches; this smart bed could soon help keep you safe from being a fall risk
Who needs another wearable when your mattress could help spot fall risks?
Bed

Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.

The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.

Read more
Anthropic’s sensitive internal data was exposed, and AI helped make it happen
Even the company behind Claude isn't immune to AI-powered security threats, as researchers discovered some worrying vulnerabilities.
Claude Anthropic Featured

AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.

The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.

Read more