Taiwanese manufacturers A-Data and MSI plan to unveil solar-powered flash devices at CeBIT, though we’re not quite sure either one is a shining example of bright new ways to harness the sun’s power. A-Data’s offering, the Solar Disk USB drive, is a fairly generic thumb drive with a solar-powered LCD that displays its available capacity. Given that USB flash drives with LCD displays are becoming fairly common, and that the use of a solar cell to power such a display isn’t exactly earth-shattering (we seem to remember picking up our first solar calculator about 20 years ago), we can’t exactly see this feature commanding a premium. Meanwhile, MSI plans to demo a solar-cell MP3 player. While that sounds like it could be promising, the solar cell won’t be the sole source of juice for the prototype player; rather, it’ll help charge a conventional lithium battery. And given the amount of time audio players spend in pockets, backpacks and purses, we somehow don’t anticipate this giving the player much of a boost.
From Engadget
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We tried. Really we did. We wanted to limit today’s Origami posts to the one we ran this morning. But we can’t resist the lure of Robert Scoble, whose haiku-like pronouncements on what Origami isn’t graced our newsreader a little while ago. According to Scoble (whose sources at Microsoft are, of course, impeccable), Origami isn’t an iPod killer, portable Xbox, OQO killer or PSP killer. So, what exactly is it? Coy boy Scoble isn’t telling, though he says he’s seen it, and that he’ll buy one with his own money. We assume he won’t be forced to do that. He’s more than earning his keep by feeding us these infuriating snippets.
