Zegna Ski Jacket with built-in solar panel

It’s about that time to start looking into warm coats to shield us from the cold. Well one company has decided to make a ski jacket that will not only keep you warm, but keep your gadgets charged as well. It has a solar panel built into the collar itself. There have been a few different designers that have attempted to slip a solar panel onto an article of clothing, but a lot of them end up looking ridiculous. This ski jacket actually doesn’t look too bad with the built-in solar panel.
One cool extra feature is that you can take the collar off of the jacket. Which means that even when you aren’t using the jacket you can put the solar panel in the window to charge up your gadgets. That also means you could use this solar panel year round. It is also waterproof, so you don’t have to worry about snow or rain damaging the solar panel. Unfortunately the jacket is pretty expensive. To get one of your own it will end up costing you $1,350.

Toshiba announces Portégé A600 notebook

Toshiba has a brand new notebok for the masses, in the form of the Portégé A600 notebook. This new release is an ultraportable notebook that comes in the 12.1″ form factor, making it small and light to tote around without straining your shoulders on the showfloor but not lightweight enough in terms of processing power that you aren’t able to run a few programs simultaneously without having the device slow down significantly. Let us take a closer look at the Portégé A600 notebook right after the jump.

Samsung wants to make inroads into US notebook market

Granted, the recent MacBook line updates surely stands heads and shoulders above all the other notebook releases we’ve been looking at, but that won’t stop companies like Samsung from releasing their range in the US notebook market. All the notebooks on offer consist of a quartet of categories known as Premium Thin & Light, All Purpose, Business, Desktop Replacement and Netbook. Premium Thin & Light sounds more like some sort of breakfast cereal instead of a notebook, but I’ll let it slide this once. Let’s take a look at the different types in greater detail right after the jump.

The Dalek Illuminating Wall Clock for Doctor Who fans

Dr. Who fans will be excited to see this latest bit of Dr. Who inspired gadgetry. Although the Dalek played a slightly evil role in the series, you can put it to work with a much simpler task. However, if you have any worries about robots taking over the world, this probably isn’t the clock for you. Otherwise you might end up having Dalek related nightmares and end up smashing your clock to pieces the moment you wake up.

Robotic plant works like the real thing

Researchers from Chonnam National University in Korea have managed to come up with the robotic plant, and this “green” robot surprisingly functions just like its biological counterpart - producing oxygen, emitting aromas (hopefully not that of a Rafflesia) as well as emit moisture to help keep the air less dry than it already is. I don’t think this robotic plant will be more popular than the real thing, but it is interesting to know we can rely on this just in case there is a nuclear fallout sometime in the future to provide us with oxygen. This robotic plant is also able to react to noise and light, but I don’t think talking to it will make it grow, since it can’t in the first place.

Encoder Ring lets you hide super secret information

Some of the most entertaining products, are the ones that haven’t made it into production just yet and are merely a concept design. This one may not seem very technology based, after all it is a ring, even if it has unique little dots encoded into it. Well those are dots are more than they initially appear to be. They represent letters within binary code. Which means you can have a ring with a secret message placed within it. Although, as hard as I try I can’t really think of a single thing I’d want to encode onto a ring like this.

Western Digital Scorpio Blue notebook

Western Digital has begun to roll out volume shipments as well as OEM qualifications for its very own Scorpio Blue 2.5″ notebook hard drive that comes in various capacities, topping out at 500GB. This is made possible thanks to industry-leading 250 GB-per-platter technology, and if you think that 500GB is just way too much for you to stomach, there is always the 400GB SATA hard drive model. I foresee that many notebooks in the near future will feature the Scorpio Blue, along with a whole host of other portable storage