Airbus Will Introduce Self-Tracking Baggage Line

by Libby Zay on

Airplane manufacturer Airbus has been cooking up another innovation: a “smart bag” that allows travelers to check in and track their luggage from their phone.

The tech-infused piece of luggage, Bag2Go, contains sensors and an RFID chip that communicates with airlines systems – including check-in and security – and relays the information to an iPhone app. For packing and check-in purposes, the luggage will be able to automatically weigh the contents of suitcases, and users will be able to track their bag as it makes its way onto the plane. It will also alert travelers if their baggage has been opened, saving travelers the trouble of getting caught in a baggage theft scam, like the one in Italy earlier this year that ended in nearly 50 arrests.

The bag is still in the development stages, but in a promotional video Airbus is saying travelers will either be able to buy a Bag2Go suitcase or rent them trip-by-trip. Although the baggage doesn’t seem to help solve the mystery of what to do if your luggage accidentally gets sent to Timbuktu, we’re glad it’ll save us from milling around baggage carousels as we impatiently wait for our suitcase to materialize.

[via Wired]

Gadling Gear Review: Two Versatile Mobile Chargers

by Kraig Becker on

There is no denying that smartphones have changed the way we work, play and stay connected with one another. Our phones provide us with directions to the nearest restaurant, tell us what time our movie begins and will even help us alert our friends when we’re running a little late. They give us weather reports, stock tips and warn us about traffic delays, all while taking great photos and sharing them across a variety of social networks. We truly live in an age of wonders during which we hold a powerful piece of technology right in the palm of our hand. That is, until the battery dies.

If there is one thing that my iPhone can’t do that my old “dumb phone” could, it is go for days without needing a recharge. You remember those days right? Back when you charged your phone once a week rather than every night. Now days, I’m lucky if my battery can get me through a single day, let alone a full week. Thankfully there are a slew of options for helping us keep our favorite devices from becoming a useless hunk of glass and plastic, including some interesting new mobile chargers that can help keep your phone up and running for hours longer than it could on its own. Here are two such options that travelers will find as worthy additions to their carry-on bags.

Waka Waka Power ($79)
With the advent of low cost and more efficient solar panels, charging our devices from the sun has truly become a viable option. The Waka Waka Power takes that concept and wraps it in a nice looking, lightweight package that is easy to carry with you just about anywhere. The charger is a little over 4.5 inches in length and weighs in at a svelte 7 ounces. That makes it easy to store in a glove compartment, purse or your carry-on, ensuring that you’ll have power whenever and wherever you need it.This mobile charger features an internal 2200-mAh battery that can be charged via the small built-in solar panel, or by plugging the Waka Waka directly into a USB port on a computer. Charging times vary greatly no matter which of those methods you choose, as the amount of direct sunlight or the level of current running to the USB port determine how long it will take to fill the power cell. Four blue lights across the top indicate the battery’s status, while an accompanying red light blinks at varying speeds to indicate how quickly the device is charging. This comes in particularly handy when the Waka Waka is collecting energy via its solar panel, making it easy to find the most direct sunlight possible.

The Waka Waka’s built-in USB port provides enough juice to charge even the most power hungry smartphones such as the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4. It can even charge an iPad, although the Waka Waka’s relatively small battery capacity doesn’t have the same level of impact on the battery life of a tablet. While testing the device, I was able to charge my iPhone 4S a couple of times before the Waka Waka itself needed to power up.

Off-Grid Solutions, the company that designed the Waka Waka, certainly had travelers in mind when they build the charger. Not only is its sleek design perfect for taking with you on the road, but it also comes with a built-in flashlight that is very handy at times as well. The light has four brightness settings and a flashing “SOS” mode, and is good for at least 20 hours on a full charge. And when the battery starts to run low, simply stick the Waka Waka back into the sunlight to start charging once again.

Demonstrating their commitment to encouraging the use of clean solar energy, Off-Grid Solutions has even vowed to give away a Waka Waka charger for every one that is purchased. So when you buy the device, the company behind it will ship another one to a developing nation to be given out to someone who doesn’t have easy access to other forms of power. That is a great program indeed and quite a gesture on the part of the company.

New Trent Travelpak Plus ($54.95)

If you’re looking for a more traditional mobile charging option, the Travelpak Plus from New Trent brings a lot of great featuress to the table. For example, it is available in two versions, one with a 4000-mAh battery and the other with a 7000-mAh battery. That means even the lower capacity model has nearly twice the available power of the Waka Waka. I tested the 7000-mAh model and found that it provided ample power to recharge my iPhone more than three times without needing a recharge itself.

While the Travelpak Plus doesn’t have a solar panel, it does come with a built-in AC adapter. The back of the device has a power-plug that flips out when needed, allowing you to plug it in to a wall outlet whenever you need to charge the battery. It also comes with two USB ports, giving you the ability to charge two devices at the same time. When plugged into the wall, the Travelpak plus instantly becomes a powerful AC adapter for any device that charges via USB and when you take it on the road, it can greatly extend the life of all of your gadgets, including an iPad or other tablet.

New Trent included an ambient light on the Travelpak Plus as well and while it isn’t nearly as useful as the one that is included on the Waka Waka, it does serve as a decent nightlight when plugged into a wall outlet. That actually comes in handy when traveling, helping you to find your way in a strange room in the middle of the night.

This mobile charger is durable and well put together, and while it weighs a bit more than the Waka Waka, it isn’t incredibly heavy. It is substantial enough that when you slip it into a travel bag you’ll know that it is there, but not enough to really make it a bother. Besides, having a powerful source of energy with you at all times more than makes up for a little extra weight.

The 4000-mAh version of the Travelpak Plus costs $44.95, while the higher capacity model is just $10 more. With such a slight difference in price, I think it makes more sense to shell out the extra cash for the 7000-mAh version. You may not need that much power all that often but it’ll be nice to know it is there when you need it. A traveling companion will appreciate the extra USB port when their gadgets start to run low on power too.

Whether you go with the Waka Waka or the Travelpak Plus, you’ll be happy to have the extra power when you need it. Both of these options are great choices and each brings their own unique options to the table. The solar panel of the Waka Waka is great for charging anywhere and the extra capacity and duel USB ports on the Travelpak are excellent as well. Either way, you can’t lose.

How HDR Photo Editing Can Ruin Your Travel Photos

by Adam Hodge on

When I was hiking last year in northern Laos, I came to a break in the​ forest near the top of the hill. The view was astonishing. The sky was filled with shadowy clouds and where bright sunlight broke through cloud cover, it settled on karst formations hanging with vivid green foliage. I whipped out my DSLR and snapped some shots so I could relive it later. When I loaded up the photos that night, I was beyond disappointed. The greens were dull and the forests were too dark to make out any detail. In my longer exposures where I could see the forest, the sky was blown out. My eye (or rather my brain compensating for my eye) saw the bright colors and dramatic shadows. My camera didn’t.

The human eye is still miles better at imaging a scene than even the most powerful DSLR. That’s why spectacularly lit scenes will often look terrible on a laptop screen. Enter post-processing. On-board camera programs, be they Instagram or other native digital filters, can do all sorts of things to improve your photos. It used to be that red-eye filters were all the rage. These days, even freely available photo manipulation programs can saturate, contrast, tint, blur, invert, soften and cross process. The more powerful tools, like Lightroom and Photoshop, can do pretty much anything imaginable to a photo.

These tools are a blessing, but unfortunately they’re not inherently good for travel photography. These tools are just as readily used for evil. For every photographer who has fixed a screwy white balance in post-processing, there’s another who has maxed out the saturation bar in Picasa or applied an infrared effect just for the hell of it. I, too, have been guilty of these sins. But if there’s one image-editing gimmick that really brings out the pitchforks, it’s HDR: high-dynamic-range imaging.

You’ve certainly seen HDR images before. They’re often eye-wateringly vivid and look off. High-dynamic-range imaging allows a photographer to take multiple exposures of the same scene, and combine them digitally to achieve a better combination of light and dark in the photo. Say you’re trying to capture a beautiful sunset. The range of light intensity is simply too high for any standard camera to pick up both foreground details and the beauty of the sky. HDR offers a magical digital fix for this problem.

Early HDR techniques were massively involved and complicated. Even when digital photography came around, computers were still too slow to handle the complex algorithms. But now, it’s extremely easy for anyone to apply the effect to any photo. In business terms, the barriers to entry are low and everyone’s doing it. The glut of faux-HDR filters and simple HDR compositors like Photomatix has opened the door to runaway misuse. Few people use HDR correctly. And when done incorrectly, HDR images look terrible.

The point of HDR imaging is to make the image look more natural. The high range of tones that the camera can’t pick up by itself can be manipulated and expressed digitally. More often than not, though, HDR images end up looking fake and weird. Why is that? Simply, it’s because people tend to go overboard with the effect. Since the shadows and highlights are easily manipulated during the process, it’s easy to end up with glowing buildings, apocalyptic clouds and cartoonish people. The key to proper HDR use is restraint. The effect works best if no one can tell you’ve used it. If you apply HDR to a set of exposures or you’ve used an HDR filter, ask yourself: Does this scene look real? If it looks weird, don’t use HDR. If you think it looks cool anyway, it probably doesn’t. It looks weird, and don’t use HDR.

Take a look at these two photos, which don’t glow and hum with cartoon colors, but rather use HDR to highlight shadows and tones that would be impossible to capture in one exposure.

Even the second one gets a little saturation-happy. It just goes to show you that it’s easy to let the reins slip.

The backlash against HDR has been extreme. If you Google “HDR sucks” you get numerous websites decrying the glowy menace. Sample blog titles include: “I Hate Your HDR“; “HDR Is Stupid And It Sucks“; and the somewhat hyperbolic “HDR Is Bad For Amurrica, And Kills Kittens.” There is a subreddit devoted to shaming particularly egregious examples. Even the Washington Post was obliged to explain itself after it used and HDR photo on its front page.

When you’re traveling and you’re desperate to capture an unforgettable scene, oftentimes using HDR is the only way to pick up on the light and tone variation that your eye is loving. But everyone knows that the Hong Kong skyline doesn’t glow white in the day, and that forests aren’t technicolor. If you’re going to use HDR, show some restraint and don’t just slap on filters willy-nilly. As for me, I deleted my crappy photos of the Laos jungle. My memory of the scene is more vividly colored anyway.

Take a gander at these egregious uses of HDR, and think long and hard if you want your travel photos to look like stills from “A Scanner Darkly.”

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Gadling Gear Review: Ematic Genesis Prime Android Tablet

by Kraig Becker on

Over the past few years the tablet market has grown from a small niche with few buyers into one of the fastest growing segments in consumer electronics. The introduction of the iPad created consumer demand where there had been none before and naturally a host of competitors soon followed. The most successful of those competitors are powered by Google’s touch-based Android operating system, which is now run on dozens of devices, including smartphones and tablets. Android has delivered on its promise to provide inexpensive devices that rival those built by Apple, and as a result someone looking to buy a tablet on a budget now has some legitimate options from which to choose. Take for example the Genesis Prime from Ematic, a device whose biggest selling point is its very affordable price.

At its core, the Genesis Prime is a 7-inch tablet with a 1.1 GHz processor, 4GB of storage and a front-facing VGA camera. It runs Android 4.1 (Jellybean) and has full access to the Google Play store, giving users the ability to download games, apps, books, music, movies and more. The device is just .4 inches thick and tips the scales at a svelte 9.6 ounces, which makes it thinner and lighter than most other tablets on the market. All of these features are pretty much the minimum of what you would expect out of any Android tablet these days, although the Genesis Prime does have one feature that helps it stick out from the crowd – its price. Ematic sells the device for just $79.99, which puts it squarely into the “budget” category and well below most of its competitors.In order to reach that price point some compromises obviously needed to be made with the technology incorporated into the tablet. How much of a deal breaker those compromises are depends on the value you place on having cutting edge technology in your gadgets. For instance, the 7-inch touch screen on the Genesis Prime runs at a resolution of just 800 x 480 – which is well below the 1024 x 768 display found on the iPad Mini or the 1280 x 800 screen that Google puts in it’s own Nexus 7 tablet. Ematic also skimped on storage space, offering up just 4GB out of the box, although that can be expanded up to 32GB using MicroSD cards. But that’s not all, the processor used to power the Genesis is on the slow side, the built in camera is sub-par and the battery life is just a shade over four hours, which isn’t even enough to complete a cross-country flight.

With all of that in mind, I tried to approach my review on the Genesis Prime from the perspective of the consumer who isn’t necessarily in the market for Apple’s high-end devices or even Google and Amazon’s mid-range tablets. I put myself into the shoes of someone who wanted a tablet but didn’t want to blow their budget acquiring one. Even coming at it from that angle, I found that I needed to set my expectations accordingly in order to not be disappointed. The Genesis does offer a full Android experience and provides access to the Google Play ecosystem, but it is also sluggish and slow at times, which can be a bit frustrating, particularly when you’re not sure if the device has registered your touch inputs or is actually doing something in the background. Once I started to install a few apps, it also didn’t take long to run into storage issues due to the paltry 4GB that comes built-in. At one point, I couldn’t even update some apps because there simply wasn’t enough storage capacity left to do so. Adding a MicroSD card fixed the problem, but that is an extra expense that some consumers shopping in this space may not be prepared for.

Still, the Genesis Prime isn’t without its merits. It you’re looking for a device to check email or your social networks, it works just fine in that capacity. It’ll even handle light web browsing activities relatively well and streaming from Pandora or Spotify worked great, although the sound quality was better coming out of a decent pair of headphones rather than the built-in speaker. Reading books through the Kindle app or Google’s own Play Books was also fine, although the low-resolution screen is likely to be a more of a strain on the eyes. Some of the more popular 2D games, like Angry Birds, performed reasonably well too, just don’t expect to play some of the more advanced 3D games in the Google Play store. Something like EA’s Real Racing 3 would probably be more of an exercise in frustration than anything else.

If you’re in the market for a tablet device and you don’t have much money to spend, you fit exactly into the target audience that Ematic had in mind when they designed the Genesis Prime. $80 for an Android device is extremely cheap for sure, although the old adage of “you get what you pay for” couldn’t be more applicable than it is here. The all-around performance of this tablet is below that of the competition, but then again most of them cost at least twice as much. The Genesis Prime is a decent enough product, provided you go in knowing its limitations. But aside from the low cost of entry, it is hard to recommend this tablet. Especially when Google’s entry level Nexus 7 costs just $199 and comes with a much better screen, four times the memory, double the battery life and a considerably faster processor.

At the start of this review I mentioned how quickly the tablet market has grown over the past few years. It has gotten so big in fact that tablets are now projected to start outselling traditional PC’s as early as next year. Apple of course commands the largest part of that market share with their iPad, but Android has carved out a nice slice of the pie with lower-cost, alternative devices. Perhaps Ematic is looking to create a bargain basement space in which they can become the dominant player. If that is the case, the Genesis Prime is a solid device at a great price. But if you can manage to dig a little deeper into your wallet, you’ll find the alternatives are much better devices all around and well worth the extra money spent.

New Backcountry Tablet Set for Late Summer Launch

by Rob Annis on

This summer, backcountry enthusiasts might be stowing a new piece of electronic gear into their packs.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, developers are planning to launch Earl, a 7-inch “backcountry survival tablet” this August. The rugged, Android-based tablet was designed for outdoor adventure, with an ultra-precise GPS chipset, weather sensors, two-way radio and laminated solar panels to recharge on the go. (A fully charged Earl tablet will run for approximately 20 hours in the wild before needing juice.)

The Wi-Fi enabled tablet can survive a 3-foot swim in a running creek, so long as you rescue it within 30 minutes, and at altitudes up to 40,000 feet. But don’t plan on using it on your next polar expedition; Earl is rated to work in temperatures down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sqigle founder and tablet mastermind Jon Perry named the device after his eight-year-old Italian greyhound, a frequent companion on his adventures. The design team went through more than 100 case designs before finding a design that would stand up to the type of abuse typically dished out on the trail.

The 7-inch 10.8-ounce e-Ink tablet will likely retail for $325 when it’s released later this summer, although early backers can purchase it for 30 percent off until June 9.