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From ChipChick and Engadget comes information on a solar-powered Bluetooth headset. Bluetooth headsets need a battery to power the radio, but it’s usually a low-wattage affair. The Iqua Sun 603 uses a small solar panel that on the exterior side of the headset to trickle charge the battery. It looks like an ideal headset for the sunny tropics, but it’s not available yet in the USA. Price is £40 in the UK.

My current headset is the Jawbone. It’s not solar-powered – the charger uses a proprietary cable that has a USB jack on one end and the headset plug on the other. The Jawbone’s best feature is sound quality. It does a very nice job of eliminating background noise in the user’s vicinity. It looks good, too. I’ve seen some really ugly headsets in the last couple of years.

When consultants, contractors and startups need office space, where should they go? The New York Times profiles several coworking groups who share an office. People rent a desk. In one cowork group, three friends who live in a loft are renting out desk space in the daytime. Coworkers often share their experiences in person and online. The Times mentions http://coworking.pbwiki.com as one such web site. Coworkers often become involved in each others’ businesses, too. Starting a business on your own can be difficult. Coworking gives entrepreneurs a social setting that may help improve productivity and prospects.

The platform wars are heating up in the mobile phone industry. It is very difficult for a mobile carrier to support several different handset operating systems. Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin estimated that his UK-based company supports 30 or 40 different OSes, according to this MacWorld UK report. Sarin is also quited in this Business Week article.

It takes a great deal of effort to establish a computing standard. Consider Apple, which became a new entrant with its iPhone. There are about 4 million Apple iPhones available or in use now, which is a respectable number when one considers its limited availability. There are no official iPhone providers in China or Japan yet, for example.

Google won’t make or market its own mobile phone, especially now that the company has dropped out of the 700 mHz auction, as reported by Forbes. The company’s Android mobile phone platform is based upon Linux, and over 30 companies have signed on to develop and support Android hardware. Prototypes of the Google phone were shown in Frankfurt at the Mobile World Congress this week. This CNET slideshow starts with a pic of one such prototype, which appears to be running and connected to a GSM network.

Microsoft used a similar approach to develop its Windows Mobile platform for PDAs and smartphones. The company expects that 20 million Windows Mobile phones from various manufacturers will be sold in the first half of 2008. None of these phones are Microsoft-branded devices.

Symbian claims to have the top spot, with 77 million units sold in the last year. Nokia is the main manufacturer that uses the Symbian operating system, along with Sony Ericsson. The latter company has started using Windows Mobile in its high-end smartphones, however.

For more information, see my earlier articles tagged as mobile, including:

• 11 February 2008: The modular mobile phone
• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 11 January 2008: BlackBerry vs iPhone
• 26 November 2007: Mobile devices for US census takers
• 24 September 2007: Do you want a PC on your iPhone?
• 23 April 2007: Samsung and Microsoft further their convergence goals

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I found links to two articles in the Times of London. In the first article, Professor Tara Brarbazon describes the research policy for her first-year students: no Googling or Wikipedia. Students should consider the authority of the source material, instead of PageRank or convenience. In a response, Times columnist Magnus Linklater portrays Brabazon’s ban as a short-sighted elitist, while praising Wikipedia for its low error rate. Wikipedia has announced that it will conduct a survey of its users and editors, with the assistance of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Of course, balance is important, as I mentioned in my 15 January 2008 article about Wikipedia’s seventh anniversary. Wikipedia and Google are convenient starting points for research, but students need to develop their own search skills.

More library databases are available in surprising ways. This Chronicle article from 7 January 2008 discusses how university libraries are posting their own Facebook applications, to provide their students with easier access to reference materials.

Courtesy of BoingBoing, here’s a photo of at least five different electrical outlets that are available at each seat in a European conference room.

It’s not just the power outlets that are different. The outlets provide different voltages and frequencies of alternating current (AC), depending upon the standards. This Wikipedia article has a good discussion that I used to develop a key for the above photo. Going from left to right:

1. Type G or BS 1363: 240v, 50 hZ. Used in the UK, Singapore and South Africa
2. Type E: 220v, 50 hZ. Used in France, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and other European countries.
3. I have no idea what standard the third plug uses.
4. Type J or SEV 1011: 250v, 50 hZ. A Swiss model.
5. Type B, NEMA, PBG: 120v, 60 hZ. The standard 3-pin plug used in the US and Canada. Japanese plugs look similar, but use 100v and 50 hZ.
6. Again, I have no clue which plug this might be.

Every couple of months, someone asks me about a power issue. It might be electric plugs, battery life or power adapters. International travelers sometimes learn a hard lesson about voltage. If an outlet supplies too little voltage, the device will not work well or at all. This is a common issue for European visitors to Hawaii, as our 120v outlets provide only half the power that a European device might need it.

If the outlet provides too much voltage, the device might start smoking or burning. American visitors to Europe sometimes encounter this issue when they force a 12ov Type B plug into a 220v or higher European outlet.

I’ve long thought that the standard USB type A connector might become a standard electrical connector for low-power devices. USB usually provides only 5v of direct current (DC) at 100 or 500 milliamperes. That’s either 1 or 2.5 watts, so USB only useful for charging or running small devices.

DC is the common standard for batteries, and is also used inside almost every electronic device. Batteries have a limited lifespan, even when recharged.

But USB is an international standard, so more and more digital cameras, mobile phones and small devices use this interface for charging. Better yet, perhaps some company will start offering USB power outlets that can be installed directly into a wall.