Powermat On Steve Liebmann

Spoke with Steve about the Powermat induction charger that is being released today and is designed specifically for charging portable gear such as iPods, Blackberries and Nintendo DS portable consoles.

I think this type of charging is going to be the future of how we power up devices. It’s clean, simple and in most cases more energy efficient because the power switches off once the unit has been charged. The Powermat basic unit is $149, with charging cases for the different phones costing $49.95 each.

Had a few calls too, including one from Roy and one from Harry, both with the same problem with their LG sets. It seems that at a particular time of the night their television turns off for a few seconds and then switches back on. In Roy’s case it was only the ABC that is affected, while with Harry it was Channel 7. Sounds like a the timer on the set has been set and needs to be reset. This is more than likely the problem.

Clare wanted to know how to download her SMS’s from her new Samsung handset. She should be able to connect to her computer uses a USB cable, and download it that way. There will be instructions with the handset that should show her how to do it. This should be possible with most modern handsets.

Dave is have a burnt or dead pixel problem. This is when one of the small pixels on your LCD no longer works and you can see that on the screen, which can be very annoying. Most vendors have a policy on replacing a screen if too many pixels are burnt or dead. I doubt they would replace a screen over one pixel, but if a few go within a certain time frame, then they should remedy the problem.

Liz bought a phone of Ebay. She said it was an E71, which sounds like a Nokia, but there are some generic brands out there who ‘borrow’ from others, so it might not be. Liz wanted to know if it was possible to turn up the sounds on her handset because she couldn’t hear her husband properly. She should be able to do so by going to the ‘Settings’ feature on the handset. Within those settings is a ‘sound’ feature that allows you to increase the sound output loudness.

Paul wanted to know how to put movies on his iPod without buying them through iTunes. There are a number of MPEG compression programs available online that help you compress the files, and then can be loaded via iTunes.