India Clinches Bronnze Medal At 2009 RoboGames

The only Indian-built humanoid robot participant in the 2009 RoboGames has won the Bronze medal in the middleweight Humanoid category.


Thursday, june 18, 2009: The AcYut-II robot, co-sponsored by Force20 Networks and designed by students from the Birla Institute of Technology and science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), India, has won the Bronze medal in the middleweight Humanoid category at the 2009 RoboGames that recently took place in San Fransisco.

FIRST SOLAR POWERED MOBILE : SOLAR GURU

The phone comes as a big relief for people living in far-flung areas where there is erratic or even no power supply.

Thursday, June 11, 2009: Now you can charge your mobile anywhere the sun is shining when electricity is unavailable. Samsung has introduced its first solar-powered mobile phone, the samsung solar Guru (Guru E1107), in India. However, the solar power charging is only an option and not the main mode of charging. To charge the battery fully via the solar panel, the phone needs to be kept in the sun for 40 hours.

Priced at Rs 2,799 (($59), the samsung solar guru will be available in India, Europe, Southeast Asia, southwest Asia, and latin America from June 2009.

You can also look forward to Blue Earth -- a pebble shaped, solar-powered touchscreen phone from samsung. samsung presented the solar charging phone Blue Earth at Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona earlier this year. The phone uses a small solar panel to provide power. A full solar charge of around 10 to 14 hours will provide enough power for around four hours of talk time.

Blue Earth is made from recycled plastic and features a special Eco Mode that users can access with a single click to wring the maximum energy use from the device.

India Bans Import of Mobile Handsets Sans IMEI

The ban is applicable only on new mobile phones being imported into the country.

Thursday, June 18,2009: The Indian Government on Wednesday banned import of all handsets that do not support the International Mobile Equipment Identify (IMEI) number. The use of mobile phones without proper IMEI numbers is now seen by the government as a threat to the country's security, as terrorists have been found to use mobile phones extensively. The ban may hit a number of chinese and taiwanese manufacturers that were flooding India with cheap handsets via the qrey market.

Markets sources say that the country currently has around 250 lakh handsets operating on the mobile networks without the IMEI number. Most of these phones are smuggled from markets like china and are sold at a very low cost.