The best thing about portable digital devices like smartphones and tablets is how they provide such information right at our fingertips. While they excel in cities and urban areas, they don’t always perform the best in extreme outdoor situations.
Designed with the outdoor enthusiast in mind, the creator of Earl has engineered a tablet that’s meant to work where normal smartphones and tablets won’t. A laminated solar panel provides up to 20 hours of uptime. The 3000mAh battery charges in five hours in direct sunlight using high efficiency 18 percent mono crystalline solar cells.
Style meets efficiency with intuitive design, fusing Android 4.1 together with an energy sipping E Ink screen and the latest in GPS, weather sensor, and radio communication technology.
A GPS chipset gives you a precise reading of your location, direction and elevation. Combine Earl with everytrail.com and have access to over 300,000 trails at your fingertips.
The internal weather sensors let you stay ahead of mother nature by forecasting changing conditions, even in remote locations. View current temperature, humidity and barometric pressure at a glance. You can also measure wind speed and direction using Earl’s built in micro anemometer and compass.
Featuring a built in AM/FM/SW/LW radio tuner, Earl lets you listen to the world no matter where you are. Stay connected to people up to 20 miles away with analog and digital radio frequencies with the FRS, GMRS and MURS transceiver.
Earl is available for discounted preorder until June 9th. For more information and to help fund the production of Earl, visit Meetearl.com.
This is a marvelous idea with but one exception. Building in a FRS, GMRS and MURS transceiver might make sense if those bands allowed digital transmission but they don’t. Including them merely adds to the cost and battery drain. This gadget isn’t the right format for a hand-held radio. And for an emergency device, you don’t want to put ‘all your eggs in one basket.’ Communication needs to be separate from locating. Losing one is bad. Losing both would be really bad.
As a radio amateur, I can only wish someone would come up with a device like this paired to a keyboard and an HF PSK digital radio transceiver. String a wire up a tree, and the device would let you communicate to the world.