Can Smart Cities Save Mankind?

What is a 'Smart City'

A 'smart city' is one that is purpose-built for 21st-century living. That means offering an infrastructure that enables everyone to access modern technologies easily and cheaply, so that communities can benefit from smarter collaboration.

The London Example

In 2013, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson revealed his comprehensive 'smart city' plan. He mentioned that, in London, between 2011 and 2021, more than 800,000 homes would be built, 641,000 jobs would be created, and 600,000 additional passengers would be using the city's peak-time public transport services.

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Iomega Skin "Industries" Hard Drive Review

Thanks to Iomega for sending out this brilliantly designed hard drive for review. Today I bring my humble opinion of the device you see to the left, the Skin "Industries" 500GB HDD.

Based on the popular eGo range of HDD's, Iomega have gone to town with this one. It's part of a special edition set of hard drives, with only 3 designs to choose from, I went for the Black as it suits my setup more, and I quite like the design on the top. The HDD comes in its own designed box which is made from a very hard cardboard, quite eco-friendly if you ask me, along with a USB2.0 cable, instructions and leaflet to download the Iomega software for the device.

So, what kind of HDD is inside this beauty? It's a 500GB, 5,400RPM (It could be 7,200RPM) HDD, with transfer speeds of up to 480MB/S, which to be honest for a portable HDD isn't all too bad. I have it hooked up to my Mac, but the deive also supports Windows (XP, Vista, 7), and Linux if you format it. I obviously formatted it to the native Mac OS X Journaled HFS+ File System, but the drive is shipped running NTFS, which is known widely throughout the Windows Platform. During tests, the drive was able to transfer a number of files in very quick succession, even using my old 500GB HDD I use for Back-up, the Skin "Industries" drive managed to transfer files in nearly twice the speed, saving a lot of time to do other things.

I think in short, I'm really happy with the performance and design of the hard drive. The only downside I have to say is that the USB cable could be a little bit longer, but apart from that I can't complain with it, it does it's job perfectly and doesn't stand out like a soar thumb on your desk like most desktop drives do.

This drive can be purchased from Iomega for around £70.00 ($110.00).

Once again, many thanks to Iomega with supplying me this hard drive; it's been a pleasure to use it.

If you want to read more reviews, then head on over to AdamParton.com.