To paraphrase serial sheet-folder Jill Cooper, one of the biggest challenges you’re going to face in your life is to control your cables. And although there’s no Jill Cooper to teach you how fold your cables into a perfect bundle, there are now two new gadgets to make things a little easier. They’re called the Rolio and the CableDrop Mini, and they’re from BlueLounge.
As the CableDrop Mini is little more than a small version of the regular CableDrop, a cable grabber that sticks to the edge of your desk and stops cords from slipping off and onto the floor, I’ll only mention it in passing: It’s a CableDrop, only smaller. There, done.
The Rolio is a little more interesting. Once you’ve worked out how to put it together (something that took me an embarrassingly long time considering I’m a gadget professional), you can use it for two things. One part is a flat, square-shaped spindle around which to wrap a Lightning cable, complete with cutout to lock the Lightning tip in place. This is fine, but too big to really be useful on its own. The other part is a little widget what sticks to your desk via an adhesive pad, and onto which the Rolio docks. Now, the Rolio becomes a horizontal dock, at just the right height above the desktop to let you slide and iPhone or iPad into it for charging and syncing.
This solves the dual problems of seeing your iPhone’s screen while it is in a dock, an also of the Lightning plug being a little too tenacious in its grip for easy removal from regular docks.
And the hole in the center of the Rolio is the same size as the USB end of your Lightning cable, so you can thread it onto your charger when it’s plugged into the wall. Neat again.
The Rolio costs just $10, and is so handy that I actually used a knife to prize it off my desk in Barcelona for my move to Germany.
It’s available now.
Source: Blue Lounge
Thanks: Kaitlin!
