The SoundJaw Boosts Your iPad 2’s Speaker By Crossing The Streams

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Are your ears strained close to cochlear ejection trying to hear your iPad’s muffled sound? A new $20 accessory currently pushing itself through Kickstarter will help you boost sound by redirecting the speaker towards the front.

The SoundJaw, designed by Matthew McLachlan, is a simple plastic widget that corrects one of the audiophonic irritations inherent to the iPad’s design: the speaker faces towards the back, meaning that any sound emitted from your iPad is actually bouncing away from your ears, not towards them. The result can be drastically muted sound, especially when your legs or hand are accidentally muffling the speaker.

The SoundJaw isn’t much of a gadget as far as tech is concerned, but as a sleekly designed, minimalist dongle with just one purpose — scooping the sound from your iPad’s speaker and throwing it to the front of the tablet where it belongs — it’s pretty elegant.

More interesting than the SoundJaw itself, though, might be the bizarre Kickstarter pledge goals that the creator has set. Pledge $750 or more and you get yourself a free iPad 2, complete with 10 SoundJaws to hand out to friends. And pledge $1900 or more for the SoundJaw and apparently you’ll go on some sort of insane helicopter ride, which the creator is sure will “go viral.” Well, if anything was going to get someone to spend nearly $2,000 for a $20 dongle, I suppose a helicopter ride would somehow enter into it, in addition to several freely performed sex acts.

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