Lioncase’s NYHK (New York Hong Kong) case for the iPad is a leather celebration of monosyllabic place names. It is also one of the lightest and slimmest cases around, and it is the one that the Lady still chooses despite the flood of test cases (pun intended) which sweep through our home.
Now the lightweight case has been expanded to fit the MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch. GONE! is the brittle iPad-holding shell (the one weak point of the original), and NEW! is the button-fastening clasp.
This is a rather specialized iPhone case, but if you’re, say, an interior designer or even just a fan of the color scheme of the end-of-level doors on first-person shooters, you’re going to love it.
The case comes from Incipio, and it turns your iPhone into a virtual tape measure.
To paraphrase the immortally wise words of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, how much more minimal could this iPhone case be? The answer is none. None more minimal: It’s nothing more than a piece of cleverly cut leather and a rubber band.
I was thinking that I’d make an incredibly clever play on the Wash’n’Go ads here, drawing a comparison between the new Horizon app, which lets you check the weather and your calendar at the same time. “Use two apps when you leave the house?” I would ask, before wrestling with the punchline, and somehow turning the original “Not me – I just want to Wash… And Go!” into something clever and calendar/weather related.
But as you can plainly see, I failed. I made a cup of delicious coffee instead, and then typed the code to add the break to this post…
This is just about the coolest iPad case you’ll see this week. It’s called the Tank, and it’s an aluminum beast which will protect your iPad and also twist to stand in pretty much any position you choose. If a movie protagonist was to walk purposefully down a street with an iPad handcuffed to his wrist, it’d be sat inside a Tank.
Forget about lame-o portable Bluetooth speakers for your iDevices and take a look at this monster instead. It’s the PylePro soundbar, and it’ll sit up on your wall and blast 300 (three hundred) watts of sound into your living room.
MultiMarkdown, the (surprise!) MultiMarkdown editor for OS X, has just launched its new 2.0 version, and it’s fantastic. If you write articles in MarkDown on your Mac, or even on your iPad, then you should probably just go spend the $5 right now.
STM has just busted out a whole new range of tech-carrying bags, from small purse-a-likes to hefty schlep-it-all backpacks. But the one I fancy most out of the new lineup is the Velo 2, and not just because it sounds like you’re meant to use it while riding a bike.
Pinbook is an excellent iOS client for the excellent paid anti-social bookmarking service Pinboard. Imagine if De.licio.us had never been sold to Yahoo and had instead started charging money to keep your bookmarks tagged and organized online. Further, imagine that the developer kept a Twitter stream that read something like the crotchety ramblings of your drunken (and outspoken) uncle. That service would be Pinboard.
The (non-affiliated) Pinbook client has just been updated to v1.3, and with the update come some fantastic new features. Let’s take a look:
Can an iPad really replace a “proper” computer? Can a ten-inch, 128GB tablet do the work of an eleven-inch 128GB MacBook Air? The answer is yes. Kinda. If your work involves having two windows sitting permanently open side-by-side, then the iPad might not be for you (although you might consider whether you need both windows open together).
For most other regular workaday work type work, though. the iPad is ideal. And here’s our guide to replacing your Mac with an iPad. Specifically a Retina iPad, but you might even manage with a mini.
What could be less creepy than secretly snapping close-up pictures of people without their knowledge? Nothing, that’s what. Well, not unless you do it whilst dressed as a clown I guess.
The MirrorCase is a hefty box that hangs off the back of your iPhone and uses an optical-grade mirror to let you shoot pictures at right angles to the screen.
Fact: If we keep consuming magnets at the current rate, the world’s magnet mines will run empty by the end of December this year. And yet this ecological disaster waiting to happen hasn’t stopped the likes of Tim Angel and his case company ZooGue from exploiting these “blood magnets” for his own ends.
The latest example is the Prodigy case, a fat, padded folio with an adjustable stand.
It won’t — unlike a boat — float, but Braven’s new BRV-1 All Weather Speaker will survive squally showers and poolside splashes with aplomb. It’s a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker, and it looks ideal for taking anywhere this summer.
There are plenty of tangle-wrangling, clutter-cutting, cable-tidying solutions out there, but none of them looks as delicious as this one: the Cord Taco.
You know what surprised me last week? That the iPad mini is almost as capable a work computer as my Retina iPad. The screen isn’t quite as readable, and you have to wait for Safari to reload pages and for apps to cold boot more often thanks to the lack of RAM, but as a machine to write on, it works amazingly well.
Which is why Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard for the Mini is a very welcome little accessory.
I have a history of losing money when I bet on my own predictions, so if you’re smart you should probably ignore this one: Vine – Twitter’s video-sharing app – will wither and die. Animated GIFs, on the other hand, have already managed to outlive MySpace and GeoCities, so it’s a safe bet (even for me) that they’ll keep on keeping on.
Which is all a rather roundabout way of introducing VineGifR, a Mac app which will take your futureless Vines and GIF-ify them.
Lavalier: When I first heard the word I though it was a kind of horseback warrior who would also come soap your back when you were showering, but it turned out to be a handy clip-on remote mic. And now Rode (or RØDE, as it somewhat annoyingly insists on being called) has a lavalier mic which works with your iOS device. It’s called the smartLav, and it doubles as a self-cleaning toilet. (Kidding!)
The SkechBook case, from master iPad case-maker Skech, was one of the things that drove me to buy and iPad mini, so slim and cute and retro-tastic is its tiny form.
Since succumbing to the mini’s charms, though, I have come to believe that it really needs no case other than the Smart Cover, and the Smart Cover is only really needed to lock and unlock the screen quickly. Why? Because the iPad mini weighs just 307 grams on my kitchen scale, making even the 68-gram Smart Cover a significant addition to its weight. And apart from the glass screen, the little iPad is so light, tough and compact that further protection seems like unnecessary coddling.
Got a “Universal” iPhone dock? Yeah, me too, and it’s pretty useless now most of my iDevices are Lightning powered. But Shapeways user nginear can help. He’s come up with an iPhone 5 adapter which will plug straight into your dock, letting you keep on using it for at least another year or so,.
The Rocksteady XS is a Bluetooth speaker with a big difference: it’s designed to be “as loud as possible.” To that end, it features a sealed design so that the sound can punch harder out of the end-mounted speakers. It’s also tough (with an aluminum shell) and cheap at just $99, making it ideal for outdoor use.
Along with Evernote’s big Penultimate announcement yesterday came another big update. Evernote Hello, the person-remembering app, is now at version 2.0. It adds two great features: business-card scanning and a tie-in with social networks.
Yes, you’ve seen both these before, but not quite as slick as this.
Dropbox’s new Albums feature, rolling out over the next few weeks, lets you share your photos and videos way more easily that you could before. Think of it as kind of a Shared Photo Stream, only anyone can use it, not just iOS6 users.
Unu’s Ecopak is about as simple as an iPhone battery case can get. And as this also means that it is thin and light, and that it will work with not only the iPhone 5 but any gadget than charges via USB, that simplicity is perhaps its best feature.
The Ecopak consists of two parts. The thin, snap-on shell-style case, and the. Battery pack itself. Let’s take a look.
With Tuesday’s’s announcement of a 128GB iPad 4, Apple is clearly signaling that the iPad is not only suitable for serious work, but that it can be the primary machine for many users. Most commenters have fixated on fitting extra movies and other consumables into the extra 64GB of space, but they’re forgetting about work.
In fact, I’d say that the iPad With Retina Display, as Apple now insists on calling it, is the new desktop machine, and the iPad mini is the new laptop. Why? Let me explain:
Kanex’s new DualRole will be pretty much essential for hotel-hopping MacBook Air owners the world over. It’s a little pocket-sized box which hooks up to the MacBook’s USB 3.0 port and turns it into three ports plus an Ethernet jack.
Yes, it costs $70, but you can expense that, right?