Take two gadgets into the shower? A spray-head and a Bluetooth speaker? Not me; I just want to shower, and listen, and go.
Yes, I’m fully aware that I just butchered my parody of the old Wash & Go ads, but it was for a very good cause. You see, the Moxie from Kohler is a shower-head with a built-in Bluetooth speaker. Yup! A shower speaker that is not only waterproof, but water-spurting.
Lightning might be the connector of the future, and quite frankly it already seems absurd to me that I have to plug Apple’s huge old 30-pin dock connector into my little last-gen Nano just to charge it, but the oversized, hard-to-insert adapter will be hanging around for as long as people still have their perfectly good last-gen iDevices.
And Tylt’s Band Wall Charger looks to be a rather excellent charger for you luddites out there.
These paper notepads are ideal. No, seriously: They’re called iDeal Notepads, they come sized to match your iPad or your iPhone, and they’re designed to be strapped to their partner device with rubber bands.
There’s a point at which a cover becomes the main attraction. Iron Man’s suit is clearly a suit. But Ripley’s Power Loader? I’d argue that it’s a mini crane with a clever, human-shaped cockpit. And so it is with the ORA, which claims to be an iPad case but is in fact a miniature theater. A miniature theater into which the iPad can be clipped.
There are almost no iPhone 5 docks available right now, and that’s for two reasons. One is that Apple has only just let manufacturers start including the new Lightning connector in their products. The other is that the new iPhone has only been around for like five minutes.
Braeburn has managed to get around the former problem by asking you to use your own Lightning cable, and the latter by, well — who knows? By being smart and hard-working I guess.
I have been using the aluminum dock for the past week, and it turns out to be pretty neat, although it won’t be for everyone.
Here’s a super-cool little idea. It’s a keyboard case for your iPad, only instead of packing a small, cramped iPad-sized keyboard it’s a case which’ll hold both the iPad and your Apple aluminum Bluetooth keyboard. Better still, it folds out to make a stand to keep your iPad propped up while you work.
The natural upgrade for iPhoneographers wanting a little bit more than their awesome cameraphone can offer is Micro Four Thirds — it’s small but gives fantastic results.
And the obvious, almost obligatory Micro Four Thirds lens was — until now — the Panasonic Lumix 20mm ƒ1.7, a fixed-focal-length wonder: perfect for low-light and amazing shallow depth-of-field images.
But there’s a new challenger from Olympus: the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 17mm f1.8.
The Projecteo is pretty frikkin’ awesome. It’s a teeny-tiny projector that throws an image from a little circle of film up onto the wall of a darkened room.
The interchangeable disks are loaded with cut-down 35mm film stock, and each one can fit on nine of your amazing Instagrams.
Prediction: A lot of East-Coasters are going to be getting solar panels and hand-cranked battery chargers this Christmas – what better stable-door/bolted-horse gift could there be?
So, if you are somehow optimistic enough to think that the sun will shine in New York in the winter, and pessimistic enough to think that global warming will send yet another squall of squirrelly weather this year, then the Switch 8 is for you.
You know what kids really love? They love it when they ask you to buy them something, and you cheap out and buy them a kids’ version, a cut-price imitation of the original. Oh yeah. They totally dig that.
And you know what else they love? Garish colors. “Cool” names. And extra-long battery life. Wait, they actually do like that last one…
You know what your super-slick, plain and simple AirPort Express needs to complement its minimalist design? A pair of rabbit ears, that’s what. And QuickerTeck, purveyor of crazily-priced Apple accessories, isn’t one to shy away when it sees a revenue opportunity.
Behold: The Antenna Express.
For quickly punching up a photo on your iPad or iPhone, it’s hard to beat the amazing Snapseed. At other times, you want a little more control, so you may pick something like Photogene. But what if you kinda want both? Then go grab Pixlr.
- Fact: I carry my iPad almost naked (the iPad is naked — not me thank God).
- Fact: I often want to prop the thing up in portrait mode to use with a Bluetooth keyboard
- Fact: Penguins and polar bears would never meet in the wild.
- Fact: Most portrait-capable iPad stands are just too unwieldy to live in a bag permanently.
Considering these amazing facts, it should come as no surprise that I’m about to tell you about a stand which will in fact hold the iPad in pretty much any orientation. What’s more, it does it whilst looking like a love egg that has sprouted a long, long pair of huggy arms. Let’s be honest — it’s pretty creepy-looking.
Lightning chargers! Get your Lightning chargers here! Scosche has finally announced a set of basic home and car chargers for the current crop of iDevices, and you can actually buy the things.
It used to be so simple: you grabbed your gadget, and you plugged it into the nearest available USB hole. Then, a few minutes or hours later, your device was fully charged.
Now we have retina iPads with laptop-sized batteries, 5W, 10W and 12W chargers, and even differently-rated USB ports in our Macs. It’s so confusing.
Let’s make this problem disappear by throwing some money at it. $49 worth of cash-money, to be precise. And that $49 will get you the… DoubleUp!
These clip-on headphones probably sound truly awful, but the paperclip that lets you secure them to your clothes or bag is genius, and probably worth the price-tag alone. Then again, they probably won’t be much worse than Apple’s old pre-EarPod earbuds, either, and we all got by with those for years.
I used to be a diehard Moleskine fan. I still love them, but I realized that I was spending too much time worrying about what to write in those precious pages that I never actually wrote much. So I switched to completely disposable (and easily scannable) index cards and I never looked back.
Well, apart from the time I found an index card written to me by my future self which said “Look behind you… NOW!” But that just turned out to be a drunken prank I played on myself.
So I have little time these days for Moleskine, Field Notes or any other fancy book that gets in the way of my scrawlings. But that’s not to say that this Field Notes Archival Wooden Box isn’t tempting.
3-D printing: It’s just like knitting, right, only more high-tech? No? OK, fine. At least I tried.
But you know what really is high-tech and just like knitting? These iPhone cases, which are 3-D printed in the shape of knitting. Try to spoil that one for me, you grumpy old sourpuss you. Just try…
There are plenty of USB-capable guitars. But there aren’t many $200 USB guitars. Now, you can not only get a USB Stratocaster for the price of a terrible Android tablet, but it actually comes from Fender — albeit under the Squier diffusion brand. But whatever, right? It’s a Strat, and you can hook it straight up to GarageBand and play it through some of the sweet (not Fender either) amps.
Camera bags are like iPad cases and murses — you can never have enough, and you can never find the perfect one. Now Kata, maker of some fine and very functional camera bags, has thrown yet more confusion into the mix with a unique new lens-storage solution.
The Kata Revolver-8 has a spinning section that lets you load lenses like you would load bullets into a gun.
I have no illusions about this retractable Lightning cable for charging your current-gen iOS devices – it looks so much like the crappy USB and 30-pin dock connector cables that come in those vending machine accessory kits that I wouldn’t be surprised if you could break the thing inside a few weeks, just by using it as it is meant to be used.
But it is just $10, and it is actually available to buy, which are two major points in its favor.
The Protex iPad from Higher Ground cover looks to be just about ideal. It’s a regular-looking TPU rubbery rear skin, but it packs a bunch of features to a) stop you from dropping it and b) protect it when you do. And as a bonus, it also has the best, most minimal demo video ever.
Writing Kit, the app with which I write each and every Cult of Mac post for your daily enjoyment, has received an update. And it’s a big one. If you never use the app much, it might at first appear to have changed very little. But if you’re a regular writer, then the changes are huge.
We’ve seen waterproof Bluetooth speaker that replace your Jambox when you go to the beach, bit what about a waterproof case that lets you take your actual Jambox to the beach? That’s the Vault, a rugged, water-shrugging case which will keep any small, candy-bar-shaped speaker safe and dry wherever you take it.
The Ballistic Tough Jacket is the clearest case of overkill I have seen in a while. If you need protection at the cost of size, weight and style, then you should probably buy one now. Otherwise, read on. The case is actually pretty useful.