The iPhone’s camera is a little wonder, not least in its actual physical manifestation. The tiny lens is now capped with a crystal cover made from the same scratch-shrugging glass used for high-end watches. And all it takes to clean off the daily gunk is a quick rub on your pants leg.
But that hasn’t stopped the folks at Ace Display (ace name, BTW!) from designing a redundant case to protect and clean that same lens.
Winter is coming (in the Northern Hemisphere at least), and with it cold weather, frosty mornings, overcoats and gloves. And not much puts a cramp on your smartphone-toting style more than a pair of gloves or mittens. I should know — I one spent a winter in Berlin and was often forced to use the tip of my nose to launch the maps app on my iPod Touch.
The answer is Touchscreen Gloves.
Noteshelf, the iPad’s best handwritten note-taking app, is now even better. V7.0 adds new pens, customs colors and support for pressure-sensitive styluses. If you already own Noteshelf, you likely already downloaded it with great excitement over the weekend. If not, what are you waiting for?
When the folks at Griffin were choosing a mythical creature for which to name their company1, they might have gone with Janus instead, to better reflect the schizophrenic nature of its offering: serious computer accessories vs. frivolous toys.
That’s not to say that the toys are bad. On the contrary, Griffin’s iOS-controlled choppers look amazing. And now they’re joined by these remote-controlled monster trucks.
Reuters’ new iPad app is called The Wider Image, and it’s dedicated to showing off the news agency’s photographs. It’s free, and if you want to spend the next few hours lost in amazing photojournalism from around the world, whilst learning a bit about that same world, then go download it now.
To be honest, I’m writing about DrBlinky for two reasons, both of them frivolous. One is the name: DrBlinky. Who couldn’t love a name like that?
The other is the Indiegogo pitch video, a triumph of cheesiness and amateur earnestness, but in a (very) good way. Put it this way — if Will Ferrell and Ricky Gervais ever teamed up to do a parody Kickstarter-style promo, it would look like this.
If it’s anything like the other products in the ever-burgeoning Beats franchise, the Beats Pill is likely a triumph of pricing over quality. It comes in at a Jamboxian $200, stands just two inches high, and works like any other portable speaker — via Bluetooth.
If you have any idea what an ollie is, or a 50:50 grind, or a heel-flip (or — if you grew up in the 1980s, an acid drop or boneless), then you should buy True Skate right this minute. Seriously. I’ll wait.
Why? Because — despite some v1 limitations — True Skate is the closest you’re going to get to a dead-on skateboarding sim in 2012. The only things missing are the security guards to come and harass you, and bad fast food.
Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.
Aside from being fatter and heavier than the the last-gen model, and running hot, and taking like a year to charge, the iPad is almost perfect. Apart from all those problems, of course.
But while those issues all stem from jamming a multi-million-pixel display into a mobile device, the iPad’s speaker is another matter. It sounds just fine — if you’re standing behind the iPad that it.
The SoundJaw Unlimited — itself a sequel to a thinner product — fixes that. And fixes it good.
Be-be, wo-wo, boo-bee. These are the kind of phrases a human being can only get away with uttering in public if still under the age of two. Fortunately, these are also the only words these underdeveloped fools can manage. There’s probably a lesson about ability vs. ambition hidden in there somewhere.
Which is to say that the Belkin Wemo baby monitor is probably the best-named baby monitor ever. Even your dumb infant can ask for it by name.
Here’s a neat idea: at least until all cameras have built-in Wi-Fi anyway: It’s a Wi-Fi SD card adapter — like the Eye-Fi cards, only instead of packing their own flash storage they have a hole which will happily hold a the microSD card of your choice.
Thus, you buy the adapter once, and stock up on a (small) pocketful of mini memory cards. This, the thinking goes, will be cheaper and more future proof than building Wi-Fi into every damn SD card you use.
The Jambox and its ilk of wireless high-tech boomboxes are fantastic, for both sound and freedom. But there’s no way my Mum would use one — it simply wouldn’t fit in with the crystal and porcelain knick-knacks (what I call “dust-catchers”) which carpet every horizonta surface like mushrooms on, well, you know.
The Joey Roth Ceramic Subwoofer, though, would probably be allowed.
Checkmark, the supper-slick location-aware reminders app for the iPhone, has gotten a feature bump in its newest update that almost (almost!) makes it a new app.
And if you don’t already have Checkmark, then shame on you — the $2 app not only makes location-based reminders on your iPhone way easier and way better than the built in reminders, but it also works on your iPad.
You know how Apple is always calling its products “magical?” Well, it turns out that it may be right. Harry Potter author J.K Rowling not only uses a MacBook Air to write, but says that it has changed her life.
QuickOffice Pro HD — an app which takes not only its feature-set but its naming conventions from Microsoft Office — has gotten a big, big new feature. Now you can not only edit office documents, but you can track changes and comments in DOC and DOCX files.
Lawyers, editors, authors and anyone else forced to use office on the Mac or PC can now do their work from the bar or bus, as God intended.
Logitech’s new Broadcaster webcam is just what it says it is: a webcam for live-streaming video, and for shooting podcasts. But that makes it sound boring, so how about this: The Broadcaster shoots 720p video, can connect to your Mac, iPad or iPhone via Wi-Fi and works with most of your built in (Mac) apps.
And, amazingly, there’s more:
Those ruggedized cases that turn your iPhone into a handy sports-cam? They can go suck it. GoPro has popped out a new sequel in its Hero lineup and it shoots 4K video whilst also being way smaller and lighter than its predecessor.
The only person who cares that your old 30-pin dock doesn’t fit your new iPhone 5 is you. Everyone else is ecstatic. Apple gets to cross another SKU off its product list, and third-party makers can sniff the sweet, sweet smell of opportunity in the air. The opportunity to separate you from yet more of your easily-spent dollars.
One such opportunist is David W, the clever chap behind the Dock+, the first Kickstarter dock we’ve seen for the iPhone 5.
Plain text geeks, prepare for nerdgasm: Jesse Grosjean’s Folding Text app is out of beta and in the Mac App Store. Folding Text, as you may remember, is a Markdown-compatible plain text editor with special superpowers.
IMore’s Apple supremo Rene Ritchie has rustled up this rather stunning wallpaper featuring the artwork for Apple’s just-announced iPad mini event. And not only is it rendered text-free for distraction-free backdropping purposes, but it’s retina-ized for your hi-res iPad pleasure.
iTwin SecureBox is a movie-thriller plot waiting to happen. It is also a security device modeled on those tacky his-n-hers heart-shaped pendants which snap in two so you can “show your love” at all times.
Back in the mundane real world, the iTwin SecureBox is a hardware encryption gadget for DropBox.
Imagine that you are chatting to somebody on your iPhone. Now imagine that — at the touch of a button — you can cause a fragrance to squirt from their iPhone and into their unsuspecting nostrils. Amazingly, there is a device which will make this nightmare scenario real, and — of course — it comes from Japan.
Been looking for an excuse to exercise? Then look no further than the App Store, for a new app from Striiv — the people who brought us the “smart pedometer” — will count your steps and turn them into gold. Virtual gold, that is. Metaphorical virtual gold. Whatever. Rewards?
Perverts rejoice! Now there’s an iPhone accessory which will let you shoot pictures of pretty girls in public without anyone ever knowing. And it’s even better than a specially adapted camera, because you can just pretend to be like checking your messages or whatever.
It’s called the HiLo lens, and it puts the “can” and “did” into “candid.”