If you think of a device that’s the very opposite of everything Apple makes, it would be the NexPhone. Whereas Apple makes a single product for each use-case (desktop, notebook, tablet, phone), each optimized for its own purpose, the NexPhone takes a Microsoftian approach. In fact, it makes the lame Surface “tablets” look sensible. Here’s the NexPhone’s tagline:
The smartphone that becomes a tablet, laptop or PC.
The Photokina photography show is in full swing, and with it comes a rain of new product announcements. Today is Pentax’s turn, with a few new cameras including the Q10, an extra body for the Q-system.
The Q10 keeps the stupid small sensor in its mirrorless body, gets a little faster and also launches with a pointless new lens adapter.
For the most part, iOS’ “multitasking” does a great job of letting you get things done, and many of the apps you’d switch out to on the desktop to perform another task (mail, finding and using a photo) are accessible from the share-sheets within the iOS apps themselves.
But there’s one thing that constantly bugs me, especially as a user of Launchbar on OS X: There’s no way to make a quick note and save it without leaving the current application. But using a mixture of Twitter, iOS 6, Notification Center, and web services If This Then That (IFTTT) and Dropbox, you can roll your own.
And while the setup takes a little work, once it’s up and running it really is a helluva useful little hack.
Ever since the iPad 3’s magnet-reversal killed the ability for my Skech Porter case to wake the screen, I have been looking for an iPad case I can keep on all the time. The criteria are as follows, in no particular order:
The last of these was just a joke, but the New York Hong Kong (NYHK) cases includes it and everything else on the list. In fact, if not for one important niggle (which is the fault of the iPad 3 itself), then the NYHK could be just about the best slimline folio case I have yet tried.
At one time, deep back in the swirling mists of time, Polaroid was like the Apple of photography, not only making the best stuff but also inventing new ways to do things. Now, the brand is nothing but a label slapped onto a bunch of crap by the current owner.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing amazing going on in the analog instant film world. Take a look at the Impossible Project’s FPU (Film Processing Unit), an amazing gadget that marries your iPhone to real, instant analog photos.
What happens if you give ten strangers the same piece of paper to draw on at the same time? Let’s up the stakes. Let’s make that paper a blank iPad screen, and let’s give all the “artists” the anonymity of the internet. This app exists, and it’s called uDraw HD.
Man oh man. This leaked Sony RX1 looks sweet indeed. If the rumors are to be believed, the camera is a mirrorless body with a full-frame sensor (the same sensor as the also-rumored Sony A99) and a whole bunch of manual controls. It also looks like it’ll play nice with proper, old-school 35mm lenses.
$9. Nine lousy dollars. With nine bucks, there’s no way you could make an iPhone stand this good, even buying parts from the cheapest of hardware stores. Hell, the only way to make a functional iPhone holder with $9 is to head to the bank, buy a roll of quarters and sit the iPhone up on top.
Which is hardly as elegant as this very practical-looking Pi Mount.
Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable
And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.
Gadgets with handles are dorky as hell: just ask anyone who owned one of the original Toilet-Seat iBooks about the teasing they endured. But handles are also, well, dead handy – just ask those same iBook owners.
The folks at Native Union have tried to mitigate the inherent dorkiness of the Gripster iPad case by picturing it being held by hot, hot models in the product photos. The usefulness, though, needs no disguise or apologies.
D&D players know the importance of a good character sheet. While dexterity, strength, charisma and alignment are key, it’s the scribbles you make between the boxes which will shape your character. And so it is with fiction, which is where Mariner’s new Mac app Persona comes in.
Persona is a character creation and tracking package for writers, and gives you simple tools to help with everything from naming your creations to tracking their every personality trait.
It used to be that if your phone ran out of juice, you could just pop into the nearest bar or cafe and ask “Do you have a Nokia charger?”, and the waitron would hand you one of the needle-tipped jacks from some cupboard or drawer.
Now, things have moved on. Battery life is measured in hours, not days, and Nokia is going the way of RIM and if a bar has an iPhone charger, it’s likely the bartender is using it to charge his own iPhone.
What you need is a charger that is always with you. What you need is the Case:Lynk.
“Plank of wood” might be a lame sounding iPhone accessory, but tell that to a kid whose favorite toy is a “cardboard box” or an iPad owner whose favorite computer is a slab of glass with a metal back.
And the plank in question actually packs some pretty great features, ready to be accessed while it floats up there in front of your wall. That’s right. I said “floats.”
External hard drives: super handy, but oh-so-slow, especially since Apple put a bullet in the back of FireWire’s head. Thankfully, Western Digital has once again come to the rescue with a neat new addition to its My Passport line of portable drives: The Edge.
These new versions not only look way more high-tech than the previous curvy plastic models, they also support MacBook-friendly USB 3.0.
It seems so simple: Press harder, get a thicker, darker line. But drawing on the iPad has been – in pressure sensitivity terms at least – little better than using an Etch-a-Sketch. Now, at last, we’re seeing the first pressure-sensitive styluses for the iPad. Very, very soon you’ll be able to buy the new Bluetooth 4 Pogo Connect for your iPad 3.
I have been looking for a decent scrapbook app for the iPad for quite some time. So I was pretty happy yesterday when I saw the brand-new Scrapnote, a snippet-organizing app which pulls in photos, videos, text, scribbles, handwriting and even Evernote notes, all into slick, handsome and easy-to-edit notebooks.
If you have been looking for a research tool, or a way to put together travel journals, diaries or – really – anything involving words, pictures and snippets of information, you should probably go and download Scapnote right now.
IStabilizer’s Monopod is just that – a monopod. Only instead of being optimized to work as a disabled tripod, a camera stand with one leg instead of three, it is made to be used with lightweight cameras like the iPhone to snap pictures from more than arms’ length.
When I first saw the PR blurb for the Quicam app, I thought “What could possibly go wrong?” After all, who could ever foresee a problem with an app that lets you snap photos and immediately send them to Twitter and Facebook, automatically and without a single extra button press.
Really, what could possibly go wrong?
Fujifilm has – as expected – announced the X-E1 mirrorless compact camera. If it had come a year ago, we’d all be going crazy about it. Now, though, it’s little more than a cheaper version of the X-Pro1, without that all-important hybrid viewfinder.
Man-bag. Murse. He-purse. Call it what you like, but you need one. Finally men in the U.S are following the European example and carrying their day-to-day gear in a bag instead of stuffing it all into a wallet, and then jamming that into a back pocket.
Cameras, iPads, iPhones, chargers, e-books and — yes — even wallets need a place to go, and what follows is our roundup of the best bags to put them in.
And who knows? Maybe one day your adult males will stop wearing baseball caps and shorts and start dressing like grown-ups instead?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could drop your iPhone or iPad on top of your speaker and have it charge as it pumps out the tunes? That’s the promise of TDK’s Wireless Charging Speaker, a product with a name about as self-evident as it gets.
Did you ever check to see which carrier offers the best coverage in your town? Or – worse – did you ever wonder which carrier’s pre-pay SIM you should buy when you go on vacation? It’s hell, right? Those maps are so deeply hidden in the carriers' sites that it’s almost like they didn’t want you to find them.
Enter OpenSignalMaps, which is not only an independent map showing you the 2G, 3G and 4G coverage in much of the world, but is also just about the sleekest and slickest map/info site we’ve ever seen. And it works just great on iOS devices.
Bark is a great way to pipe your Growl notifications into Mountain Lion’s Notification Center – at least until Growl offers official support. There are other ways to make Growl-capable apps work with the native Mountain Lion notifications, but Bark has a few unique tricks which make it better – and maybe easier – to use.
If you’d shown me the Hi-Call a few years ago I would have ridiculed it and moved on, probably forgetting that this stupid Bluetooth glove even existed. Now, though, in a world infected with “sanitation engineers” so in-demand that they have Bluetooth headsets wedged permanently into their ears, and idiots wander the streets holding their in-line mics up to their mouths as they speak, the Hi-Call from Hi-Fun doesn’t seem so dumb after all.
Do you still own a collection of music stored on cassette tapes? Then I have some advice: STOP LIVING IN THE PAST! Those things’ll kill you eventually. If the wow and flutter doesn’t get you, or the ridiculous rewind times don’t drive you crazy, then the magnetic tape will probably spool out at nights and strangle you in your sleep. Probably.
But before you ditch those mix-tapes, you might want to transfer them to your iDevice. And wouldn’t you know it, but Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you a device almost as useless as your own (probbly perfectly-preserved) Walkman to do it.