Charlie Sorrel - page 63

Quick – guess what the “Multiple Attachments” App does. Correctamundo! It lets you add multiple attachments to an email on iOS.

Transporter just took another step towards being a viable alternative to Dropbox for mobile users. Now the private cloud has become a “platform.” Don’t worry though – this just means that app makers are now free to add Transporter support to their apps, letting you sync and save your data from your iPad and iPhone.

Urban Outfitters, everyone’s favorite copyright-infringing chain store, is at it again with the Happy Plugs, earbuds from a “Swedish fashion and lifestyle brand that brings color to the world.”

Can you imagine a pair of Apple’s old Earbuds, only in color? Congratulations, because you just imagined the Happy Plugs, in a uncannily accurate piece of mind theater.

At last, a portable Thunderbolt drive that leeches its power from the Thunderbolt connector itself, just like a USB drive. And you can’t even lose the cable for WD’s new My Passport Pro – it’s built into the unit itself.

BusyCal from BusyMac, the app that saved busy people by being a way better calendar than the junk Apple ships with the Mac, now makes BusyContacts. Or has at least announced BusyContacts. Like BusyCal before it, BusyContacts takes your local address book and syncs it with any online contacts lists you may be using. The public beta should launch this summer.

This week in Review Roundup we look at luxury leathery book-a-like iPhone cases. All three are made to last, with real leather or bookbindery covers. Two are ultra tough, one is a little more low-profile, and all three will probably last you forever. But which one is best?

The Candidates

Pad & Quill’s Luxury Pocket Book, a wood-framed, leather covered wallet case with space for some cash.

Davarg’s Kanam is a simple wraparound flap of leather with a (somewhat reusable) sticky pad that glues the iPhone into place. It’s less bulky than the other two, and very nice looking.

Meison Morgan’s Handmade Case is a lot like the Luxury Pocket Book, only it has a bookbindery cover instead of leather.

Let the contest begin:

Meison Morgan’s Handmade iPhone 5s Case Is A Beauty 

Manufactured in Greece using the same bookbinding process that traditional notebook makers use, this case offers not only good looks, but also all-round protection that promises to withstand the test of time.

It’s available in black and denim (blue), and it’s super affordable at €30 ($46).

On the whole, the Meison Morgan is a fantastic iPhone case that looks great and offers plenty of protection. It’s also relatively inexpensive at €30. But the experience is marred somewhat by a couple of issues that could so easily be fixed.

If its makers can iron out those problems, then I’d have no reservations about recommending this case.

Buy it $46

P&Q Luxury Pocket Book Is The iPhone Wallet Of Kings

The Luxury Pocket Book is a leather-bound book with a Baltic beechwood insert, a leather lining and slots inside the front cover for credit cards and cash (bills, not coins). It has cutouts for all your ports and buttons, plus a hole in the back for the camera and flash.

Lastly, there’s an elastic strap to hold it closed, just like on a Moleskine notebook.

Buy it $85

Like Fine Wine, Davarg’s Case Will Only Get Better With Age 

The Kanam is a book-like wraparound cover which protects the back, the front and one edge. Unlike the SurfacePad, the Kanam protects the right edge, opening backwards (or forwards if you’re one of those manga weirdos). This leaves the mute and volume switches free to be used. There’s also a small cutout over the phone speaker so you can talk with the case closed and still hear the conversation.

The iPhone 5 itself is held in place with a sticky, reusable adhesive pad. You just clean the back of the phone, peel off the protective waxed sheet (setting it aside in case you ever need to take the iPhone out of this case) and stick. It holds just fine.

Buy it $52

The winner? The Pad&Quill Luxury Pocket Book. Why? It’s expensive, but it’s made to last. The Meison Case is already falling apart in our review, and the Davarg is bulky without adding any extra features. The P&Q case wins for a combination of craftsmanship and clever design.

Can we all agree that iTunes’ App Store search is truly, truly awful? That you can not only never find what you’re looking for, but you have to wait forever for the results to load?

Good. Then you’re going to love Fnd, a web-based search tool for the whole iTunes Store. It’s accurate, fast and not at all annoying.

Fotobit is a 4.25 x 4.25-inch frame designed for wall-mounting your Instagrams. It’s modular, so you can slot the frames together to cover the wall with an Insta-mural, and the frames themselves are a handsome matte black or white. But there’s more.

Sharebox adds a feature to Dropbox that should probably already have been there: it lets you drag and drop files onto the Dropbox icon in your Mac’s menubar, and have them upload to Dropbox. The neatest part is that it works using the existing icon, keeping your menubar clear.

Twitter will now let you attach up to four images to a Tweet, and tag the people in those photos, all without counting towards your 140-character limit. This is a pretty obvious attempt to beat Instagram and make Twitter your go-to sharing service.

Paper? In the age of the iPad? Unthinkable! Ink from a pen? Inconceivable! And yet that’s what the new Booqpad for iPad Air promises us, a case that both protects the iPad and gives you a pad and paper to write on. Not only that, but it does it all with magnets.

I use flash thumb drives for precisely one purpose these days – taking a PDF boarding pass to the local print shop. That doesn’t stop me being impressed with Edge’s new DiskGo Sonic USB 3.0 Flash Drive, though, which is a super-fast SSD drive in the form of a USB stick.

Back when I wrote at Wired, I called Waterfield’s keyboard case a “signal of the end of civilization.” Who needs a coddling cover for a keyboard that is so tough it can keep working even after you have a tantrum and smash it on a marble topped table? Repeatedly? (Like a friend of mine did one time).

Now I actually use that same cover whenever I travel, so I’m a little more accepting of the new “CitySlicker for the Jawbone Mini Jambox,” a case for the toughest little speaker on the market.

BlinkMail is a great new OS X mail app that lets you speed through your inbox using just the arrow keys. It also integrates with other services like Evernote, and Dropbox, Things and Omnifocus support is on the way.

Oh man. If you make a product. Then somebody, somewhere, will make a case of a stand for it. This is a rule as fast as death, taxes and death taxes. So, if you were thinking that your AirPort Extreme was doing a pretty crappy job of sitting on your desk, and of not falling over, then the Air Mount is for you.

When your camera is a computer instead of a dumb lens and light sensor, you can do all sorts of tricks. That’s the idea behind HTC’s new One M8, a camera which matches its two names with two lenses.

I’m typing this review on the Filco Majestouch 2 Tenkeyless keyboard. It has blue Cherry MX switches, and a standard ISO layout with UK English markings. It is the best keyboard I’ve used, but despite that this won’t be a regular review – a million people have already written about this keyboard.

Instead, I’ll tell you what I like and then tell you how I made this Windows keyboard play well with my Mac. Warning: includes nerdy hacks.

Mailtracker is an app that lets you snoop on the folks you send email to. It tells you if and when your mails were read, what device they read it on and what city they are in. Sounds pretty creepy right?

The Photographer’s pouch is a boiled-wool pocket that will stick inside any camera bag thanks to the velcro strip on its back. And of course you’re not limited to cameras, or even camera bags – anything that will fit fits, and any bag with velcro can be used.

This is more of a tip than a gadget, but it uses a gadget, so we should be cool. Photojojo’s new Selfie Help book (actually a web page) is full of great tips, but one jumped out at me: why not take that fisheye lens you have and stick it on the front camera of your iPhone?

Apple has added a new “related apps” feature to the app store when viewed on an iOS device. Now, along the top of the screen, over the details of an app, you’ll see the breadcrumb trail in the picture above.

What if Apple’s iWatch is’t an iWatch at all? What if it’s a spec, like CarPlay, that lets folks like Casio and Rolex put an Apple chip inside their watches to make them talk to your iPhone?

Problems solved:

• Apple doesn’t have to get into the fashion watch game, or make “ladies” and “gents” watches.
• The watch industry gets a shot in the arm (pun intended) as watches get useful again.
• You don’t need a power-sucking display. The iPhone is the display.

The little BOLT Charger Battery is as clever as it is good looking. The USB wall-charger packs a backup battery into its tiny body, as body that leads its maker to call it the “The World’s Smallest Wall Charger + Battery Backup.”

I’m not sure how true that it, but who cares? It fits in your pocket and it’ll juice your iPhone twice, even without a wall to shove it into.

The already-great GeoTagr app has been updated to v4.4. This doesn’t sound like much, but there’s one huge new feature in this update: support for geotagging photos stored in your iPhone or iPad’s local photo library.

The Tactivo Mini case for the iPad mini lets you lock down apps so they can only be used when you insert a smart-card into a slot on the back. The idea is that businesses and government agencies can secure software on mobile devices, which sounds like a neat idea.