One of the best things in the new iOS7 beta is Command Center, which lets you toggle Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, the flashlight (on the iPhone anyway), AirDrop and others from one quick-to-access place. Fast Toggles wants to do the same and more, only on your Mac.
The DB60 speaker looks a lot like the tip of an airliner’s wing, ripped off, shrunken, polished and hung on the wall. And it might well be – who knows where the designers got their materials? But once mounted on your wall and hooked up to power, it becomes a Bluetooth speaker of uncommon practicality.
Apple’s Earbuds and EarPods mightn’t be the best-sounding headphones around, but they come with every iPhone, and they’re tough enough to wrap up and keep conveniently in your back, unnoticed until you need them. And I would do exactly that, if the ’pods didn’t just drop out of my giant ears no matter how hard I jam them in.
What I need are some EarSkinz. Yes, that’s with a “Z.”
Juice Up is a super-smart concept design with one big flaw: it relies on the kindness of strangers to actually work. Still, with a little modification it could be just about the best bumper you could buy.
It’s likely that your reactionary knee-jerk hatred of iOS7’s sweet new look has worn off by now, just like you’re still using Instagram and you haven’t yet actually quit Facebook (although you totally will any day now). But if you’re like our own Killian Bell, who just this second described iOS7 as “looking like the walls of a crack house after a drug-fueled makeover,” then you might want to take a look at this web app, which lets you redesign iOS7 yourself.
It might be hard to remember during this absurdly hot summer, but there’s this thing called rain. And rain hates gadgets. Or rather, it seems to love gadgets, but they hate it. The obvious answer is an umbrella, but then you have to kind of squeeze its shaft between your shoulder and your ear so you can use both hands to operate your camera/iPhone/iPad.
What you need is the Brolly umbrella.
USB thumb drives are fast becoming useless, simply because we have nothing to plug them into. I used to get excited when PR folks gave me a 1GB stick instead of a DVD containing their press info, but how am I supposed to stick it into my iPad?
SanDisk’s new Connect Wireless Flash Drive fixes that. It’s a 16GB or 32GB thumb drive, only it has a Wi-Fi radio inside
The Filip is a smart watch for kids, complete with a built-in cellphone, a tracker so you can keep an eye on them wherever they are, and messaging so you can continue to harass and berate them even as they try to build their own sense of independence.
I kind of hate it.
Apparently, the hot new thing is to stick your iPad to the kitchen wall and then immediately start chopping red peppers. Luckily for those new to this emerging fashion, there is both a product and an instructional video available to help out. The product is the MagBak, and it consists of a pair of rubbery, magnetized pads that stick onto the back of the iPad.
Dumb phones had a few advantages over today’s smartphones. First, their batteries lasted for what seemed like weeks between charges. And second, if the battery did die, all you lost was the ability to call and SMS people. You didn’t lose your e-mail, your camera, your iPod, the book you’re reading or the movie you were planning to watch on the train home.
So you carry a spare battery. But what if you could eliminate the need for that spare, and also ditch that creepy wrist-strengthener you insist on pumping all the time like some hyperactive pervert?
Good news! With the Mipwr Dynamo Case, you can do both.
This is the Cambridge Camera Bag, and it is supposedly inspired by the schoolbags of English children. Perhaps this was the case in past years, when only the privileged offspring of royalty and wealthy industrialists attended school, because these days English schoolkids drag their crap around in the same battered Eastpak backpacks as anyone else.
Not that this makes the Cambridge Camera Bag any less desirable. Quite the opposite, in fact, if you’ve ever met a genuine English hooligan.
A new experimental add-on for DSLRs brings Lytro-like refocus-able photos to any camera, and tosses in a few extra clever features for good measure. The KaleidoCamera, as it’s called, is a unit that sits between your lens and your camera and performs some clever magic on the light that streams into it.
Manything turns a spare iOS device into a cloud-connected security camera. Install the app, sign up for an account and leave the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with its camera pointing at your desk, your yard or hidden in a plastic bag and pointing up from the bowl of your toilet.
For any unsuspecting visitors, it will be too late. You’ll have seen everything.
The Braven 855s is pretty good for barbecues, or what some folks call “grills.” How do I know? I tried it last night. And even when I spilled cow’s blood on my un-dyed leather loafers, the music kept on going. And it sounds pretty good too.
Oh Hasselblad. As if your absurd and hideous Lunar wasn’t bad enough, you’re about to compound the embarrassment with the Stellar compact, yet another Sony NEX camera dressed up with a stupid wooden grip and a huge markup. What happened to you?
LumoPro’s LP180 flash is quite excellent. Even the Strobist himself, David “can I flash you?” Hobby said that “It’s the first flash that I actually prefer over a Nikon SB–800.” High praise indeed, as the SB–800 has been his workhorse small strobe for years.
Why is it so good? Tough, easy to use, and with some genuinely handy (and unique) features. And all for $200, which is fully $350 less than the current top-end Nikon speedlight, the SB–910.
If you’re already wearing a backpack, then the best place to hang your camera might be from one of its straps. That’s the idea behind the Capture Camera Clip v2, a follow up to the runaway success that was the Capture Camera Clip.
Instants is a great new iPhone app for browsing your photos. It brings several of iOS7’s organizational ideas to the current iPhone, but does it in a much cleaner and more intuitive way. Plus, it’s free (with an in-app purchase for one extra feature).
Remember those cool, ultra-light wooden iPhone 5 cases from Kubxlab? Now they’re available with the skins of exotic animals replacing the slivers of rare-tree flesh on the back panel. They’re called “Exotics” and “Elegance.” Let’s see if they live up to that.
There’s a great little trick with the latest Google Maps for iOS (the v2.0 that shipped earlier this week). Just by typing a magic phrase into the search box, you can cache the current map view for online use.
You just have to love the TurtleCell. First there’s the name, which conjures up images of hard-to-empty bowels. Then there’s the website, which manages to pack in plenty of Standard Infomercial Tropes: the cheesy, grinning model (usually either a family member or just the most photogenic person on the team, but never, ever a professional model), the overplayed example of the problem the product solves (in this case, an absurdly-tangled pair of earbuds) and even – yes, really – a sunglasses-wearing animal mascot in the product video.
It’s almost deliberately ridiculous. Oh, and the product is an iPhone case with built-in headphones.
You might not know the name, but you definitely know the work. If you have seen Star Wars, or Robocop, or Jurassic Park[1], you’ve seen Phil Tippet’s stop-motion (and go-motion) animation. Tauntaun? Tippet. ED–209? Tippet again.
And now you can buy 3-D character animations by the Tippett Creature Shop right inside a new storefront in the Efexio iPad app.
Briefly gets the award for most-appropriately-named app of the week. It lets you create neat little videos from your photos, and it does it really, really briefly.
PowerCycle is a hip-flask-shaped USB battery pack which is designed to be charged by your bike. You’ll need to be running a dynamo hub with an electrical output to actually charge it, so this is more a bike-friendly design than a bike-only one.
Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.