Ever faced with one of those situations where you need to give out your phone number, but you feel a bit iffy about doing it? RingShuffle is a free app that’s ideal to have on your iPhone for exactly those occasions.
Smule’s been racking up the hits with apps like Ocarina and I Am T-Pain. Their latest is called MadPad, and like the others, it’s well-polished, cooler than an arctic popsicle and impossible to put down. And today, it’s free.
Curvy. Smooth. Uncomplicated. Think of any product One Infinite Loop has spat out over the last decade or so and you’ll almost invariably and immediately come up with a few key adjectives to describe them (and if you don’t, you’re probably not reading this right now anyway).
But The Bluetooth-equipped Altec Lansing InMotion Air ($200) is pretty much the opposite of anything and everything Jony Ive and his colleagues at Apple believe in. At least, that’s true as far as its aesthetics and ergonomics are concerned; under the hood though, it packs a punch.
Our story so far: For the better part of a decade, Orb Audio proceeds to build a stellar reputation for high-end home audio with their award-winning, modular systems based around the iconic spherical speaker for which the outfit is named.
But then the iPod and its iDevice cousins sneak into a rapidly-growing number of pockets, creating a massive, swollen market that’s eager to be introduced to high-end audio, yet yearns for a more compact, less complex setup than the traditional high-end home audio layout. And what about all those computer users stuck with tinny PC speakers? Surely they deserve siren-like audio too.
So the company comes up with a solution: Take a pair of the celebrated spheres, marry them to a tiny amplifier and call it the Orb Audio Mini-T Amplifier and Speaker Package ($299): bam, instant Orb Audio experience for your iDevice or Mac!
No, not quite.
One of my first favorite portable video games was a boxing game on — of all platforms — a Casio calculator (that’s right — you think your life’s tough, try living in a world where the most entertaining handheld a kid can play with is a calculator). The third-person perspective of Manny Pacquiao: Pound for Pound, a new iOS title that’s expected to be released soon (pending approval by Apple), reminds me of that game. But with features like swiping for attacks, customizable outfits and being able to level attributes, it’s bound to be, well, a knockout.
Nothing says “hey baby, how you doin’ ” quite like expensive, cutting edge-technology wrapped in luxurious wool. Libratone’s new AirPlay-equipped Live and Lounge speakers don’t just say it, they sing it. With a European accent.
So we’re all pretty aware by now that the iPhone has regressed back to it’s 3GS days and become a bit of an energy pig again. Battery-maker Mophie is appealling to a group of people who’d feel this most keenly — namely, the outdoor set, who tend to use the iPhone’s juice-sucking GPS — with the Mophie Outdoor ($120) battery for the iPhone 4/S.
There’s nothing like wandering through the Outback, camping under the stars…with an iPad: It can help identify the constellation you’re gazing at, let you sneak in a few chapters from your latest read or track your odyssey. That is, if you can keep the thing juiced.
Solar power is the obvious choice, but there aren’t many portable solar panels with the ability to charge the iPad; add the requirement that the panel be truly rugged and your choices become very, very slim. Luckily, the Joos Orange solar panel ($150), the outfit’s first product, may be the only choice you’ll need to consider.
A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.
Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.
Trident’s new A.M.S. iPhone 4/S case is edgy. And maybe dangerous. It’s probably what Q would give Bond to protect his iPhone, except it doesn’t come equipped with rocket launchers or a laser.
For all those kids out there frenziedly ringing doorbells or knocking on doors till your knuckles hurt: If no one’s coming out to rain candy into your little plastic jack-o-lantern, they’re probably just taking advantage of OnLive’s Halloween weekend of temporarily free-to-play games and too busy to come to the door.
No doubt, leather requires some sacrifice. Those who want their iPads wrapped with animal hide usually have to make do with considerably more bulk, less usability or less money in the bank account — or, most often, all three. But Sena’s new Florence iPad 2 case ($70) is a surprising exception.
Planetary isn’t the most practical iPad app, but it’s absolutely one of the prettiest. The app reads your iTunes collection, then forms a gorgeous miniature galaxy — complete with elegantly animated solar flares — on your iPad, where the suns, orbiting planets and moons all represent artists, albums and songs respectively.
Wizardry has to be one of the longest lived franchises in gaming history — and is especially beloved by us, because the dungeon RPG’s first-ever appearance was on an Apple II. Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls will be the newest title in the 30-odd-year lineage when it debuts on November 3 for the iPhone.
Let’s face it: Chess is pretty geeky. Then again, so is the iPad (c’mon, it is). Blend the two though, and you’ve got…well, let’s just say that playing chess on an iPad at your local coffee hangout is a Wookie’s fingernail-width less geeky than insert-hyperbolic-geek-stereotype-here.
Who cares though; with its portability, large screen and potential to reach all 600 million chess players around the world, the iPad is the ultimate gadget for playing electronic chess, and the free Social Chess app is the way to play.
Carbon weave has got to be the Miracle Whip of gadgets — it makes anything taste better. We reviewed Sound ID’s 510 Bluetooth headset in a BT headset head-to-head (try saying that fast) a few months back; and while it sounded great and was pretty much our pick of the week, it wasn’t the coolest looking kid on the block — and you couldn’t order it to do stuff, like you could some other headsets. Sound ID’s new Six fixes all that, and adds a trick for Siri too.
This is pretty wild: the Kogeto Dot ($80) is a 360-degree lens that snaps onto the back of an iPhone 4, shoots 360-degrees worth of video; then a player in the cloud (if you upload the clip) or on your iPhone 4 in the form of Kogeto’s free Looker app (if you keep the clip on your phone) allows you to play the app and change to any viewpoint in a 360-degree circle during playback.
Almost all mic-equipped canalphones that can be had for about $100 use moving-coil drivers to produce sound, as is the case with all the previous IEMs in this review series. But the Ultimate Ears 600vi ($120) are different — this set employs a single tiny armature in each ear. Armatures generally allow for a more neutral sound with better definition than their moving-coil brethren, and that’s exactly the case with the 600vi. In fact, this set uses pretty much the same excellent drivers as in the now-discontinued, $180 SuperFi 5vi we reviewed early last year.
And yes, apart from the V-Moda Vibrato, the 600vi is $20 more than the other earphones in this review series — but we think the extra Jackson is worth it.
Maybe you’re not going to buy a pair of earphones based on the way they look; maybe you’d rather spend your moolah on a pair that came with exquisite performance. What if you could have both? In spades? Here you go: With their deep, bone-tingling bass and blue-blood looks and manners, the Klipsch Image S4i earphones ($100) is the Prince…of Spades.
I arrived at this party pretty late — I’m probably the junior member here at the Cult of Mac, as far as Apple adoption goes. I haven’t discussed it directly with the entire staff, but I’m almost certain everyone else here had been using Steve’s gadgets long before I started.
My wholesale defection from PC to Mac finally happened in 2005, when I walked out of the Stonestown Galleria Apple Store, beaming, with a 12-inch iBook G4, never to return to the world of Windows. But the journey began two years earlier, when I met and fell in love with my first Apple product.
Yes, it was an iPod.
I always feel like I should be wearing diamond-studded sunglasses, walking around in a silk bathrobe or drinking Cristal from actual Bohemian crystal whenever I sink a pair of V-Moda’s babies into my ears. This doesn’t have anything neccessarily to do with how they sound, but rather because V-Moda has a knack for creating earphones with exotic looks and a luxurious feel to them that also appeal to the other senses. And so it goes with the V-Moda Vibrato Remote earphones ($130).
If you’ve got a bicycle and an iPhone/iPt, here’s a pretty interesting development: iBike, who earlier this year introduced a $200-plus kit that turned the iPhone into a sensor-linked cycling computer, has just released a $70 iPhone cycling package for riders who aren’t Gu-fueled cycling nuts; and it includes what looks like a stellar — and free — cycling app.
So you’ve got your new iPhone 4S, and now you want to talk to Siri (and maybe friends) and enjoy some tuneage. Step one: Donate those pathetic white buds that came with your iPhone to your favorite charity, if they’ll take ’em. Step two: Get yourself a snazzy pair of microphone-equipped canalphones — earphones that fit snugly in your ear. Why? Because a good set of canalphones are the best accessory ever made for an iPhone; they’ll create a seal that will block out ambient noise while enhancing sound coming from the earphones, especially bass — which means better conversations with friends (or Siri), and better music.
Around $100 seems to be the point at which there’s a big jump in quality; also, most in that range are now equipped with inline volume controls (in addition to the play/pause and track-skip controls like the ones on Apple’s stock buds).
We’ve assembled an Apple Store’s worth of canalphones at that level, and we’ll be reviewing them over the next several days. Up first is Sennheiser’s MM 70 iP earphones ($100).
The latest piece of full-on AirPlay sound hardware is from the sonic wizards over at Los Angeles-based Audyssey.
Yeah, the Lower East Side Audio Dock Air ($399) looks more like a Lego brick than the outfit’s svelte South of Market dock we raved about earlier this year — but the new, six-speaker dock is filled with audio-techno-jargon like “passive bass radiators” and “Smart Speaker technology,” which is probably English for “this will blow you away, dude.” And of course, don’t forget the AirPlay.
Since we posted about AirBeam’s free giveaway (it’s usually $4), developer Heiko Straulino has been busy improving his powerful iDevice surveillance app — and the newest update, released over the weekend, now let’s users stream and record audio as well, and adds an audio detection feature similar in function to motion detection.