Simple, elegant and fun, the Ribbn car charger is no-muss, no-fuss.
Offering up 4.8 amps, Tylt’s little Lightning charger plugs into a standard cigarette lighter socket and adds a bit of bright-blue bling to your car’s interior.
Who needs 3 feet of rugged Lightning cable? Anyone who spends any time at all on the road, that’s who.
Cameras, cameras, cameras. German photographic trade show Photokina is just around the corner, and the big names are outing their latest models before the news pipes get completely clogged with the tangled hair and soap scum of new releases. So this week we have a bunch of cool new cameras and accessories, including a GoPro harness for your pooch, along with the usual mix of gadgets designed to make you want to part with your cash.
Moshi’s Xync packs a Lightning-to-USB charging cable into a handy, dangly carabiner-clip package, and adds a secret compartment on the side. But is it better than just carrying a regular Lightning cable in your pocket/bag? The short answer? Hmm…
The long version? Read on.
Even the BeachSafe won’t save you if you leave it alone on the beaches of Barcelona, but it’s still a pretty neat idea. It’s a tote bag that folds out to make a seat for sitting on the sand. Slide your towel out of its compartment, fill that compartment with sand (for ballast) using the built-in scoop and secure the bag’s opening with a combination lock. It won’t stop anyone from making off with the whole thing, but I like the idea of a combo bag/seat, whether it’s safe or not. €60
I like this Hammerhead Lightning cable for two reasons: it’s red, and the cable is flat. Actually, make that three reasons – it’s called the Hammerhead, like the frikkin shark.
Back in the 1980s, and probably continuing into the 1990s, every neat gadget was shoehorned into a credit-card-shaped form factor. Magnifying glass? Credit-card-sized. Vinyl record de-duster? Credit-card-sized. And so on.
The Jumper Card continues this excellent heritage by putting a Lightning charger, a 30-pin dock connector and a microUSB charger into the same credit-card-sized package, ready to be slipped into your pocket. But not your wallet, because, like all “credit-card-sized” gadgets, this one is way too thick.
I’m a great example of why backup iPhone batteries don’t really work. I have a stack of the things in all shapes and sizes, and yet where are they when I need them? At home in a gray felt cat house (don’t ask). I just never remember to take the things with me.
Photojojo’s new Power Boost Keychain aims to change that, putting a smallish battery pack and charing cable on a keychain. Now you’ll never leave the thing at home. Or if you do, you’ll be locked out, and you won’t be able to call a locksmith.
What if your iPhone charging cable could charge your phone even when it wasn’t plugged into a charger? It’d be pretty neat, right? Well, that’s what Native Union’s Jump does, and it does it all while being the best-looking Lightning cable yet.
The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.
What?
As ever with many of Quirky’s excellent crowd-sourced designs, the Prop Power Pro inspires me to make my own. I’m pretty sure a regular extension cable plus a bendy wire coat-hanger plus a length of flexible tubing would do the trick. The thing is, by the time I’d bought all the parts (plus a roll of gaffer tape), I’d be in the hole for way more than the $25 Quirky want for its version.
In the market for a new Lightning cable for on-the-go charging purposes? Then consider the awkwardly-named “8-pin Lightning Data Sync (iTune) Blocker” from USB Fever. Not only is is like about a third of the price of Apple’s own cable, but it comes with a switch on the wire that’ll let you plug your iDevice into any charging hole without worrying that it’s going to suck out your data of pump it full of filthy malware.
This goldie-lookin Lightning cable seems absurd at first, a piece of shiny nonsense that surely costs a fortune, aimed squarely at the kind of fools that pay real money for Swarovski crystal and Vertu phones. But in fact it’s a pretty great gadget. Why?
It’s not just you: iOS 7 has seemingly killed off support for some unlicensed, third-party Lightning cables.
Who needs to carry a clutch of compatible cables just to charge a few gadgets when you could just toss the CrossLink into your pocket/travel bag and be done? Best of all, it costs less than many single dedicated cables.
There’s probably one single fact that’ll get you interested in the fancy Juicies Lightning cable:
That’s right – for just a dollar more you can have aluminum plugs and a corded fabric cable instead of plastic and… More plastic.
We’ve all been there: out of juice on the road and with no charging cable on hand. You can, of course, carry around a 30-pin or Lightning charging cable with you, but that takes up space. There’s something to be said for a small footprint and peace-of-mind.
Enter the Kii by Bluelounge. It’s sync-and-charge piece of mind on a keychain, in a very convenient form factor.
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.
One of the unsung advantages of the iPhone’s crazy popularity is that you can almost always find a charger for it, whether from the lost property box at a hotel or from the guy at the next desk in your office.
But now that Lightning exists, things are more complicated, and a lot of the old 30-pin cables people were willing to lend out are now useless. So how about carrying your own? That’s the idea behind the Nomad cable, a three-inch stub which attaches to your keychain.
There are several truths about cables:
This is one reason I like the look of Brit Morin’s cool DIY project. The other reason is that it’s not just for cables but for several other things I have too many of: sunglasses, neckties, straps (just kidding about the neckties).
Cables: I love what they do – keeping my beloved gadgets juiced and full of delicious data – but — unlike a playful kitten — I hate their tangled mess. Perhaps the perfect charger cable is here at last though: It’s the curly phone-style Lightning cable from Japanese company Sanwa.
Sick of tangled cords when traveling? Want to look more like a cool-headed doctor than a disorganized teenager when you tend to the charging of your various iGadgets? Then the Cordito Wrap is for you: It’s a super-stylish (and super-simple) leather sheet for organizing cables and chargers.
Cute and practical, that’s the Itomaki adapter from Softbank. The charger is shaped like a kind of smoothed-off cotton reel, and – surprise – lets you wrap the charger cable around it when not in use.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, which is clearly nonsense. My mother’s family photos, for instance, are worth three (Flash. Too. Bright). But this simple photo, from LifeProTips on Twitter, really does explain everything…
Fingers is a concept design, but it’s so simple and clever, and so easy to make for yourself with just a piece of stiff card and a pair of scissors, that it seems worth taking a look. It’s yet another desk-tidying cable manager, but you’re going to love it, I promise.