Arcam, the UK high-end audio company, has a little nugget to tempt audiophiles. It’s called the miniBlink, and it’s a “hi-def” Bluetooth audio adapter with a proper built-in DAC. What? Don’t fret. It just means you can beam Bluetooth audio to your stereo without it sounding crappy.
LAS VEGAS — Seriously, everyone has a mother, but not everyone wants to live with her.
Here comes Mother, the remote sensor gadget we got to play with a bit at CES in Vegas this week. It’s a small, shmoo-shaped object that sits in your house, and tracks the sensors you can then attach to a variety of mundane objects like your toothbrush, your pill bottles, your mattress, or your refrigerator.
Mother then interacts with one of the 15 entry-level apps that come with the device to help you track what you do: how many times do you brush your teeth a day? Are you eating too much in the evening? How’s your sleep?
The initial bundle, available only at CES this week, is $222 for the Mother sensor hub and four cookies. The retail price will likely be higher when Mother hits stores.
I love everything about my iPad Mini’s Smart Case but for one thing: I can’t use it with the BlueLounge MiniDock, a super handy little charging dock.
The iPort Charge Case and Stand won’t help there, but it will at least let me charge the iPad while it’s inside a case. It’ll even work in landscape orientation.
Cult of Mac favorite Braven is showing off a wireless speaker at CES this year. It’s totally not what you’re expecting, though: The Vibe System is a range of hybrid Bluetooth/Wi-Fi speakers that can be used individually – hooked up to your iDevices – or in multiroom concert, Sonos-style. And being from Braven, it all runs away from mains power.
Braven’s new BRV-Bank is a ruggedized backup battery for your mobile devices, with some very neat/curious additions: It has Bluetooth, for one, and it can be remote controlled from your phone. WTF?
This is the Ladibird, and it might just be the answer to the question, “What the hell are the camera makers going to do now that we all have iPhones?” The Ladibird is a camera case that slides onto your iPhone 5/s and lets it take great portrait photos, complete with the blurred backgrounds characteristic of a fast lens.
Eye-Fi has launched Eye-Fi Labs, a place to find test versions of new software. The first thing that you might be interested in is the Eye-Fi Mobi Desktop Receiver for Mac, an app that will let you beam photos from your Eye-Fi Mobi card direct to your Mac.
If there’s one thing the fine citizens of the United States love in their cars it’s cup holders. God knows why a car needs like 20 places to stow a bucket of coffee or soda, but it does. Which means, ironically, that the average U.S car has an average of 16[1] cup holders empty at any one time.
Thankfully, the SpeeCup is here to fill up at least one of them, although given the amount of free cup-holder space available, it seems almost silly to combine a speaker, a Siri-enabled mic and a cup-shaped vessel into just one single gadget.
Canon’s new PowerShot N100 is also called the Story Camera. Why? Because it reads to you as you fall asleep at night? Because it puts speech bubbles in the mouths of your portrait subjects? Nope. It’s because it has a second camera on the back that snaps a photo of the photographer as they snap a picture of, well, anything.
Nikon has chosen the media shoutfest that is CES to announce the D3300 SLR, an update to the – that’s right – D3200. It comes with a new sensor, a faster processor, a different crappy kit lens and this year’s favorite new gimmick: no optical low-pass filter.
The FAVI pico+ projector is just another little battery-powered “beamer,” a DLP projector that can be kept in a pocket and used to throw photos and video from your iPhone or iPad up onto the wall. But this one has a neat extra – the built-in Wi-Fi radio ands AirPlay support, so the only cable you’ll need is the charger to keep the thing going.
The Fujifilm X100S aka The Best Camera I Ever Owned aka The Only Leica A Photographer Can Afford is now available in black. And unlike the overpriced special edition black X100, the black X100S is neither a special edition nor more expensive – it’s just a regular alternative colorway for the camera.
Have you ever watched somebody with long fingernails tap-tap-tapping at their iPhone or iPad screen? It’s painful. Either their overgrown keratin caps skitter over the screen in a chitinous clatter, or they have to approach the screen with the flat pads of their fingers, as if they were carefully giving the government a perfect image of their fingerprints.
But no longer. The most useful new product showcased at this year’s CES is Elektra Nails, a set of capacitive stick-on talons.
You know what would make all of those crazy-dangerous squirrel-suit action movies even better? A big, wide, cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio. And that’s just what you’ll get with the new Letus AnamorphX Adapter for the GoPro Hero.
Griffin has added a non-ugly, multitrack version of its StudioConnect music box. The sturdy-looking unit lets you record multiple instruments on your iPad (or Mac, if you’re still living in 2010), piping the results straight into the music software of your choice.
Ever felt the need to turn your Mac up to 11? Of course you have, and now, thanks to Griffin’s new Bluetooth PowerMate, you can do it wirelessly.
The rush to announce products at CES means we often see CGI renders and vague price promises, just to get in on the news action. But we’re giving SuperTooth a break here for two reasons. One, the company makes great speakers, and two, pretty much every one of those speakers has started life as a dummy model on a trade-show stand.
Withings isn’t content with looking after your body throughout every waking hour of your life. Now it wants to make like some kind of Inception-style doctor and keep an eye on your dreams with the help of the Aura.
Would you pay $7,800 for a suitcase full of carbon fiber and aluminum tubes? No, me neither, but clearly somebody will, or Shadowcam wouldn’t be hawking its crazily-priced S–5 camera stabilizer, a three-axis gimbal rig that would keep your shots steady even if you stood on a vibrating table with a bowl of jello on your head.
The Mummy Case is one of our all-time favorite iPhone cases, and now it has a sequel. No, it’s not the execrable The Mummy Returns. It’s the Straightjacket, and it looks pretty rad.
MaxStone is yet another way to trigger your camera from your iPhone, with all the usual timer and detection options to fire the camera’s shutter from afar. But this one takes a different approach to the hardware. Instead of running a cable from the iPhone to the camera, the MaxStone uses a combination of Bluetooth and IR.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’m a sucker for great charger designs, and Ventev’s Utilitycharger 2100 is clearly a smart design. So clever is it that I’m even willing to overlook my hatred of cards for a few minutes as I write this post.
If you’re looking to soften up your photo lighting (and let;’s be honest, who isn;t these days?) then you could do worse than the AirBox range of light modifiers. The AirBoxes are soft-boxes that you inflate. With Air. Hence the name AirBox.
My current desk cost me around €30 in the local flea market, comes from the GDR and is awesome. But it’s not a great desk for piling up with tech, thanks to a complete lack of charger cubbyholes and cable wranglers.
If you put my desk at one end of the tech-configurability spectrum, and a neat, modern desk on the middle, then the Bee9 Tablet Desk 2.0 would be way off at the other end of the scale.
“Thunderbolt, ho!” That’s the cry of low-frame-rate animated big cats when they found out just how much the new Akitio Thunder Dock can do when hooked up to a Mac. And “Snarrrfff” is what their rat-like friend said when he saw the $269 price tag.