gadgets - page 25

The Saidoka is both ingenious and utterly superfluous, both at the same time. It’s an iPhone dock designed to let your iPhone lay almost face-up, letting you charge it and use it when you’re sitting at your desk. It comes in 30-pin and Lightning flavors, and hooks up to a charger or computer via micro-USB.

You know what else keeps your iPhone say on your desk and facing upwards as it charges? Nothing? That is, you can put nothing under your iPhone and it’ll do the exact same thing. And neither will it cost you €50/$50.

The new A4000i electric scooter from Japan’s Terra Motors can hit 65km/h (40mph) and do 65km on a full charge (or “gallon”) of electricity. Used to travel 20km per day. The scooter will cost just $29 per year to run. That’s even less than my bike, which I fuel with a combination of delicious pizza and chocolate.

But the real reason I’m writing about the A4000i Is that it’s a giant, mobile iPhone dock.

Manfrotto’s new Pixi tripod is built to supports hefty compact cameras, but will be equally at home when shoved under your iPhone (via a case with a tripod screw mount, of course). In fact, it’s almost perfect for iPhoeography as it doubles as a handgrip letting you shoot much steadier video than you could with the iPhone only.

If we’re guessing about improvments coming to the next iPhone, then a better camera is a pretty safe bet. Each iteration of the iPhone has bumped the megapixels and improved image quality, low-light performance and added featres like HDR and panoramas. Many other makers (cough Samsung cough) have attempted to match the iPhone’s camera, but only one has really come close – Nokia. And the new Lumia 1020 looks even more amazing yet.

Fray Fix is my favorite kind of gadget: cheap, simple, and completely single-minded. And it doesn’t even have any stupid CamelCasing or vowel movements in its name. What is it? A protector for the power cable on your MagSafe brick.

Olympus was always the company with the best gimmicks, the smallest cameras and the coolest TV ads (in the 1980s UK, at least). And that (apart from the ads) continues to this day. Almost a year ago, the company showed off the Body Cap Lens, and now it’s available to buy. As in, “buy from Amazon today.”

The Blazar is yet another wireless speaker designed to play nice with your iDevices, and any other music-machines you might have laying around. This one distinguishes itself with a few neat features, including stereo pairing and NFC.

Just five short years ago I interviewed the magnificently-bearded Julius von Bismarck about his Image Fulgurator, a modified 35mm film SLR which would project an image onto whatever it was pointed at using a powerful flashgun. The gimmick was that the device was triggered by the flashes of innocent tourist sheep as they flocked to famous monuments and snapped point-and-shoot pictures.

Invisible to the human eye, Julius’s various pictures and messages would be marked indelibly onto the pixels of these tourist photos. The fact that the Fulgurator looked like a gun just made the whole thing cooler.

Now, there’s a version you can buy. It comes from the folks at DIY Photography, and it’s called the Light Blaster.

Scott Stefan’s Kickstarter project is an odd one, but more on that in a second. In order not to bury the lede, I am obliged to tell you what the product is right up here in the first paragraph (or “graf” as “we in the biz” call it). It’s called the MaCool, and it’s a beer cooler designed to look just like an original 1984 Mac.

hŌld is an orange plastic taco for your iPAd which makes it a lot easier to hold. Instead of having to grip the thing the whole time, risking a broken wrist from the Retina iPad’s monstrous bulk, you can kind of let it hang on your fingers. And it even works with your Smart Cover attached.

If you obsess over even the tiniest speck of grease or dust on your camera lens, then you should probably avoid this video, which shows a poor Canon 50mm ƒ1.8 standard prime being tortured. And I do mean it when I say “tortured”: Evil photographer Richard Choi really gets elemental on that front element. The surprise? The lens (almost) doesn’t feel a thing.

Diamond Scale is what looks like a kind of fake novelty app which purports to turn you iDevice into a scale. The best thing is to just describe it to you.

The little drilled aluminum Braven 650 is one of my favorite portable Bluetooth speakers – it’s small, it’s light and tough and it sounds great. Plus, it’s a lot louder than the Jambox, and it has a USB port so that you can recharge your iPhone from the speaker’s battery.

So I have high expectations for the new 850. If the 650 was a competitor to the Jambox, the 850 is a rival for the Big Jambox

Garmin has just announced a neat new HUD box that takes the map info from your iPhone and projects it up onto your car windshield. Named after the Paul Newman character in the movie of the same name[1], the HUD is designed to work with Garmin’s Navigon and Street Pilot apps, connecting to the host phone via Bluetooth.

Today is the day Strobists have been longing for. Why? It’s the official launch day for the LumoPro LP180 flash, an amazingly capable little (or not-so-little) flashgun which costs way less than the equivalents from the likes of Canon and Nikon.

The Wristlet looks like quite a useful iPhone wallet. Instead of going all minimal and offering a few useless slots on the back for credit cards (some of us actually pay for goods with our own cash money), the Wristlet comes on like a miniature unisex purse, only it’s a tiny purse designed mostly for the iPhone.

It’s fast turning into “Camera Monday” here at Cult of Mac Spain, and so I shall continue unapologetically into the next photo-themed subject: the OpenReflex, an open-source, 3-D-printed SLR from model making supremo Léo Marius. When capturing colors accurately is essential, a Nix Color Sensor can be a game-changer, helping photographers and designers match colors with precision.

If you never used a reflector to help out the lighting in your photos, you’ll probably be pretty surprised at just how big a difference they can make. A reflector can kick back light into the shadows of your subject, taking a standard boring portrait and turning it into something that looks way way better, eliminating the unflattering pools of darkness lurking in the faces imperfections.

But only a pro would bother tossing a big reflector into their camera kit, right? Photojojo thinks not, and will now sell you a perfect pocket-sized reflector for your iPhoneography.

I love my Olloclip, but there’s one thing I find myself wishing more and more often: that it came with a telephoto lens. Well, as you can probably guess that this post is about just that – a new telephoto from the makers of probably the best add-on lens for the iPhone.

Here’s a great idea: It’s the Satechi Bluetooth Wireless Smart Keypad and it combines a number pad for your Mac with an actual old-school calculator. It even matches your Apple Wireless Keyboard.

On-camera flash is usually a terrible idea (with just two – maybe three – exceptions I can think of). It lights up your subject, sure, but it totally kills the mood that made you want to take a photo in the dark in the first place.

But if you’re a fan of shiny, overexposed faces, red eyes and disappearing backgrounds then why not grab an iblazr, the world’s first all-lower-case iPhone flash. Kidding. It is all lower cae, but that’s not really its tagline. It’s real tagline is “is the first universal LED flash for smartphones and tablets.”

Lame.

Recently on Twitter, our deputy editor John “pipe and slippers” Brownlee posted a picture of his Mac keyboard, with wooden tiles stuck to the keycaps. It was utterly hideous, and yet completely in keeping with John’s fetish for anything made of wood. It was the real-world equivalent green felt or rich Corinthian leather.

This all-wood keyboard, on the other hand, is pretty gorgeous. It comes from French company Orée, it’s called the Orée Board and it costs a steep-ish €150 ($193).

I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I’m going to admit it to you: I spend far too many brain cycles pondering better ways to carry my camera and other essentials. Worse, I have a box full of bags and straps leftover from my efforts. So i’m not sure whether this tutorial for making a DIY harness is a great idea of the beginning of another foolhardy adventure. I suspect it might be both.

If you ever walked around Las Vegas’ Strip, you’ll be familiar with its drunken-theme-park aesthetic. Every hedge and lawn is watered and trimmed to Disney-esque perfection. Every sidewalk is swept. The only difference is that the pedestrians carry three-foot-long plastic tubes of some sickly pink liquor.

And of course, there are hidden speakers everywhere. Now, those speakers could be replaced with Anakondas.

People love to moan about the slimline MagSafe 2 adapter that was launched to match the skinny (current) MacBook Air. It falls out, they say. It’s too easy to knock from its magnet-hole. I’ve never had any trouble with it. In fact, I like it more than the original because not only does it stay firmly in place, but it also snaps in properly in to begin with. I often found the old fat MagSafe would fail to engage, leaving me with a dead battery when I left the house (not that I ever actually leave the house).

Anyhow, you whiners now have something else to waste your money on: the Snuglet.