gadgets - page 28

In the U.S, lucky market traders, beggars and panhandlers can stick a sugarcube-sized dongle into their iPhone’s (or iPad’s) headphone jack and start taking credit cards. Over in Europe, we don’t yet have the Square reader, so our street-folk have had to put up with old-fashioned cash. Until now that is. Thanks to a combination of Apple’s liberal policies governing how dirty you have to be before you’re refused entry to a store, and the newly-stocked Payleven chip’n’PIN machines, tramps and bums all over the EU can now take plastic.

The SETA smartphone stand is another one of those post-Lighting iPhone “docks” which don’t actually let you dock the phone. The 30 pin dock connector was bad in many ways but it did at least give us docks into which we could dump our devices and let them charge.

The SETA pretty much ignores the dock part and just proves a handsome, minimalist spot on your desk to park your phone. And it also provides a neat way to control your charging cable.

Like blades on a disposable razor, there can never be enough ports on a USB hub. At least, that seems to be the thinking behind Satechi’s 7-port USB 3.0 monster, a wedge-shaped desktop hub made for Mac users.

Sonte’s new film can switch up its opacity in just a second, and it can be controlled from your iPhone. Cover a window and flip it from transparent to opaque at the tap of a screen, blocking out nosy passersby or ugly distractions whilst still letting in most of the light. It’s like turning any room into a bathroom. Only without the extra plumbing required.

The KickLight is a $180 LED lamp for your iPhone. I hear you. “WHAT?!” you shout, in justifiable ALL CAPS. You even combine a question mark and an exclamation mark to further express your angered confusion. To which I can only say CALM DOWN. It’s actually worth the money.

Remember the Hitcase? It’s the “virtually indestructible” iPhone case that our own video jockey Michael Steeber checked out at this years CES. Now you can buy not only the case itself, but a range of neat-o accessories which let you put the thing on bike handlebars and car… Tubes?

I love it when hardware integrates with iOS devices, endowing them with new powers they never hoped to possess. The Withings WS-50 smart scale, paired with their very good iOS app, does just that.

By connecting to your Wi-Fi and sending your health stats to the cloud, the Withings WS-50 smart scale allows you to effortlessly track your weight, body mass index, indoor air quality, and even your heart rate. All you have to do to make it work, is step on the scale from time to time, then boot up their app to see just how fat or cut you’re getting.

This is the Bridging Book, and it “bridges” the gap between reality and virtual reality by combining an iPad app with an actual paper book. The concept is simple and yet looks to be very effective, if the smiles on the kid in the video are anything to go by: The iPad detects page turns made in the book using magnets. Yes, frikkin’ magnets.

Quick question: How do you feel about 60˚? That’s the angle, not the temperature. Do you like it? Still not sure? Then let me put it another way: Are you a fan of tilting things back by 30 degrees?

If so, and if you don’t like to adjust things, then the ChillTab2 might just be the perfect stand for you.

It’s hard to believe, but some people don’t like the image-crunching, JPG-mangling special effects of app like Instagram. Instead, they want the output from the iPhone’s highly-tuned camera to be clean and as good as it can be. Which is why Olloclip’s new iPhone app goes in the opposite direction to most grungification apps and corrects errors introduced by the company’s clip-on lens of the same name.

My camera eats batteries. I’m not sure exactly why — maybe it’s because the NP-95 battery it uses is tiny; maybe it’s that its hybrid viewfinder is particularly power hungry; or perhaps it’s just that I refuse to engage any of the performance-slowing power-save modes — but my X100s is thirsty.

I get around this by carry a pocketful of those tiny batteries, but taking the giant Fujifilm charger on vacation is a pain. So I set out to find a USB charger that would do the job without frying the batteries.

Then I realized I was doing it wrong. Instead of a USB-powered battery charger, what I needed was a proper camera battery charger which had a USB port in the side. Thus I could charge everything from one wall socket, in one compact unit.

The device is the Digipower TC–55.

The Mutator is a hardware mute switch for your iPhone. What’s that you say? You already have a hardware mute switch on your iPhone? Well, yes you do. But – as the poor fellow who caused Mahlergate found out – mute doesn’t always mean “mute”.

I know what you bike nuts are thinking. You’re jealous of all the hue-controlled lighting available to the stay-at-home folks, and you want a little bit of that color-changing action for your ride. Well, the folks at Helios have heard you, and are just about to launch a couple of crazy handlebars with built-in LEDs. And that’s not all they do. Oh no…

Apple might not make bumpers anymore, and Antennagate may be a thing of the past, but there are still some good bumpers out there… and top of the list is the AL13.

Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.

Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?

Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.

And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.

Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.

Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.

That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.

UltimateEars Boom is yet another wireless Bluetooth speaker, a category that has gone from a mere sprinkling of spores on the petri dish of consumer gadgets to a veritable mushroom field of musical materiel. However, as is now necessary in this crowded corner of consumerism, there’s a twist: This speaker will annoy everyone equally, wherever they may be.

The obvious thing to say about the XiStera is to call it the "“Swiss Army Knife” of iPhone 5 accessories. Leaving aside for a second the fact that, if all the Swiss Army is bringing to the fight is that little knife, it’s no wonder it refuses to play in any wars, let’s make a better analogy for the Xistera. It’s like a Glif crossed with a Pulltaps corkscrew.

Waiting for Apple’s iWatch? Good luck with that if you’re expecting anything fancier than a fitness-tracking iPod nano with a wrist strap. You should save your money, your hopes and your time and buy Beloved Crapware Vendor™ Brando’s Fashionable Bluetooth Vibrating Bracelet + Watch instead.

To be honest, I’m writing this post based solely on the awesome name of this iOS-compatible headphone amp: the Mobile Music Pump. What is it? An amp to boost the puny output from your iPhone’s headphone jack to make big headphones sound better.

Apparently the OLPC cemented the colors green and white as the color scheme of choice for the education market, because now the new Logitech Wired Keyboard for iPad is similarly hued.

I have no problem with that: the combo is so ugly that it’ll seriously diminish the resale value should light-fingered pupils decide to earn a little extra pocket money.

Two new iPad mini keyboard cases from Zagg today: A super-thin magnetic cover and a thicker stick-on “folio” case, similar to the Pro Plus case for the regular-sized iPad only with a top cover too. And both, amazingly, are backlit.

Wallets: I hate them, but having loose coins in your pocket which fall out every time you sit down is worse. Especially in a country where the coins are actually worth something. Right now I have a typically over-engineered German wallet which will probably last me forever, but I like the look of SF Bags’ new Finn. It’s flat, it holds cash and cars and – if you pick the bigger model – it also has space for your iPhone.

I quite like the dark linen texture that sits behind the elements of the iOS (and recently OS X) interface, but I’m pretty sure that Jony Ive’s upcoming Great Purge will consign it to the same tomb as brushed aluminum – after all, this is a designer so minimalist that he even removed a superfluous “n” from his own name.

So this wraparound case from Plus Motif might be my last chance at linen.