Forget about lame-o portable Bluetooth speakers for your iDevices and take a look at this monster instead. It’s the PylePro soundbar, and it’ll sit up on your wall and blast 300 (three hundred) watts of sound into your living room.
Made from rare woods, leather, and nickel-plated aluminum, Element’s Ronin iPhone 5 case is definitely one of the most beautiful and finely crafted cases I’ve seen. But at $180, its price might be hard from some to swallow.
STM has just busted out a whole new range of tech-carrying bags, from small purse-a-likes to hefty schlep-it-all backpacks. But the one I fancy most out of the new lineup is the Velo 2, and not just because it sounds like you’re meant to use it while riding a bike.
What could be less creepy than secretly snapping close-up pictures of people without their knowledge? Nothing, that’s what. Well, not unless you do it whilst dressed as a clown I guess.
The MirrorCase is a hefty box that hangs off the back of your iPhone and uses an optical-grade mirror to let you shoot pictures at right angles to the screen.
Fact: If we keep consuming magnets at the current rate, the world’s magnet mines will run empty by the end of December this year. And yet this ecological disaster waiting to happen hasn’t stopped the likes of Tim Angel and his case company ZooGue from exploiting these “blood magnets” for his own ends.
The latest example is the Prodigy case, a fat, padded folio with an adjustable stand.
It won’t — unlike a boat — float, but Braven’s new BRV-1 All Weather Speaker will survive squally showers and poolside splashes with aplomb. It’s a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker, and it looks ideal for taking anywhere this summer.
There are plenty of tangle-wrangling, clutter-cutting, cable-tidying solutions out there, but none of them looks as delicious as this one: the Cord Taco.
You know what surprised me last week? That the iPad mini is almost as capable a work computer as my Retina iPad. The screen isn’t quite as readable, and you have to wait for Safari to reload pages and for apps to cold boot more often thanks to the lack of RAM, but as a machine to write on, it works amazingly well.
Which is why Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard for the Mini is a very welcome little accessory.
Lavalier: When I first heard the word I though it was a kind of horseback warrior who would also come soap your back when you were showering, but it turned out to be a handy clip-on remote mic. And now Rode (or RØDE, as it somewhat annoyingly insists on being called) has a lavalier mic which works with your iOS device. It’s called the smartLav, and it doubles as a self-cleaning toilet. (Kidding!)
The SkechBook case, from master iPad case-maker Skech, was one of the things that drove me to buy and iPad mini, so slim and cute and retro-tastic is its tiny form.
Since succumbing to the mini’s charms, though, I have come to believe that it really needs no case other than the Smart Cover, and the Smart Cover is only really needed to lock and unlock the screen quickly. Why? Because the iPad mini weighs just 307 grams on my kitchen scale, making even the 68-gram Smart Cover a significant addition to its weight. And apart from the glass screen, the little iPad is so light, tough and compact that further protection seems like unnecessary coddling.
Got a “Universal” iPhone dock? Yeah, me too, and it’s pretty useless now most of my iDevices are Lightning powered. But Shapeways user nginear can help. He’s come up with an iPhone 5 adapter which will plug straight into your dock, letting you keep on using it for at least another year or so,.
The Rocksteady XS is a Bluetooth speaker with a big difference: it’s designed to be “as loud as possible.” To that end, it features a sealed design so that the sound can punch harder out of the end-mounted speakers. It’s also tough (with an aluminum shell) and cheap at just $99, making it ideal for outdoor use.
Kanex’s new DualRole will be pretty much essential for hotel-hopping MacBook Air owners the world over. It’s a little pocket-sized box which hooks up to the MacBook’s USB 3.0 port and turns it into three ports plus an Ethernet jack.
Yes, it costs $70, but you can expense that, right?
True story: Back when I was a university student, there was a local DJ called DJ Crap. He actually was pretty crappy, but nobody really cared, because DJ Crap had a signature gimmick: He used an old-style telephone handset to cue up his records. Come to think of it, this might be why his mixes never matched…
Now Numark will sell you a modern version of the same thing. It’s called the Redphone, and DJ Crap would love it.
Remember the Optimus Maximus keyboard from Art Lebedev? No, me either. But if I did I’d probably recall the LED keycaps which had two distinct functions: One, to display a tiny image on top of each key and two, to send the cost of the keyboard through the roof.
Today we bring you the e-ink keyboard, which is the same kind of thing, only way more practical.
Here’s a great idea: put this magnetic paperweight on your desk and enjoy the relaxed tranquility of knowing that your cables will never fall to the floor again.
Or try this even better idea: go grab the super-strong rare-earth magnet from one of your disused iPad cases (or even its over-engineered packaging) and tape it to the edge of your desk. Voila! (or wa-la! or viola! as forum-posting morons like to say) – you have your own free cable tidy. And better yet it won’t actually untidy your desk by cluttering up its surface.
I consider Apple’s Lightning SD card adapter to be a step backwards – the original camera connection kit not only included an SD dongle and a USB port, but it also provided them in convenient, pocketable, non-be-cabled form.
Thanks to the fine folks at Photojojo, though, you can now relive the excitement of not using a cable to plug in your SD card with the Lightning SD Reader.
I have a hate/hate relationship wireless SD cards. Hate because they never quite seem to work when I really need them to, and hate because they promise so much, and then they crash my damn camera. Again. Wait, I have another one: They also kill the battery.
The new ezSh@re from world-famous manufacturer 1 LZeal mightn’t do anything about the first two, but it can fix that last one.
Archos, maker of dodgy, hard-to-use MP3 players back in the 1990s, is hopping on the Bluetooth keyboard bandwagon.
Its offering is mostly standard, with one (literally) standout feature.
Griffin has finally admitted to itself that no matter how good an iPad or MacBook case it makes, you are – eventually – going to toss it away. So the Paper Nomad is designed to decompose gracefully, kind of like the opposite of every aging Hollywood star, ever.
You probably don’t give much thought to your chargers – after all, they come bundled with your devices, and Apple’s especially are mostly well-designed (MagSafe 2). But Kanex’s DoubleUp – which I took with me on a recent whistle-stop tour of Las Vegas and San Francisco – is worth a look if you travel a lot, or even if you just want something a little better, and a little more convenient, than Apple’s free option.
Neat. This $99 dongle adds GPS to your Wi-Fi-only iDevices.
Bad Elf is the first Apple approved, direct connect GPS accessory for the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. The Bad Elf delivers high performance location awareness through a 66 Channel, 10 Hz capable, WAAS compatible (SBAS/EGNOS/MSAS) GPS receiver.
Curious (and completely unresearched) fact: Bike geeks are often photography nerds, too. And so it makes perfect sense that Chrome — the messenger bag company — should put out a camera bag. So if you have been looking for an overprotective, heavy camera backpack with a U-Lock holster, the Niko Camera Pack could be for you.
Like a dummy, I bought a waterproof iPhone pouch without checking whether it fit my iPhone 5. It did, but only with some scary squeezing and bending. I bought the case to see me through a rainy trip to Paris at the end of last year, but when I discovered the mismatch (Paris Mis-Match?) I used my formidable mental powers to solve the problem – I hid in bars and coffee shops every time it rained.
If I’d had the mentalKase, though, I could’ve explored the city a little better. Well, almost.
Having utterly failed in my efforts to not buy an iPad mini, I have already started a collection of cases. Most of them are review units, and almost all of them add too much weight and bulk to the tiny mini. But the Booqpad mini seems to have a different idea: If you’re going to add weight anyway, why not just go the whole way and make the extra grams worth it?