Ding-a-ling! Wakey wakey! If you have trouble getting up in the morning, why not become a tech blogger? Just kidding. We work, like, super hard. What you really need to do is buy yourself yet another gadget, this time a physical bell for your iPhone which will emit a thunderous TRING at breakfast time.
Vox’s Amphones is a pretty neat little range of headphones. Named for “amp” and “headphones.” they combine the two. Thus, you just jack the cans direct into your guitar and enjoy various effects as you play.
When you think about it, the iPad 3 is possibly the best platform for simulated pinball, like, ever. Why? Because even though it’s very small, it has a high enough resolution for even the most complicated tables. And it has an accelerometer to activate the tilt warning. But more importantly, the iPad’s great accessibility options (like voiceover) mean that even a deaf, dumb or blind kid should be able to play a mean pinball.
All you need are some buttons to flip the flippers.
There’s so much wordplay to be had in this post that if I start now, I might just forget to write about the product itself. So if you want dick jokes and Star Wars references, you’ll find them at the end of this post. In the meantime, let’s take a look at Richard Solo’s horribly-named FreeWheelin Audio System For Helmets.
Sick, enraged or just plain glum about the fact that your new iPhone 5 won’t work with your multiple and expensive speaker docks? Then you should probably lose that sense of entitlement.
Or you could move to Brazil (where an iPhone costs the same as a small private plane, more or less) and start buying paper magazines. Because a recent Coca Cola ad turns a copy of Capricho magazine into a passive cylindrical speaker dock.
Remember those novelty retro cellphone handsets? The ones with curly cords that attached to your handset’s proprietary connector and made it look like you were making a call on a rotary telephone circa 1970? In the pub?
Well, the Swissvoice ePure is something like that, only more useful, and way, way cooler looking.
“Father of the iPod” Tony Fadell’s company Nest has released version 2.0 of its Apple-like thermostat. And like any good Apple update, the Nest 2.0 is thinner, better and good-looking-er.
I'm a sucker for bags, and — like TV's Dexter — I have come to be at peace with my darker side (I'm just starting season 4 though, so maybe he gets all crazy after becoming a father and everything). I realize that no matter how many sleeves, totes, backpacks or messenger bags I buy, it will never be enough.
I haven't yet started bagging up the old, discarded models and tossing them into the Gulf Stream to be carried off to a watery grave far away, but it can't be long. In the meantime, help talk me down from dropping almost $200 on this simple but gorgeous wool and leather sleeve.
Remember when people used to say that the iPhone was useless for e-mail as it doesn't have a hardware keyboard? Think back: it was a while ago, around the same time that the iPhone was doomed for not supporting Flash.
Got it? Well, apparently some people somewhere still think that way, and this post is for them (if you know one of them, perhaps you could print out this article and fax it to them or something). Yes, you can now turn your state-of-the-art iPhone 5 into an also-ran BlackBerry.
Having spent far too much time and money trying to mount an iPad onto the handlebars of my bike, I know all about fastenings both simple and complex. And I also know when to quit with the DIY and just drop some cash.
The Satechi Bikemate Slim 3 isn't big enough for the iPad, but it will fit iPhones both tall and fat, and its mounting is both simple and easy to use.
Today the iPhone 5 goes on sale in The Rest Of The World, and it goes out into that world naked and empty, free of contracts and lock-ins. Yes, you can hook up with your favorite carrier and get a subsidized handset, but real men go commando.
And in this case, unless you have some forward-thinking telcos in your country, “going commando” means “cutting your own SIM.”
Which is why we’re taking a timely look at this natty Nano SIM adapter, which will let you put just about any SIM into any phone.
Tripod and lighting supremo Manfrotto — the Italian company whose name seems to combine the words “man” and “frottage” — is finally getting in on the iPhonegraphy game. And its Klyp looks to be every bit as sturdy and well thought out as the rest of its products.
The iPhone isn’t the only thing that looks more handsome when it gets taller and thinner. Bookbindery cases get better looking too, as you can see with event he quickest glance and Pad&Quill’s new Little Pocket Book. Stretched lengthwise and squashed a little depth-wise, it’s “thinnest we have ever made,” says P&Q honcho Brian Holmes.
Remember when Buster found an iPhone at the bottom of a river while he was floating down it on an inner-tube? The previous owner had the right idea: he sealed it in a plastic bag to keep out the elements. But he forgot one thing: Even in a bag, the short, heavy, ugly iPhone 4 will sink like, well, like last year's crappy iPhone.
What he should have used was Coghlan's Dry Pouch.
You're in a hotel room, and you want to hook up to the in-room Wi-Fi. And guess what? It sucks, just like at every other hotel you ever stayed at. So Instead you dig out your MacBook and hook it up to the hotel's Ethernet cable, and use internet sharing to generate your own wireless network.
Wait… The newest MacBooks Air don't have Ethernet ports. But don't worry: you can pick up the $60 mySpot from Kanex, a little dongle which takes an Ethernet connector and turns its sweet network payload into a wireless cloud, ready for all your iDevices and your non-Ethernet MacBook Air.
Some gadget accessories just keep coming back, getting useful again after they've been sat at the back of a kitchen drawer of a closet for a few months, or even a few years. I have an acrylic business-card display thingy which has done duty as an iPad 1 stand, a speaker hook, a phone charging station and –right now — an iPad 3 movie-watching stand. And I thought €8 was expensive for a piece of bent Perspex.
The ItFits looks like that kind of accessory. It bends to fit almost any small phone-sized gadget, and acts as both a stand and a clip. Let's take a look:
It used to be that we carried spare batteries for our devices. Then Apple sealed its products’ cases shut and some of us complained. Loudly. Then we realized that carrying an external battery pack meant we didn’t have to power-down to swap out batteries, and that we could now pick and choose the perfect third-party option, and we all shut the hell up.
Which is my long-winded way of introducing the new Zaggsparq packs, a range of three battery packs tailored perfectly to your iCharging needs. As long as you don’t own an iPad 3, that is.
Got an iPhone 5? Missing the Glif stand/tripod adapter/icon that fits your old, fat, ugly (not to mention slooowwww) iPhone 4/S like a (right-angled plastic) glove?
Don’t worry: by simply spending more money, you can secure yourself a brand new, elongated and slenderized version of the Glif for your new iPhone.
Photographer Dustin Curtis decided to put his new iPhone 5 up against his ~$4,000 Canon 5D MkIII SLR in a head-to-head shootout. The result? Clearly the Canon won, but the iPhone did surprisingly well.
Some years ago, I had a science-fiction idea. What if you could wear a camera and record your entire life? It would be small enough to hang around your neck or clip to your clothes. It would have enough memory and battery power to run all day, and it would record with a high enough resolution that you could “enhance” images to see close-up details.
Of course, this tech now exists. The latest iteration is this neat little Autographer, and in some ways it’s even better than my “invention.”
Oh man, this iPad mount is either a fantastic idea, or a lawsuit waiting to happen: you decide. It’s called the BiKASE and it mounts your iPad onto the handlebars of your bike.
Matias, maker of clicky, mechanical-switch keyboards, has spent the last two years perfecting a new clicky mechanical keyboard switch. The twist? It’s almost silent. If you want the feel of a proper, burglar-killing keyboard but love the (lack of) sound of your modern, slimline notebook keyboard, then this $150 monster might be just the ticket. It’s called — fittingly — the Quiet Pro.
So you just had your own personal iPhone 5 unboxing. What next? If I were you, I’d hop on my bike and go burn a few calories, taking in the sunny view of the city as I go. But where would I put my new toy? After all, there are no iPhone 5 handlebar mounts available yet. Or maybe you live somewhere rainy and dull, and you want to keep your iPhone in a pocket or bag.
Luckily, the RFLKT now exists. It’s a little LCD bike computer that sits on your handlebars, only instead of just spitting out your speed and lap times, it displays sports info beamed to it from your iPhone — 5 or otherwise.
Dodocase is back, but this time without the faux-Moleskine iDevice covers. Now you can protect your tall, skinny iPhone 5 with Dodo’s new Durables range of covers, which also come for the MacBook and the iPad.
After boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia to be one of the first in the whole world to get their hands on an iPhone 5, the folks at iFixit have torn it apart and found that — surprise — the new iPhone seems to actually have been designed with easy repair in mind. Partially, at least.