$9. Nine lousy dollars. With nine bucks, there’s no way you could make an iPhone stand this good, even buying parts from the cheapest of hardware stores. Hell, the only way to make a functional iPhone holder with $9 is to head to the bank, buy a roll of quarters and sit the iPhone up on top.
Which is hardly as elegant as this very practical-looking Pi Mount.
Gadgets with handles are dorky as hell: just ask anyone who owned one of the original Toilet-Seat iBooks about the teasing they endured. But handles are also, well, dead handy – just ask those same iBook owners.
The folks at Native Union have tried to mitigate the inherent dorkiness of the Gripster iPad case by picturing it being held by hot, hot models in the product photos. The usefulness, though, needs no disguise or apologies.
It used to be that if your phone ran out of juice, you could just pop into the nearest bar or cafe and ask “Do you have a Nokia charger?”, and the waitron would hand you one of the needle-tipped jacks from some cupboard or drawer.
Now, things have moved on. Battery life is measured in hours, not days, and Nokia is going the way of RIM and if a bar has an iPhone charger, it’s likely the bartender is using it to charge his own iPhone.
What you need is a charger that is always with you. What you need is the Case:Lynk.
“Plank of wood” might be a lame sounding iPhone accessory, but tell that to a kid whose favorite toy is a “cardboard box” or an iPad owner whose favorite computer is a slab of glass with a metal back.
And the plank in question actually packs some pretty great features, ready to be accessed while it floats up there in front of your wall. That’s right. I said “floats.”
External hard drives: super handy, but oh-so-slow, especially since Apple put a bullet in the back of FireWire’s head. Thankfully, Western Digital has once again come to the rescue with a neat new addition to its My Passport line of portable drives: The Edge.
These new versions not only look way more high-tech than the previous curvy plastic models, they also support MacBook-friendly USB 3.0.
It seems so simple: Press harder, get a thicker, darker line. But drawing on the iPad has been – in pressure sensitivity terms at least – little better than using an Etch-a-Sketch. Now, at last, we’re seeing the first pressure-sensitive styluses for the iPad. Very, very soon you’ll be able to buy the new Bluetooth 4 Pogo Connect for your iPad 3.
IStabilizer’s Monopod is just that – a monopod. Only instead of being optimized to work as a disabled tripod, a camera stand with one leg instead of three, it is made to be used with lightweight cameras like the iPhone to snap pictures from more than arms’ length.
Fujifilm has – as expected – announced the X-E1 mirrorless compact camera. If it had come a year ago, we’d all be going crazy about it. Now, though, it’s little more than a cheaper version of the X-Pro1, without that all-important hybrid viewfinder.
Man-bag. Murse. He-purse. Call it what you like, but you need one. Finally men in the U.S are following the European example and carrying their day-to-day gear in a bag instead of stuffing it all into a wallet, and then jamming that into a back pocket.
Cameras, iPads, iPhones, chargers, e-books and — yes — even wallets need a place to go, and what follows is our roundup of the best bags to put them in.
And who knows? Maybe one day your adult males will stop wearing baseball caps and shorts and start dressing like grown-ups instead?
If you’d shown me the Hi-Call a few years ago I would have ridiculed it and moved on, probably forgetting that this stupid Bluetooth glove even existed. Now, though, in a world infected with “sanitation engineers” so in-demand that they have Bluetooth headsets wedged permanently into their ears, and idiots wander the streets holding their in-line mics up to their mouths as they speak, the Hi-Call from Hi-Fun doesn’t seem so dumb after all.
Do you still own a collection of music stored on cassette tapes? Then I have some advice: STOP LIVING IN THE PAST! Those things’ll kill you eventually. If the wow and flutter doesn’t get you, or the ridiculous rewind times don’t drive you crazy, then the magnetic tape will probably spool out at nights and strangle you in your sleep. Probably.
But before you ditch those mix-tapes, you might want to transfer them to your iDevice. And wouldn’t you know it, but Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you a device almost as useless as your own (probbly perfectly-preserved) Walkman to do it.
I bet you never thought you’d feel early-adopter’s remorse for a bathroom scale, right? Well, if you bought the Withings Wi-Fi-connected scale to wirelessly share your weight and BMI with the world (or just with your own suite of fitness apps) then prepare to get stressed out, and maybe to comfort yourself with a big slice of rich, delicious chocolate cake: The Withings WS30 is here.
Olloclip users rejoice. Or rather, Olloclip users who really hate any kind of lens-induced distortion, rejoice! For now you can grab a free app which will automatically remove and correct any and all of the bends, aberrations and artifacts of your handy add-on lens.
Clearly the “military” part in Griffin’s Military Grade Survivor case for the iPhone doesn’t refer to the color. While olive drab is an option, the majority of the rugged cases come in candy colors more suited to a pre-schooler’s toy box than the killing fields of, well, whichever countries the U.S is currently at war with.
What I want in a rugged sports camera: High definition (to see every detail), a waterproof case (so I don’t have to worry about taking a dip), a slim and stylish body (to match my own!) and probably some other things I never thought of yet.
And here comes the Sony HDR-AS10 HD Action Camcorder, which takes care of all of these bullet points, including the last one.
Wowsers! Western Digital’s Thunderbolt My Book VelociRaptor Duo is all about the big numbers. 10,000 RPM platters, 2TB storage, 10Gb/s transfer (in both directions) and – if you daisy-chain it with other Thunderbolt drives – you can RAID things up to make them even faster.
Heck, even the price is impressive: $860. Ouch!
I can’t think of many things worse to do on a bike than ride it indoors on a stationary trainer. After all, without the world going by and the wind in your hair, you’re effectively just sitting on a stool and waggling your legs.
However, if forced to use these blow-up dolls of the bike world, then I’d insist on one that connected to my iPhone 4S or iPad 3 via Bluetooth 4 and let me control it and hook it up with third-party app. And amazingly, that’s just what Wahoo’s Kickr PowerTrainer does.
Over at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin. Zagg has launched a couple of new iPad keyboards. And one of them, the Pro Plus, has something I have missed ever since I took to typing on my iPad in the corners of dark and seedy bars: a keyboard backlight.
Aleratec’s Charge-Glo dock cable has a very simple yet very neat gimmick: like the MagSafe charger you have for your MacBook, it sports an LED in the plug, and this LED changes color to show charging status. No more tapping at your iPhone’s home button to see if it has done charging.
Just when you thought it was safe to enter a camera store without being assaulted by megapixel madness and other “feeds and speeds,” Samsung goes and adds a new tech race to the game. Processor speed. Its impressive new camera, the Galaxy Camera, comes with a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, and looks like the future of compact camera design, packing an Android 4.1 Jellybean computer.
Imagine if your took the ultimate hippy artifact (apart from the roach clip, I guess), and combined it with the ultimate must-have hi-tech accessory. That’s right: the beanbag chair meets the microfiber cloth.
Now, further imagine that you shrunk the result, and added some fabric designs that would be more at home on a corporate robot’s necktie than on a filthy 60s dropout’s cheap furniture.
Now, behold the result of your crazed imagination: the Toddy Wedge, (not to be confused with the “Todd Wedgie, which was an unfortunate schoolyard event that led directly to the laugh-a-minute movies Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness)
Ugh. That was my first reaction to the CruxSKUNK, a case which turns the iPad into a laptop-shaped-object. Then I got onto the name, which is equally clunky. Then I saw the price, which appears to be around $155-$250. Oh, and this case? It comes with its own case. Nice.
When I was a cub scout, I made my own backyard weather station. It was to get my science badge, or weather nerd badge, or whatever, and it mainly consisted of counting the millimeters of rain in a jamjar with an oversized plastic funnel perched on the top. And there was always rain: This was England.
If I’d had access to the wonderful technology of today, though, I could have stayed in watching TV and let the Netatmo do the work for me. The Netatmo is a weather station for both indoors and outdoors, and is sold as something that will stop you from worrying about your children and — therefore — the future.
Apple has won a massive damages sum of nearly $1.05 billion in the patent trial against Samsung and the reaction from the technology community has been vast and swift.
In an email immediately following the verdict, Forrester Research Principal Analyst Charles Golvin told us the main takeaway from the verdict is the focus on innovation. Companies will now be forced to create legitimately different products, or at least engineer some without extravagantly similar features:
The jury particularly vindicates Apple’s software patents and their decision has implications not just for Samsung, but also for Google, other Android device makers like LG, HTC, and Motorola, but also potentially for Microsoft who employs features such as pinch to zoom, bounce on scroll, etc. These competitors are now forced to go back to the drawing board and come up with substantively different designs — or seek settlement terms with Apple. Since many of these controls are now built into the expectations of customers in how they work their phones, those are substantive challenges.
Gartner analyst and VP of Mobile Research Van Baker agrees the redesign of products in the long term is an issue but that it won’t affect any products anytime soon.
This is a clear win for Apple but it will have little impact on the market in the near term as it is highly likely that there will be an appeal so we will have to repeat the process. If sustained it has the potential to force Samsung to redesign a number of products and it will apply significant pressure on all smartphone and tablet makers to avoid trying to emulate the Apple designs as they bring new products to market.
Earlier, the two principals in the case immediately followed the shocking judgement with their own statements.
Bluetooth speakers? Count me in. I love the things: portable, great-sounding, remote control right there on the speaker, and wireless. But Bluetooth headphones? Aren’t they bulky, and with crappy battery life? Not, apparently, the new Satchi BT Lite headphones, which – as the name suggests – are pretty “lite.”