Reviews - page 120

The Patagonia MiniMass commuter bag ($69) is my first taste of Patagonia’s gear, and I’ve always wondered if their stuff was worth the hype. The company has a bit of a reputation — perhaps fair, perhas not — as the outdoor industry’s bourgeois player, probably due to generally higher prices than the competition, an innovative design ethic and the use of green materials throughout their line.

But Patagonia has also spawned a fanatical following. I once worked with someone who literally camped outside the company’s Southern California headquarters (it sits literally right aross the road from the beach) in the hopes she’d be hired. She wasn’t, but toting around my tablet in the the fantastic little MiniMass let me grasp why she tried.

The MiniMass is the smallest sibling in Patagonia’s family of courier bags (all of which end in “Mass” — a nod to the Critical Mass bicycle movement). This makes the MiniMass a perfect tablet carrier. And even though it isn’t explicitly to ferry tablets, it excels in the task.

Going down a storm on the App Store this week is the brand new version of Crazy Taxi from Sega. Yes, it’s just like Crazy Taxi you used to play a decade ago. And that’s a good thing.

There’s been a lot of hoopla today about Rockmelt, a free new iPad app for browsing the web. Everyone keeps calling Rockmelt a browser, but I disagree. This is not what I call a browser. It’s a feed reader.

The Don’t Panic case is like a pair of comfy slippers for your iPad. As the name suggests, just using it is relaxing, the iPad-acessory equivalent of a valium or a well-mixed Old Fashioned at the end of a long day.

The floppy felt and leather sleeve is also a little like your embarrassing uncle. He has some horrible habits, and annoys you to death some times, but you can’t help loving him despite his foibles.

This is Dolphin. It’s a neat web browser for iPhone. You could easily be forgiven for saying: “What’s the point of having an extra browser? Mobile Safari does everything I need.”

Which is true. Safari does everything you need. But try Dolphin for just a few minutes, and you’ll discover a browser that does everything you need but in a totally different way. A way that’s much better suited to using on your phone while you’re moving around.

I’ve been messing about with this new app, called Listen, on my iPhone 5 for a little while, after the developer hit me up on Twitter about it. Now, I’m not able to jump on on every app, Mac or iOS, that someone asks me to look at, but I gave this one a look-see. Turns out, it’s a pretty neat little app, which does exactly what its name says it does.

Multi-touch? Pah, that’s so last year. Gestures are where it’s at. Only yesterday, we reported on a prototype wrist-mounted motion detector; today, we’re trying out Flutter, a free OS X app that we first mentioned back in March when it was still a demo.

Now it’s available in the Mac App Store. It claims to put gesture controls at your, um, fingertips, using your Mac’s built-in webcam.

Does it live up to the hype? Well, sometimes.

The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues.  If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.

Back in early April, I got to review the Retrospective 5 messenger-style camera bag from Think Tank Photo.

I loved it.

But you know how it is; using something for several months offers a lot more perspective than merely reviewing it for one or two weeks. So I decided to give the Think Tank Retrospective 5 another look, and with six months of use under my belt, I’m ready to tell you how it’s really performed.

MonoPhix is a two-dollar black-and-white photography app for iPhone, with a separate companion MonoPhix HD version for iPad. Although it produces good results, MonoPhix suffers from some odd design choices that make it a disappointing and frustrating experience.

Text editor groupies of the world, gather round. I have something new to show you.

Clean Writer Pro is a newcomer to the OS X text scene, and offers a lot of the basics for a very good price: and right now, it’s on sale for a dollar.

Headquake is a music sound enhancement app for iOS. It claims to “flat narrow sounds to an enormous yet perfectly balanced 3D Sound experience surrounding your head.” But hearing, like music, is a very individual thing, and Headquake’s efforts aren’t always much of an enhancement.

We don’t often praise Microsoft here at Cult of Mac, but with this game they’ve got almost everything right. It’s a cool action-adventure romp with great visuals and a sense of humor. The only thing that leaves me boggling is the ridiculous name: “Tentacles: Enter the Dolphin.” I beg your pardon?

As a gadget reviewer, I go through a lot of shipped packages. Which means I have to deal with a logistical nightmare second only to the Allied supply lines following the D-Day landings (except my packages tend to be, for the most part, somewhat less liable to explode or cause diarrhea). But that’s OK — I have a secret weapon to help keep everything straight.

Junecloud‘s Deliveries Status ($5) tracks shipments in a wonderfully simple, easy-to-read, straightforward manner; and like many of Apple’s own products, it just works.

There’s not a lot I need say about today’s Best Thing Ever, so I’ll keep it brief.

Manga Camera does exactly what its name suggests, and it’s no surprise that it’s a sudden huge hit on the iOS App Store.

You wait for ages for a calculator, then two come along at once. Following on from Sums which we reviewed the other day, here’s Calculator LCD, a smart-looking one dollar desktop-style calculator for iPad.

The Cygnett Lavish from MobileFun is a genuine leather flip case for iPhone 5 that contains a plastic snap-on shell that houses your device. It boasts a magnetic closure, and a card slot that will comfortable house one or two credit cards without adding too much bulk to your pocket.

The Lavish provides access to all of your ports and buttons, and can be folded back to expose your iPhone’s rear-facing camera. It comes in black or “regatta blue,” and it’s priced at $41 (£30).

It’s not the cheapest iPhone 5 case, then, but is it worth it?

New from Tapbots is Netbot, an iOS client for app.net users.

If you’ve used Tweetbot, you already know how to use Netbot. It looks almost identical to its precursor, and behaves almost identically too.

Co-inciding with her latest TV series, Nigella Lawson’s latest foodie app, Nigellissima is now on the App Store. The theme is simple, delicious Italian food. Nigella, as always, makes amazing dishes look effortless.

The new app is free, but huge, demanding 750MB of storage space on your iOS device. That would be OK if it was packed with useful content. But it’s not.

Sums is a gesture-based calculator for iOS, and whether you like it will, I suspect, largely depend on how much you’re already accustomed to using traditional calculators.

Brian Eno has a new app out. It’s called Scape. Like other apps he’s produced, it’s about making music – even for people who have no musical skill or knowledge whatsoever.

Phiaton’s new Moderna MS 200 earphones ($149) sound good and have great sound isolation, sure, but what’s more important is how good they look plugged in to your new iPhone 5.

Screen protectors aren’t sexy or glamorous. They’re like condoms: prophylactics for your smartphone screen that are difficult to put on correctly, feel worse than going bareback, and are just disgusting totems to the shame and filth of your lifestyle when greasily wadded up and hurled into the nearest waste basket.

The only thing I hate more than screen protectors is watching the inevitable patina of nicks and scratches milkily cloud up my iPhone screen. Over the years, I’ve tried a bunch of iPhone screen protectors, from the inevitable Invisible Shield to the PureTek Roll-On. Last year, though, I finally found my favorite screen protector for the iPhone 4S: the Spigen Glas.t, a sheet of 0.4mm tempered glass that not only is easy to apply, but feels just the same as riding your iPhone bareback.

Now the iPhone 5 is here, and Spigen has released a new, longer GLAS.t to match the new iPhone’s longer dimensions. For my money, just like its predecessor, this is the only screen protector you should even bother with.

There’s an important list every serious outdoor junkie has at least heard of — it’s called the Ten Essentials, and it lists gear no adventurer should journey into the wilds without. But it was codified long before the digital age arrived; now that power-hungry electronic gadgets are a part of adventuring, a relaible backup fuel tank is pretty important. It could even make the difference between life and death.

That’s where Mophie’s Juice Pack Powerstation Pro ($130) comes in. It’s a monstrous 6000 mAh chunk of a battery guarded by a ruggedized, military-spec housing — and it’ll charge practically anything short of a laptop.

The Belkin Grip Sheer, provided by the fine folks at MobileFun, is an iPhone 5 case manufactured from thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) that promises to be “super durable, yet thin enough to slip easily into your pocket.”

Priced at just $21 (£16), the Grip Sheer comes in a range of fancy colors, and boasts a high-gloss transparent finish that’s designed to look good and feel great. It also provides you with access to all your buttons and ports, and leaves a nice big cutout for your iPhone 5’s camera and flash.

So, is the Grip Sheer a case you should be picking up with your new iPhone 5?