gadgets - page 10

Back in the 1980s, and probably continuing into the 1990s, every neat gadget was shoehorned into a credit-card-shaped form factor. Magnifying glass? Credit-card-sized. Vinyl record de-duster? Credit-card-sized. And so on.

The Jumper Card continues this excellent heritage by putting a Lightning charger, a 30-pin dock connector and a microUSB charger into the same credit-card-sized package, ready to be slipped into your pocket. But not your wallet, because, like all “credit-card-sized” gadgets, this one is way too thick.

Castello Davarg’s latest hot leather case is the Heming for iPad, an upgraded, redesigned version of its excellent iPhone case. It comes in iPad mini and iPad Air flavors, and is surprisingly full-featured for what looks at fist glance like a plain folio sleeve.

If you have a nerd in your life, and you need to get him/her a gift anytime soon, then your search is over. Go buy them the new Lomo Konstruktor Super Kit, the “directors cut” of the original build-it-yourself plastic film camera kit that now contains not one, not two but three lenses, plus a proper viewfinder.

I saw the Oaxis InkCase at the Mobile World Congress last week, and it looks pretty neat. The v2 “case” is actually an e-ink panel that connects to the iPhone (or other device) via Bluetooth and can show anything on its e-ink screen. The new version is modular, so you can slip in into any case for any device, and even mount it, say, on the handlebars of a bike for a sunlight-friendly readout.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the themes were – as we expected – waterproof phones, smart-watches and NFC (again). Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 was a high-profile example of the waterproof trend, and the company also showed its new Galaxy Gear watch, which looks pretty neat for a giant wrist-screen. And NFC is in every Android handset these days.

But how do these themes relate to the iPhone and iPad? Let’s think about that.

You can now double the storage space of your MacBook Air by jamming Sandisk’s new 128GB microSD card into an adapter in the SD card slot. Or you can slide it into any number of devices that use the pink-nail-sized storage standard. And if you are using it in a phone or a camera, it’s fast enough to capture HD video recorded straight to the card.

Fujifilm has announced the Instax SP–1 mobile printer at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. It’s a wireless, battery powered number that spits out 3×2 prints, and is controlled by an app on your iPhone (or Android device).

And while it looks pretty neat, if you can do without the battery power then I have a much better recommendation.

Satechi’s new F1 Smart Monitor Stand really is smart, apart from the name which almost had me tossing it into the email trash because I thought it was a car-themed novelty accessory.

In reality, it’s a little stand for your iMac or your Cinema Display, only it comes with a built-in USB hub with headphone and microphone ports. WHY HAS NOBODY THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE?

Black-ash finish? Check. Big four-inch woofer? Check. Plenty of knobs and dials and even a built-in screen? Check, check, check! If you were to glance sideways at the Grace Encore (GDI-IRC7500) Stereo System whilst simultaneously taking some experimental military drug that altered your perception of time, you’d think that the Encore was from the 1980s.

How about an iPad accessory so dorky, so unashamedly utilitarian that even the Android-using Killian Bell just dared me to wear one around this year’s Mobile World Congress? Interested? Good. It’s the Survivor Harness from Griffin, and it is so named becasue if you wear it, you’ll struggle to survive the taunts and humiliation it will surely bring.

The BluCub is a lot like the Tempo pebble I reviewed a few weeks back, only instead of measuring just temperature, it also measures humidity, adding another feather to your home-weather-station cap. If you wear a cap and put a feather in it when you buy a Bluetooth sensor, that is.

Rapoo’s new E2700 looks to be the perfect companion for my iMac, which is sat on a desk at a suspiciously convenient distance from the sofa in my office, letting me kick back and be amazed by episodes of True Detective and, uh, The Mentalist. Aside from being a regular keyboard with all the usual media keys, it also packs a trackpad on the rightmost end, so you can play/pause those annoying browser video players that don’t respond to the spacebar.

Hey, owners of the Best Camera Ever™ who want to use a 50mm equivalent once in a while – I have some good news for you. Fujifilm is set to release a 50mm adapter for the X100S, letting you use this classic “standard” lens focal length.

Tivoli has long made great-looking, full-toned radios and speakers with a distinctly classic style, and the new Model Three doesn’t change any of that. But there’s one addition which is distinctly modern. The nine-year old design now comes with Bluetooth.

The Togo Dock is a new pocket-sized iPhone dock from the makers of the Une Bobine, the super-successful “handy bendy iPhone-holding snake.” The new gadget is as simple as can be: it’s a little plastic reel with a magnet on the back, which turns a lightning cable into an iPhone dock that can be stuck to anything – as long as it’s made of ferrous metal.

Here’s a neat take on the small pocket strobe or flash. Instead of forcing you to buy and manage the charging of a ton of AA batteries to use it, the Neewer TT850 is a hot-shoe strobe that uses a 12-volt li-ion battery. This not only makes charging easier, but also means you get a lot more pops per second thanks to the fact that the battery can dump 12V instead the flash instead of the paltry 6V that 4xAAs can manage.

When Heidi from Waterfield Bags wrote to tell me about the Rough Rider, I had no choice but to write about it. It’s called the Rough Rider after all, which pretty much means I can make as many “going commando” and “bareback” jokes as I like.

It’s almost too easy.

If you Google Cult of Mac for “minimal iPhone case” you get a lot of results (too many, in fact, including a Mac-only music app – nice job Google). But you should ignore every last one of them, becasue the Bumprz really is a “case” so tiny you almost can’t see it.

Canon’s new G1 X Mark II brings good news and bad news. The bad news is that it ditches the optical viewfinder that has been found on G-series compacts like forever. The good news is that it adds a faster lens, better manual controls, a flip-up touch-screen LCD panel, Wi-Fi and NFC.

So, on balance, not so bad.

If Indiana Jones carried an iPad, he’d carry it in the Outback Solo. It’s a beautiful, tough waxed-canvas and leather number, with a padded lining for an iPad, pockets on the front for an iPhone and a wallet or a charger, a little loop on the front for handing your whip and a leather flap that closes with a magnetic clasp to keep out snakes. It’s pretty great.

How hot is Sigma’s new DP2 Quattro camera? [Licks fingertip, mimes touching object, makes “tssss” sound with mouth.] That hot! The crazy-looking new camera not only has a whacked-out body design that looks like it’d be real comfy to hold, it has a crazy new take on Sigma’s already weird Foveon sensor inside.

The FAVI may look kind of dumb, but I have a use-case for it right now: Whenever I play music or podcasts in my kitchen, I use a Bluetooth speaker. This means first getting the speaker to talk to the iPhone, and then it means finding a safe spot in the kitchen where my iPhone won’t get killed by spills.

The FAVI solves both these problems, by being a stand which connects wirelessly to your iPhone when you set it down on the cradle.

If you’re going to stick your beautifully slimline iPhone inside and external battery case, then why not make it a battery case with wireless charging built in? That’s the thinking behind the new Unu Aero case, a slimline (15mm) case that doubles the battery life of your iPhone 5, and frees you from ever plugging it in ever again.

You know how it goes: you and your adventure buddies are standing around in the middle of the arctic, or atop a high-altitude jungle, and you’re all bored stiff. The campfire is burning down, you’ve all told your best ghost stories, and all you want to do it Tweet that awesome photo you just took of a penguin kissing a polar bear.

What’s the answer? The Iridium Go!, a kind of satellite MiFi that brings a data and voice connection down from the heavens and shares it between up to five devices via Wi-Fi. Never suffer the boredom of nature again.

We’ve seen several horn speakers here on Cult of Mac, and made at least as many schoolboyish horn jokes. But to my knowledge this is the first speaker that looks like an acoustic amplifying horn, but is in fact just a regular novelty speaker. It’s also probably the only gadget we’ve featured that has “trendy” as a bullet point on its feature list.

And finally, it looks like a snail.