There’s probably one single fact that’ll get you interested in the fancy Juicies Lightning cable:
That’s right – for just a dollar more you can have aluminum plugs and a corded fabric cable instead of plastic and… More plastic.
Until the Olloclip came along and changed iPhoneography forever, I got along with stick-on magnetic lenses for my iPad and iPhone. They work fine, as long as you don’t mind having to glue a metal washer around your iPhone’s lens, or Lining the lenses up to the iPhone camera’s own lens by eye, every time you either installed it or just knocked it.
The PhoGo case fixes this while adding a bunch of other neat iPhoneography features to your iPhone.
One of the main reasons I don’t use a case with my iPhone (except when testing for reviews) is that the iPhone 5 is so sleek and hot-looking that a case usually just fuglies everything up. Not so with Spigen’s Neo Hybrid, a case as handsome and slimline as the iPhone it protects.
Hey Strobists! Don’t you just hate the constant charging and swapping of batteries that your hobby/profession entails? What if I told you that you could ditch the AAs and instead use a li-ion battery pack that plugs straight into the external power-port of your flash, halves your recycle time and keeps going for way longer than your AAs?
You be interested, right? So what if I also told you that the graphics on the unit itself seem like they were ripped wholesale from the side of a 1980s arcade game cabinet, shrunk and stuck onto the Lumedyne X? Awesome, right? But there’s a problem.
The “Kúla Deeper” might sound like yet another technique ex-Policeman and legendary love-machine Sting has learned in order to drive the ladies wild, but it is in fact an add-on for any DSLR that makes shooting 3-D pictures and movies easy.
Yes, in theory those 3-D videos and pictures could be of Sting removing Roxanne’s red dress in slow motion, for eight hours at a time, but you could also use its powers for good.
The one thing I’ve never thought about my mouse is that it’s too thick, and yet here comes Logitech, fresh off its success with the Ultrathin Keyboard Cases for the iPad and iPad, making an Ultrathin Touch Mouse for your MacBook Air (or “Ultrabook,” as the gender-neutral marketing parlance has it).
Jeff Atwood (of Stack Overflow fame) decided that he needed a new keyboard for his coding adventures. So instead of just firing up the Amazon app and starting from there, he decided to make his own. And now you can buy it, too. It’s the CODE mechanical keyboard, and you can use it to clack away to yourself, silently and in the dark.
No messing around with iLuv’s new camera case for the iPhone 5. It’s called the Camera Case, and it turns your iPhone into a little Leica-alike.
“The Executive.” The very name brings to mind leather cellphone accessories, oversized black onyx desks and “business class” seats on a 737, which consist of a curtain between you and the oiks, an inch of extra legroom and a terrible, plastic-wrapped breakfast to shove into your gullet during the 25 minutes of non-restricted flight time.
And “The Executive” is also the name of a Bluetooth keyboard designed — presumably — for using in those cramped “business class” seats.
You know how when the iPhone first came out and people were all complaining about how you couldn’t take out the battery? I know, right? The market swiftly moved in to solve the “problem” by supplying battery packs that could be added only when you needed them, and without rebooting the phone to swap them, and in whichever sizes you needed.
Now we have come full circle, as they say, with the Mojo Refuel for iPhone 5. It’s an external battery pack which — get this — has its own removable battery.
Put your hands down on your keyboard. Now pick them up and rotate them as if you’re about to hold an iPad in landscape mode. Now imagine that you’re gripping a keyboard, and that the keys of that keyboard are around the back of the slab in your hand, running vertically under your fingers.
That’s how the TREWGrip was designed.
The second piece of Sony news today (along with the neat new NEX 5T) is the Alpha A3000, an SLR-style mirrorless camera for the crazy, crazy low price of $400. Take that, entry-level Canon Rebel bodies.
It’s actually pretty easy to shoot sneaky pictures of people using the iPhone. You can pretend you’re doing something else as you point the camera at your unwitting/unwilling subject, or you can just hold the iPhone up to your ear, walk past them and snap a picture using the volume button.
Now there’s a third way: the Smartphone Spy Lens, an add-on that lets you shoot sneaky shots at 90-degrees to the camera’s own axis.
RayFlash’s new ringflash adapter is called the Universal, and it is. Well, almost. There are actually two different sizes, so you’ll have to choose the “Universal” model that fits your camera.
I kid. Kinda. The Universal part of the name actually refers to the flash-hole, which can now accommodate pretty much any flashgun, not just the handful of Canon and Nikon strobes that the old RayFlash supported.
If you take a trip to the local laboratory supply store, and then follow it up by dropping into the vintage camera shop (or just a thrift store) then you could make your own beautiful lamp, just like those fashioned from dead photo gear by the Taiwanese Ystudio. It sure beats the usual crap you get from Ikea.
What the hell is wrong with wireless SD card makers? They manage to cram an entire Wi-Fi router into an SD card, along with the memory that’s already in there, and yet the software looks like they got their idiot cousin to write it in a weekend for like $100.
Toshiba’s FlashAir is a great example. The hardware is sound, and has some really great features. But the software is awful. Truly, breathtakingly terrible.
DJing (or is that deejaying?) on the iPad is pretty rad, but what do you do about cueing up the next track? If you’ve got $20 to spend, you can buy the Traktor DJ cable, a splitter that lets you cue a track with your headphones and play another through the speakers.
Remember those adapters that let you permanently flush-mount a microSD card in your MacBook Air’s SD card slot, adding welcome (if slow) extra storage to your SSD portable? I certainly do: I mixed up the two main brands when I wrote a review and never heard the last of it.
Now you can skip that extra step, because PNY now makes a sawed-off SD card that does the same job – without an adapter.
I saw a kid at the airport the other day, carrying a Fujifilm Instax camera, and I wondered what the hell kind of cruel trick her parents were playing on her. That thing is hideous.
But if she’d been carrying the new retro-style Instax Mini 90, I’d have been all “WTF?”
It’s almost instinctive these days for me to place my iPhone or iPad facing in in whatever bag or pocket I use, to protect its screen from bumps. But the new Portal series of bags from Osprey might just make it worth breaking the habit: The bags have a pocket at the front with a flap that opens to let you use your iPad without removing it from the bag.
Ever tried to snap a self portrait with your iPhone? And I mean a proper self-timer self portrait, not an arm-out-the-side-of-the-frame selfie. It’s almost impossible. First, you have to deal with the lack of a self timer on the iPhone. And second, you have to find somewhere to balance it.
What you need is Joby’s new MPod mini.
Every time I use my iPhone 5, I’m less and less convinced that it even needs a dock. It’s far easier to use the phone when it’s laying flat on my desk than when it’s propped up at a steep angle. The only place I’d like one is on my nightstand, and as I don’t have a nightstand that option is out. However, many people want docks, and of these many of them keep their iPhones in fat, ugly protective cases. The Sarvi Dock is for them.
In camera years[1], Canon’s G-Series is now drawing a pension and should really be scratching out a will. And when a product line is so successful and so mature, it gets hard to improve on it. The G15 had a big sensor, a fast ƒ1.8 lens and a handy front control dial, as well as all the rugged capability that made the G-Series last this long.
The new G16 adds very little, but it get one hugely handy update: Wi-Fi.
Protex’s new iPad case is a big improvement on the original – aesthetically, at least. The folks at Higher Ground (the company that makes the Protex) sent me the original and I couldn’t bring myself to review it as it looked like a rubber boot with a stripper’s underwear sewn to the back.
The new one keeps the rugged design, but swaps out the stretchy, satiny X on the back for a cross-shaped silicone grip.
Remember the Area Ware wooden iPhone dock concept that we saw back in May? No, neither do I, a problem not helped by the fact that Google insists on searching for “are aware” when I tap in “Area Ware”. Either way, that neat design has been, uh, redesigned and can now be almost bought: it’ll be shipping on November 1st.
