News - page 19

This small Bluetooth speaker looks remarkably like the iconic Jawbone Jambox, arguably the most popular ultra-portable Bluetooth speaker on the market right now. And just like the Jambox, it can be used to stream music and make calls. It even comes in what looks like the same colors — or very similar colors — the Jambox comes in.

But look more closely, and you’ll see small cosmetic differences — because this isn’t the Jambox. It’s the Urge Basics Sound Brick, and it has one very big difference with the Jambox: it’s less than one-third the price.

We say “might,” because we haven’t tested it yet; but sandwiched between the hard exterior shell of Incase’s new Chisel case and the iPhone it protects is a second, soft case with a secret ingredient called Poron XRD — a material we’ve found almost unbelievably excellent at absorbing impact energy.

Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.

Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.

It had to happen eventually: Photoshop for your phone. As of today you can buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – It’s not all announcements of exciting new Android handsets with fractionally faster processors here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Oh no. You’ll also find rose-tinted spectacles. Yes, Elecom – maker of some of the most accessorial iAccessories ever – now makes some specs that will stop your eyes from being ruined – ruined! – by blue light.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Excito is an AppleTV-a-like puck which hooks up to your home network and lets you stream TV, music and movies to any stereo or screen in the house.

So what, right? The Apple TV already does that? The difference is that the Excito only uses your phone as a remote, and streams the content either direct from the internet, or from your own local media server. Oh, and it costs around half the price if the already-cheap Apple TV.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Here’s something I wish would come to a future iPhone, or — even better — an iPad: e-ink. Imagine being able to switch to an e-ink version of the tablet and read in bright sunlight. Or turn off the various radios and enjoy a battery life measured in months, not hours.

That’s what the e-ink phone can do.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS –

RadBlocker might sound like some lame anti-skateboarding device from the 1980s, but it is in fact an Israeli company dedicated to keeping your brains unscrambled. And nestled amongst its RF-denying belt holsters (for Dad!) and laptop trays is this amazing pair of headphones: Echo Tubez.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Pssst… don’t tell anyone, but I just saw Mophie’s new Juicepack Air for the iPhone 5. After months of abusive complaints in forum and comment threads the world over, the Air is now finally… almost… available for the slim new iPhone.

Maybe you’ve never played what is, inarguably, the best series of empire-building games ever created, and want to see what all the fuss is about. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to try that Vikings expansion pack. If any of the above fit, now is the time: Aspyr has cut the prices of all their Civilization titles by half to coincide with the release of the Civilization V: Gold Edition.

The French have a history of coming up with some pretty fascinating ideas. Some don’t work out too well. Some are ingeneous. The VEA Buddy watch looks like it fits in the latter category. What makes it different than the deluge of other smartwatches that have recently arrived: It might actually be brilliantly (French word, by the way) practical.

Every time I even go near a computer on a desk my wrists lock up and my carpal tunnels tighten. Still, even I can appreciate the amazing versatility and capacious storage power of this fully operational My Writing Desk, a beautiful plywood and fiberboard confection from etc.etc. designs.

There’s this really cool, funny, slick video made by a bunch of Israelis called Sight, in which a guy walks around in a world where everything he sees is overlayed by augmented reality. Everything. All the time. Sounds far-fetched? Not so much anymore.

Today, Metaio announced that their new augmented-reality chip, called the Metaio AREngine, will make its debut in ST-Ericsson phones — in a handset(s) that may be available to the public as soon as the end of this year, or early 2014 if things move more slowly.

Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company, has a rather neat take on Instagram-style retrification filters. Instead of releasing yet another photo-filtering app, Ray-Ban’s Ambermatic actually shoots your photos through a real pair of Ambermatic shades.

Is it just me, or have SLR cameras gotten really boring in the last few years? I mean, I know they’re awesome machines and all, but they don’t do anything new. And all the while the rest of the camera world is pulling farther and farther ahead.

The iPhone in my pocket not only takes photos, it edits movies and shares my pictures with the world, wherever I am. And Sony’s incredible RX1 is pretty much a full-frame SLR in the body of a pocket camera.

Meanwhile, cameras like Nikon’s new D7100 would have been impressive a few years ago, but now they’re just that same old thing, with some bigger numbers on the spec sheet.

Flickr’s iOS app, which pretty much relaunched the company into mobile after years of creeping neglect, has gotten a pretty significant update. No, it has’t yet gotten an iPad-native version, but you will like the new features nonetheless.

Like the Plantronics Voyager Legend we reviewed a few months ago, Jabra’s new folding-boom Motion series incorporates motion sensors — so they can do things like automatically answer calls when you place the headset to your ear, and even automatically adjust the volume.

About a month ago, right after the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Disney held a small, invitation-only press conference in Los Angeles where they revealed their ambitious, stunning new cross-platform Infinity game universe. They invited us, of course. Only problem was, Infinity had practically nothing to do with anything Apple.

After all the fanfare, when the event was almost over, I pulled aside one of the Disney folks and asked why the heck they’d invited me; turns out iOS is why I was there, and that they had a big mobile-related announcement coming — and this picture just might be its enigmatic messenger.

Having all but dumped my iPad for an iPad mini, I’m now back in the bag dating pool, searching for the perfect match for my little friend and his favorite accessories.

The Polly bag certainly isn’t that perfect match – it’s a girls’ bag and it’s for the big, ugly retina iPad – but when it turned up on my dating radar I figured that it’s totally worth a look.

Everpix is my new favorite photo app. Or rather, photo service. Grab the apps for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and PC and Everpix will upload all your photos (except screenshots) to its servers and then perform some special magic upon them. For instance, the Highlights view will only show you the very best of your pictures. It’s pretty neat.

ECBC’s new range of roll-along luggage packs a rather neat feature: a battery pack which will charge your gadgets as you travel.

Did you ever paint miniatures when you were kid? Or as my mother called them, “toy soldiers,” even though they were obviously space marines and orcs. Did you ever wish you could also design the plastic or lead models underneath your amazing ink-wash and dry-brushing technique?

Then – if you also dreamed of never getting a lick of paint on your thumb ever again – I have just the app for you. It’s from the awesome boffins at Sketchbook, and it’s called 123D Creature.

Everything has a downside. As Macs grab more market share, we’re beginning to see developers take the Mac more seriously (witness AutoCAD returning to the Mac after an 18-year absence, and the resurgence of Mac gaming). Unfortunately, Macs are also beginning to find themselves more often in the crosshairs of hackers and virus developers.

So it’s no surprise that there’s a flurry of activity on the antivirus front. In fact, one of the clearest signs that viruses have become a real danger for Macs is that Intego says they’ve revamped their line in order to make it less expensive and less technical, and more user-friendly for everyday Mac users.

That’s what CamFind‘s developers are claiming — that the app is at least four times more accurate than Google Goggles at recognizing and then searching for the subject of a photo you’ve taken with your iPhone.

If you’re unfamiliar with the two-year-old Google Goggles function (integrated within the Google Search app) the idea is pretty simple. Just snap a photo with your iPhone, and the app tries to recognize what you’ve taken a photo of. Once identified, you can then initiate a Google search for that item.

MacPhun makes a boatload of photo editing apps for iOS and the Mac; for the next two days, their meat & potatoes Mac app, FX Photo Studio, is half off at $10.