Meet Nick. Nick D’Aloisio. He’s 17, lives in London, and his new news app Summly is attracting quite a lot of interest over in the UK. It seems to me that most of the media coverage is because of Nick’s age than the app he’s created. So let’s take a closer look at that app and see what all the fuss is about.
We’ve mentioned Apparent’s Doxie Go portable document scanner a few times in the past. The flexible, battery-powered scanner is a trusty tool for any mobile professional; anything fed into its maw can be turned into 300 dpi images on a Mac, iPad, the cloud — or Doxie can simply keep the scanned images for later download.
The new Doxie One, unveiled today, comes without the $200 Doxie Go’s rechargeable lithium battery — but at $150, it’s also considerably cheaper.
I have a plan for trouble. When it rears its ugly head again, I’m grabbing my all-hell-has-broken-loose list, dumping the items on the list into my trusty backpack and hauling ass. I figure there’s still the zombie apocalypse and the Mayan whatsit (which may well be the same thing) to worry about, so I might as well be prepared.
I’ve populated the list with things I would need in a disaster scenario: things like a sleeping bag, first-aid kit and rum. Of course, my iPad is also on the list. Oh, I’ll be taking my phone for sure — but the iPad’s large screen will be invaluable in any disaster situation as a navigation tool, for work (yes, even in a zombie apocalypse, blogs must be updated) or just keeping up with current news; mine’s a wifi+cellular, so I suppose wifi-only versions would be somewhat less useful in that last role.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “A disaster zone, Eli, is no place for an iPad.” That’s true only if you don’t have the right gear to accompany it. The following list will show you how to turn your iPad from a liability into an asset when things go very wrong.
With the holidays coming, maybe there’s no such thing as “too many photobook makers.” At least, that’s probably what Mixbook is banking on with their new Mosaic app, which lets you quickly create a hard-cover photobook for $20.
This one’s a little different though: Not only can you create and order your photobook with your iPhone, but the books are created with an unusual effect where photo thumbnails peek through windows in the book’s cover. Definitely attention-grabbing.
Paper is an iPad app which proves that you don’t need to add bells and whistles to your software if it’s well designed. Unless your app is a bell and whistle simulator, I guess.
But Paper, which won fans with its ultra-simple interface and amazingly natural brush-and-paint engine, really was a little too stripped down. The new v1.2.1 fixes that, adding custom color palettes and a very sweet new color mixer, plus support for a pressure-sensitive stylus.
Quick test: see if you can guess what the following product does, just by decoding its cryptic name. Ready?
Belkin NetCam Wi-Fi with Night Vision
The iPhone 5 is the best camera Apple has ever made (OK, maybe the second-best), so why not dress it like one of the best film cameras ever made?
That’s just what PetaPixel’s Leica skin will do, turning your long, thin iPhone into a long, thin fake rangefinder.
It turns out that the iPad Mini is the first Apple mobile device to ship with stereo speakers. Although Apple’s product page only mentions a “built-in speaker,” the two grilles on the new iPad’s bottom edge do in fact contain separate stereo speakers.
Unshielded, shoddily built and as close to dangerous junk as you can get without actually being dangerous. Today, this description happens to apply to these knock-off Lightning adapters from China, but it could equally describe any cheap no-name Chinese electronic accessories.
How does the new iPod Touch’s 5MP camera size up to the iPhone 4’s low-light-loving 8MP monster? IMore’s Leanna Lofte decided to find out, pitting the cameras head-to-head in a rather extensive test. The short form: if you were thinking of buying the iPhone 5 just for the camera, you could probably save yourself some money.
I give great, fluid, professional-appearing speeches. Put me up in front of a crowd and I’ll crow on all day log, with nary a stammer nor a hesitation. The problem? I have nothing to say.
Other people actually have interesting information to convey, and yet they’re scared stiff of public speaking. Speeches app is here to help. It won’t boost your confidence, but it will help you to remember what you’re supposed to be talking about.
Lookout is like Apple’s Find My iPhone app, only it adds a whole bunch of extra features. It’ll let you track your lost phone from any web browser, even when the battery has dies (kinda), and it also adds a slew of features that only the dumbest of people will need.
The Kindle Fire/Fire HD and Nexus 7 have given birth to a small, yet powerful, sub-category of affordable 7-inch tablets. One that has been slowly eating away at a market that has been dominated by the much larger Apple iPad. To battle this growing trend, Apple decided to break down — after vowing to never to make a 7-inch tablet — and create a smaller version of their highly successful iPad line. Apple’s iPad Mini may not be a 7-inch tablet (it’s 7.9-inches), but it’s clear Apple’s intentions are to disrupt the sales of those pesky 7-inch competitors out there who keep chipping away at their market share.
Earbuds and sunglasses, two things that sit up on your head and hang from your ears. If only there was some way to combine the two…
Oakley tried it some years ago with the Thump, which resulted in one of the most hideous product designs ever conceived — if H.R Giger had re-imagined between-toe fungus as an alien growth across your eyes and temples, it would have looked like the Thump.
Luckily, Sanpei Optics has come to the rescue with this gadget, which takes a normal-looking pair of shades and a normal-looking set of earbuds and simply sticks them together.
Google’s updated search app adds lightning-fast voice-controlled search, just like you get on Android. It’s simple, impressively fast and will run on just about any iDevice you might have, not just the latest hardware.
But it has a long way to go to compete with Siri.
There’s never been a better time to get fit, thanks to the wealth of fitness tracker options available to work with your iPhone. That’s not strictly true — first, it’s always a good time to get fit. And second, the more choices there are for fitness trackers, the more opportunity there is for procratination.
Still, the Striiv is a welcome addition.
Office Drop is kind of like a mission-specific Dropbox. It comes with Mac and iOS clients, and lets you upload and share your various documents between them. However, it has one big stinking extra which could be amazingly useful to some people: It performs automatic OCR (optical character recognition) on your stored documents.
Purple Haze, is in my brain… Ah, sorry. Just singing a little Hendrix there. But — completely coincidentally — this next app brings purple haze correction to the iPhone. If you want to listen to Jimi Hendrix songs as if played on an un-amplified classical guitar, then this may be the app for you.
Just Mobile’s new Alurack is a clever solution to the question “Where do I put my stupid MacBook while I’m using it with an external monitor?”
The Alurack’s answer is “Hang it,” either from the back of a Cinema Display or from your iMac.
Just when you thought an iPhone or iPad dock had been built into every possible household object, here comes the iRocking Chair. In looks, it's a pretty traditional rocker, but it has some surprises built in. Not least is the fact that it can charge an iPad 3.
Calling the new Livescribe Sky a pen is like calling your iPhone 5 a phone. Technically the Sky is a writing instrument, but it has about as much in common with a pen as your iPhone has with an old rotary dial telephone.
The Sky lets you write and draw on paper, and it then uploads your notes wirelessly (no computer required) to your Evernote account. From there you can immediately access them from your iPad, iPhone, Mac or any device with a browser.
Now that Google has unveiled its Trifecta of Nexus devices, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed. I can’t exactly pin-point why I feel this way, but alas, I do. Perhaps my perception of what a Nexus device should represent has become misguided. I’m not sure when I began to expect more than just a Vanilla experience, but the latest batch of Nexus devices has knocked me back to the reality that “Nexus” means nothing more than having an untainted Android OS with certain end-user freedoms and timely updates.
I’m not going to write up every single photo gadget that gets updated for the iPhone 5 (I’ll stop when Olloclip ships an updated version of its clip-on accessory lens, I promise). But as iPhone 5 gear is as thin on the ground as the iPhone 5 is thin in your hand, then the new Holga Filter Case is worth a mention — not least because is also gets a new color.
These gorgeous wooden iPhone 5 cases come from the U.K, and look like they’d cost you an absolute fortune. Amazingly, for something hand-crafted and exquisitely designed, they cost just £35, or $56. Sure, it ain’t cheap, but neither is it crazy.
I will be ordering a Button 2.0 for every single one of my shirts. I will even be sewing them onto my t-shirts in order to make them more useful. Why? As you can see in the image above, Button 2.0 is a simple upgrade to boring old Button 1.0 which turns it into a grippy place to clip your iPhone’s headphone cable.