USB - page 6

UPDATE: iLuv has since clarified the price of the RockWall to be $29.99, not $129.99. iLuv’s rep misspoke during our interview. For $29.99, including Apple charger compatible international plug adapters, this is a very good deal indeed.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – iLuv’s pretty much known for making button-cute accessories at super affordable prices, so when they broke out a mysterious, secret $129.99 device they were keeping away from prying eyes and not on display to the majority of the CES public, my eyes lit up. This must be something special, as awesome as it was a total bargain, even at that price.

“What does it do?” I asked earnestly. “Some sort of Bluetooth-enabled, app-controlled atom smasher? An iOS-compatible home Lasik kit? Is it GOD? Is God in that box?”

Nope. Meet iLuv’s seemingly inexplicable, $100+ USB wall charger.

It’s usually pretty hard to get excited about an Apple Dock Connector, but this one’s fantastic. It uses a Russian Nesting Doll style of cascading connections to fit a mini USB plug into a micro USB plug and then in turn into an Apple 40 pin dock connector plug. For just $20, then, this is literally the only USB cable you need. Awesome.

[via Everything USB]

Mac OS  X Lion introduced the world to FileVault 2 Apple’s solution to full disk encryption. It is one of my favorite features in Lion, and it is definitely a welcome addition to Mac OS X. Just about anyone can use it to encrypt the startup disk on their Mac, but more importantly, they can use it to encrypt their USB thumb drives and SD cards. Why is that important?

It is important because USB thumb drives and SD cards are small and easily lost. If they are encrypted, you don’t have to worry about whether the content they carry falls into the wrong hands.

Been holding out on buying Lion until you can get it on officially sanctioned physical media? According to 9to5Mac, Lion USB recover media is now available for fulfillment… an it’ll even be handed out free to those of us who aren’t able to use Lion’s built-in recovery tools to restore their hosed Macs.

Apple’s line of MacBook Airs never shipped with an optical drive and now the Mac Mini has joined the party. The new Mac Mini, released this week, no longer includes one of these drives either. If you want an optical drive to use with these Macs you have to purchase an external USB SuperDrive. Now the arrival of the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini herald the death of the USB thumb drive.

You might be surprised to find out that neither these systems ship with a set of  DVDs or a USB thumb drive that you can use to restore, repair or reinstall Mac OS X.

Instead Apple has come up with something new.

Apple finally launched OS X Lion today, and although the release will be exclusive to the Mac App Store initially, Apple has confirmed it will be available on a USB thumb drive for $69 in August.

Yes, that is a Parallels Desktop 6 USB stick jammed into a MacBook Pro’s ethernet port, as seen on the official Apple Store page. I wouldn’t give Apple (or Parallels, who likely supplied the image) too much guff about it, though: I’ve made the same mistake a couple of times myself.

[via OS X Daily]

Following its report yesterday that promises a thinner, lighter iPhone 5 by the end of this year, The Wall Street Journal now offers us some information on Apple’s 2012 iPhone, which it says will boast a whole “new way of charging.”

Like the brilliant Insight we reviewed a month or so ago, Belkin’s Conserve Valet comes form their new line of green-angled tools created with the idea of saving energy. Unlike the Insight, the Valet — a $40, four-port USB hub designed around the idea of smart organization and energy conservation — isn’t as well executed, and not nearly as effective.

Although Apple was the first company to debut Thunderbolt with the 2011 MacBook Pro refresh, Intel and Apple’s next-gen, one-port-to-rule-them-all is open to all takers. Already, though, one of Apple’s biggest competitors is rocking the Thunderboat, and threatening to fragment the Thunderbolt standard before it even has a chance to clear port.

Apple is working on a new dock connector for its devices that will boast high-speed connections including USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, according to a new patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday. Entitled “Reduced Size Multi-Pin Male Plug Connector,” the patent reveals a smaller 30-pin dock connector that will also feature a dual-lane DisplayPort.

Imagine this scenario: your Mac crashes and all of your files are gone forever. Do you want this to happen to you? If not, Time Machine is the perfect solution. It automatically backs up your Mac every hour, so you can always have the peace of mind that your files are safe. The video below describes how you can set up Time Machine quickly and easily.

The Swiftmouse is an innovation from New Zealand that aims to offer a decent mousing experience in a very small unit.

In that, they’ve certainly succeeded. Swiftmouse is absolutely tiny. measuring just two inches from front to back, an inch and a half tall, and the same distance across.

Tiny, but sculpted. The contours of the mouse have been carefully designed to fit the tips of your curved fingers, so that it nestles in place. Despite its size, it feels comfortable to hold in the hand and is well weighted.

Apple’s not ready to throw their hat into the USB 3.0 ring just yet. As Steve Jobs made abundantly clear in an email last week, Cupertino’s doesn’t see USB 3.0 taking off, at least until Intel starts officially supporting it… and evidence suggests that Apple might avoid USB 3.0 entirely in favor of Light Peak.

But what if you want USB 3.0 on your Mac now? Well, Apple’s not serving up official drivers yet, but LaCie’s stepping up to fill the void: they’ve just announced USB 3.0 drivers for their line of solutions.

To get USB 3.0 on your Mac, first you’ll need to buy one of LaCie’s cards: either a $49.99 USB 3.0 PCI Express Card or the $59.99 USB 3.0 ExpressCard/34, both of which will bring a couple of USB 3.0 (and backwards compatible USB 2.0) ports to your Mac Pro or MacBook. Then install the free driver and you’re ready to pick yourself up one of those blindingly flash USB 3.0 external drives that are all the rage right now.

Not a bad solution for Mac Pros, but ExpressCards can be fairly irritating to have hanging out of a MacBook, and obviously this won’t help you if you’ve got a MacBook Air, Mac mini or iMac. Still, if you’re committed to being on the cutting edge, LaCie’s happy to take your cash and make it happen.

If you’ve decided to pick up one of Apple’s miraculously thin new MacBook Airs, but have a large media or photo library, you’re probably going to have to pick up an external USB hard drive to go with it: those SSDs are blisteringly fast, yes, but they’re not exactly voluminous.

What external hard drive can match the Air’s resplendent svelteness, though? Try the Hitachi G-Drive Slim. It’s only 0.39 inches thick and clocks in at 320GB for $99.99. That’s not a lot of storage space for the price, but then again, neither is the Air.

Here at Cult of Mac, we love the crowd-sourced, gadget-creating think tank at Quirky.com, and their latest is a fantastic answer to the tangle of USB cables snaking out of the back of your iMac.

LaCie’s latest, the MosKeyTo thumb drive — get it? Har. — is a product that manages to pull off the nearly miraculous: it’s not only just 20mm long, or about the same size as the nanoreceiver of some wireless mice, but it’s actually garnered our interest enough to break our oath and yet again hit the keyboard to write something about the most boring species of gadget on earth: the USB storage dongle.

It’s not the specs, which are standard. It’s not the price: 4GB for $17.99, or 8GB for $27.99. It’s not even the drive’s tininess. No, we’re writing about it to call attention to the official product image above, featuring a giant mosquito wildly fornicating with its namesake on the lid of a MacBook Pro.

Congrats on catching our attention, LaCie! Time to give someone in your art department a raise.

As if the antenna and proximity sensor woes weren’t enough now we can add one other issue to the pile of iPhone 4 woes: catching fire. BGR reported today that one unlucky iPhone 4 owner ended up with a “fried iPhone 4” and a “slightly burned” hand.

According to the story the customer attempted to get help with the iPhone 4 by bringing it into a local store, but it was to far gone to be repaired. The incident occurred while the user was plugging the iPhone 4 into their computer using the Apple USB cable that came with it.  The conclusion was that the USB port on the iPhone 4  was probably defective and while the iPhone 4 suffered some damage the cable seems to have been damaged the most.

This isn’t the first time that an iDevice has caught fire, since 2009 there have been a number of reported incidents that included: an iPod Nano recall for faulty batteries (Apple eventually updated the battery warning on that recall) and an iPhone 3G also caught on fire ironically at the same spot as this years iPhone 4 — the USB port. Additionally in 2009 a Mac Laptop went up in flames.

While this could happen based on prior reports about the iPhone 3G and iPod Nano it isn’t likely going to happen to you. However, if you are overly worried about things like this then you might consider keeping a pair of oven mitts and a bucket of water (or chemical extinguisher per the comments) handy just in case.