Hasta La Gadget!

Mobile accessory manufacturer Innopocket launched today its Hexapose Stand for Apple’s infamous iPad. For $49.99 the stand allows you to treat your iPad as if it were an iMac. Well, you could pretend it’s as powerful as an iMac all you like, just expect to be waiting for a good amount of years.

My attempts to live with an iMac were met with nothing but grief. I needed a rebound relationship—a total opposite to the prudish minimalism of Apple design—a bad girl with unnervingly fast tendencies. More »

It’s fairly safe to say that DMC Worldwide’s Copia e-reader family won’t exactly make that estimated Spring 2010 ship date, but a new report over at The Wall Street Journal is cluing us in on a bit of a revised outlook. As of now, the first Copia suite of e-readers will “hit stores this fall in time for the holiday season,” a suite that’ll presumably include the 5-inch color (LCD) Wave 5 for $99, a 7-inch Wave 7 for $129, a 10-inch Ocean Color for $299 and a pair of E Ink-based options for $49 (Tidal) / $159 (Tidal WiFi). It doesn’t seem as if the two Waves will include any sort of wireless connectivity, and given the LCD display, we’re sure that battery life will be nowhere near as good as the marginally-more-expensive Kindle. That said, the user interface does look rather striking from afar, and if these manage to slip a bit further in price before that magical day in December, you could very well see a rush to stuff stockings with a member of this here family. Give those links below a poke if you’re on the prowl for more detailed specifications.

DMC’s 5-inch Copia color e-reader landing this fall for $99, others to follow originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The FridgePad is billed as the “ultimate fridge magnet”. I’d say it’s probably the ultimate anything. Think about it. Even with my obviously awesome “Waterproof, Kitchen-Proof iPad Case” (a ziploc bag), your iPad still gets in harms way in the kitchen. The FridgePad fixes this by mounting the iPad up where nature intended: on the front of the refrigerator.

Made of aluminum with a big old magnet on the back to keep it firmly stuck to the fridge, the FridgePad holds the iPad with four plastic corner clips. Once secured to the door of the smallest and coldest room in the house, you can use the iPad to play music, podcasts or audiobooks, show you recipes or, well, anything the iPad can do. The more I think about it, the more it is clear how perfect the iPad is as a kitchen computer. And if you’re really messy when you cook, you could even slip the whole rig, magnet and all, into the ziploc bag and just slap that onto the refrigerator.

The stand will cost £50 ($78) when it ships, and will be available through Amazon. There’s no word yet on a launch date, but you can sign up for email alerts on the product site. In the meantime, I have a feeling that a trip to the hardware store is in order.

FridgePad [Woodford Design via CrunchGear]

See Also:

• Endo: Finally, A Useful Fridge Magnet
• Vista Fridge Magnet Completely Misses the Point
• How-To: Gorillapod Doubles as Awesome iPad Stand
• How-To Make a Waterproof, Kitchen-Proof iPad Case and Stand …

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You will not be surprised that the porn industry is all over the iPhone 4 like a bad case of the clap. The latest business opportunity is, almost inevitably, FaceTime, although it probably won’t actually be called Face Time.

In the U.K., the ever-accurate Daily Mail reports that “video-sex chat services […] are hiring workers through internet adverts.” These services would connect you one-on-one with the sex worker of your choice.

It’s a great idea. Because FaceTime is Wi-Fi only, you won’t be surprised at the end of the month by huge and scary charges on your phone-bill. Another advantage is that, because it won’t work over 3G, it’s unlikely that the person on the plane next to you will be indulging. A phone would also seem to be the perfect place for this most personal kind of entertainment. As Quentin Boyer of adult production company Pink Visual told the Mail: “A phone is such an intimate thing, you usually don’t lend it out or have someone else use it.” At least not without cleaning it first, we hope.

It’s often said that the porn industry drives technical innovation, but it might be more accurate to say that it is the ultimate early adopter. People scoffed at the idea of smut on cellphones until the iPhone made it easy to browse the web and the number of mobile porn sites took off. And the iPad, a device ridiculed for its lack of Adobe’s Flash plug-in, has seen adult video sites rushing to re-encode their catalogs in the iPad-friendly Quicktime format. Pushing sex over video chat has been pointless until now but, as the number of customers with easy video-calling explodes, so will the business opportunities.

Being the sensationalist rag that it is, the Mail veers off into talk of the dangers to kids (“children and sexual predators are often ahead of parents when comes to technology”) and tries to make a case that Apple somehow doesn’t like adult material on its devices (ridiculous, as Safari on the iPad is probably the best porn browser on the planet). But the best point in the article is made by adult actress Teagan Presley, who highlights a technical shortcoming of the face-to-face nature of video calls.

“You can have the phone on your face, or other body parts,” says Presley, “but not both at the same time.”

Now Apple iPhone 4 users can make video calls to X-rated stars with Face Time [Daily Mail]

Photo: Joe Loong/Flickr

See Also:

• Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says
• Adobe Plays the Porn Card in Flash Campaign Against iPad
• Apple Removes Porn Apps From App Store
• Porn Comes to the iTunes App Store
• Child Porn Is Apple's Latest iPhone Headache (Updated)

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.