Hasta La Gadget!

Hopefully the BoomCan won’t sound as tinny as its name suggests

Portable speakers are awesome. And while I’m not sure if Scosche’s BoomCan is awesome without testing it, it’s not going to cost much to find out: the little pocket-sized speaker is just $25.

The BoomCan has a single 35mm driver, mounted in a cylinder and pointing upwards. It hooks up to any device using a 3.5mm jack, and runs for up to seven hours on its rechargeable li-ion battery. It also has a line-out connection so you can daisy-chain a bunch of speakers together.

I have almost stopped using my proper home-stereo speakers. It’s just too convenient to beam music over Bluetooth the a SuperTooth Disco or a JawBone JamBox, and the sound is good enough. The BoomCan needs a wire, and is unlikely to come anywhere near the sound quality of a $200 speaker, but it’s still rather handy. And one thing is pretty certain: There’s no way on Earth that this could sound worse than the speaker built into the iPad 2.

BoomCan product page [Scosche. Thanks, Mark!]

See Also:

• Bike Mount for Foxl's 'Audiophile' Portable Speaker
• SuperTooth, a Block-Rocking Portable Bluetooth Speaker
• Altec Lansing Orbit: Stripped Down Portable Speaker
• Bass-Bustin', Battery-Powered Speaker Invented by Rocket Scientist …
• Great Balls With Wire: Razer Ferox Notebook Speakers

The Eraser Pencil does away with wood

Why buy a pencil and an eraser, or even a pencil with an eraser, when you could have the Eraser Pencil? The design, from Deuk Young Lee of Korea, ditches the wood entirely and replaces it with a long length of stiff rubber. Thus, as long as the pencil is long enough to write with, it still has an eraser.

Why Lee made it a cross shape is a little less obvious. It certainly limits the amount of available eraser, and also looks rather uncomfortable to hold, despite Lee’s assertion that it is in fact more comfortable. And what happens when the rubbery exterior bends? Will the lead inside shatter and snap into several shards? Almost certainly.

Deuk Young Lee: Eraser Pencil [Design Boom]

See Also:

• Video: Inside a Pencil-Making Factory
• Drill-Mounted Pencil Sharpener: What Could Possibly Go Wrong …
• Sharpie Reinvents Pen with Liquid Pencil
• Neither Pen Nor Pencil: Write Endlessly In Metal
• Continuous Pencil Means No More Stubs

When I’m drunk, I always think it’s a fantastic idea to fall asleep while listening to some kick-ass rock like the White Stripes’ Catch Hell Blues, only to wake up a few hours later tangled in my headphone cable. These Bedphones won’t save me from drunken nocturnal choking, but they’ll sure make it more comfortable to fall asleep in the first place.

Instead of sitting inside your ear, the Bedphones have flat speakers which sit on top of your ear-hole, held in place by a short length of “memory wire” that wraps around the ear itself. Because they are so thin, you can lie on your side without them being jammed into your head.

So is it a good idea to fall asleep with headphones? I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on a YouTube soap opera, so I have no idea, medically speaking. But it seems like a bad idea, what with all the cables and noise.

I can see that they’d be useful for watching movies quietly in bed, though. My other favorite drunken bedtime ritual is to put Back to the Future or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on my iPad and sip whisky until I nod off. The Bedphones won’t help with the spilled scotch, or the iPad that slips off my lap onto the hard tiled floor, but at least I can sleep the whole night soundly and deal with these problems in the morning.

Bedphones product page [Bedphones via Werd]

Smart Note is a kind of analog iPad

I have tried to use the iPad 2 as a classroom tool. In my ongoing quest to learn to speak Spanish at least as well as the average Spanish three-year-old, I go to classes a couple nights a week. I have used both iPads one and two (the 2 was bought to snap photos of the whiteboard, a task it utterly fails in), and they’re great. The problem is, they keep slipping off the table.

The neat little Smart Phone Note might be just the thing, though. With it I can press my aging iPod Touch back into action one last time, just like a tiny, electronic Rocky Balboa. The Smart Phone Note is a paper notepad with a slot up top to hold your iPhone (although it should work for the iPod Touch too). You can even leave the phone in there as you run from class to class or — in my case — from class to nearby bar. The slot will hold the iPhone in either landscape or portrait orientations.

Thus equipped, I could use a dictionary app and view photos taken of the whiteboard from previous lessons (with a proper camera, dammit) while writing on paper, all without anything slipping off the desk. There’s even a cut out for plugging in headphones, which frankly seems dumb, or at least pointless.

The Smart Phone Note is available now, for 30,000 Won, or around $27.

Smart Phone Note product page [Design Tag via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Shot Note Paper Pads Designed to Be Scanned by iPhone
• Paper Notebooks Mimic iPhone
• SPhone: A $500 Paper iPhone Clone

This tiny stylus can be gripped between fingertips

Imagine a stylus barely longer than the first knuckle of your thumb. A stylus as tricky to grip and use as the worn-down stubby pencils you were too cheap (or too poor) to replace back in school. Now imagine that, instead of being comfortably cylindrical, these styluses instead are a sharp-edged lozenge shape, complete with a sharp plastic strip protruding from one side.

Congratulations. You just imagined the JAVOedge Mini Stylus for iPad 2. The tiny chalk-stick sized nubbin slots into the dock connector when not in use to stop you losing it (hence the plastic strip), and comes in both black and white to match either flavor of iPad.

The storage idea is a good one, but if you’re going to wrestle with such a short pen, why not just use your short an stubby finger? The stylus could have been made a little longer, too, and still be short enough not to stick out when plugged into an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The stub-tastic styluses cost $10, and are available now.

Apple iPad 2 Mini Stylus [JAVOedge via Oh Gizmo and the Gadgeteer]

See Also:

• Wacom Stylus for iPad Is Not What You're Hoping For
• Crayola iMarker, a Kid-Friendly iPad Stylus
• Magnetic Stylus Sticks to Your iPad
• Brush Stylus Paints on iPad