Hasta La Gadget!

The Gripzila is a handy stand for almost anything

Gripzila might be the last phone/iPod/GPS/media-player stand you’ll need. It’s a tiny, spring-loaded vise grip that sits on your keychain until you need to stand your device up, and then it swings into action.

In its resting state, the Gripzila looks like a tiny pistol handle, a little contoured piece of plastic with a small ribbed protrusion. To use it, slide this protrusion up and the jaw opens, revealing a rubber-lined slot into which your gadget of choice can slide. Let go and it clamps shut, forming a solidly-joined appendage that works as a kickstand.

The designer, Kelvin Hulet, sent me a 3D-printed prototype to check out, and I like it. I can use it with my horrible Samsung phone, or iPod touch, and it can be clipped onto and gadget that is thinner than 0.8 inches thick. You won’t want to use it for tablets, though, as their weight and size mean they can topple over. Kelvin specifically says that it isn’t designed for such big gadgets, but I have a pair clamped onto my Kindle right now and they seem perfectly fine. The iPad (1 or 2) is way too heavy though.

It has other uses, too: Clamping wires to stop them sliding off the desk, working as a headphone-cord wrapper or even clamping stuff together when you glue it.

The Gripzila is a Kickstarter project, and needs $5,000 to make it into production. To get one, you’ll need to pitch $12, which seems like pretty good price.

Gripzila – A Super Simple Universal Smartphone Stand & More [Kickstarter. Thanks, Kelvin!]

See Also:

• Hanfree: The World's Biggest iPad Stand?
• Piolo iPhone Stand the Most Minimal Yet
• The Pocket Stand, an iPad Stand and Amplifier
• Beautiful Polyply: The Most Personal Gadget Stand Ever

The quality of the Urban Outfitters bike crate comes across perfectly in this over-zoomed image

When it’s not busy filling its shelves with cheap, crappy, fashion versions of bikes and record players, Urban Outfitters likes to spend its spare time courting controversy. This time the product of contention is the Classic Crate Wood Bike Basket.

I’ll leave you to Google “urban outfitters rip off,” but the short story is that many, many independent designers complain that the chain-store copies their creations without permission. Usually, though, these “homages” are simply very similar — and non-litiginous — takes on an obvious idea. And so it is with this bike basket.

Closely modeled on the hand-crafted Custom Porter Crates from Bates Crates, the basket is a wooden crate which mounts onto the front of your bike, fixed to the handlebars. Cole Bates invented his crates after waking up one morning wanting to surprise his girlfriend with pastries and coffee. Thus, the two models feature inbuilt cup holders to get the coffee back from the bakery without spilling.

Amazingly, Urban Outfitters’ crate also has these cup holders. It also looks heavier and much less well made, right down to the fixing method. The Urban Outfitters version just straps onto the handlebar and hangs there. The Bates Crates have proper metal fixings which clamp the basket into place, along with rods that support them from beneath. Bate’s makes his baskets from various reclaimed woods. The chain-store version is pine, and you have to put it together yourself.

Th other difference is the price. Cole Bates hand-crafted designs cost $125. Urban Outfitters’ tat can be had for $40.

Custom Porter Crates [Bates]

Classic Crate Wood Bike Basket [Urban Outfitters via Urban Velo]

See Also:

• Portable, Battery-Powered Turntable. For Playing Records
• Tat
• Snap-Together Camera Kit for Cheap Film Fun
• Retro Radio Puts Vinyl Back in Music

The iDapt i1 universal charger will charge almost anything. It also has green accents.

I’m pretty sick of carrying a whole bagful of chargers whenever I travel. I doesn’t even have to be a long trip: just a weekend away can require chargers for a camera, iPad, iPod, Kindle, Bluetooth speaker and so on.

I have gotten around this mostly by choosing gadgets what will charge via USB, and running everything off the iPad’s power-brick. But I could also go for the iDapt i1, a new universal charger which costs $25, or less than an Apple charger alone.

The iDapt uses interchangeable “tips”, which hook into pretty much any device. These tips are more like plates, and they clip into one end of the iDapt. It ships with mini and microUSB, as well as a 30-pin dock connector, and also has a regular USB port on the side so you can plug in a second item for simultaneous charging.

The iDapt also has circuitry which cuts the power when your devices are fully charged, eliminating “vampire draw”, aka the tiny amount of power still supped by most anything that’s plugged in, even when it’s off.

Tips can also be had for various phones, handheld games consoles, Bluetooth headsets and games controllers. In short, if you can charge it, there’s probably a tip. Available now, in time for your summer vacation.

iDapt i1 product page [iDapt. Thanks, Valerie!]

See Also:

• Idapt Gadget Dock Charges Almost Anything
• Compact Power Station Cuts Cord Clutter
• Touch-n-Go: A Multi-Charger You May Actually Want
• iPhone Car Charger with Gesture Control
• Kensington PowerLift is a Chunky Charger for iPhone

Despite the off-putting product shots and video, the SoundJam looks like a great fix for the iPad’s crappy speaker

SoundJaw is a small plastic widget that fixes one of the worst things about the iPad 2 — its stupid, tinny backwards-facing speaker. It clips onto the bottom of the iPad 2 (and also the iPad 1) and bounces the sound back towards you, greatly increasing its volume.

The original iPad sounded pretty great for something so small. The curved back and decent amount of space inside probably accounted for the surprisingly bassy output, and the good-enough volume. The iPad 2 has a speaker grille so ugly I still can’t believe it was designed by Apple, and so easy to cover with your hands (or a folded-back Smart Cover) that it can be all but muted at any time.

Matthew McLachlan’s SoundJaw fixes this by scooping up the sound and sending it towards you and your ears, and not letting it get muffled in your lap. The clip-on plastic scoop can be seen in action here in his otherwise obnoxious video (Trains! Shaky camera! We’re so cool!), and appears to make quite a difference. You can actually test this yourself by cupping a palm over the speaker and redirecting the sound waves. Try it.

Pretty effective, right?

The SoundJaw is yet another Kickstarter project, and a $20 pledge will get you one of them if the $7,000 target is reached. If you pledge $225, McLachlan will meet you for lunch and bring along 8 SoundJaws, and if you pledge $750 you’ll get an iPad 2 and ten SoundJaws “to pass out to your friends.”

Or you could make your own. I’m currently experimenting with household junk and will report back if I have any success.

SoundJaw – iPad 1 and 2 Sound Booster [Kickstarter via Brownlee]

Livescribe smartpens aren’t just pens.

They’re “multimodal computers,” according to CEO Jim Marggraff. And with the launch of Livescribe’s Connect service, his multimodal computers get an array of useful new ways to send and share notes and information.

Livescribe Connect is available today as an update to the Livescribe Desktop application and as an app for Echo and Pulse smartpens, including a new 2-GB Echo model also launching today.

Previously, notes written on Livescribe’s dot paper could be exported as “pencasts” — PDFs or as audio files — through Livescribe Desktop. With Connect, users can share pages as an interactive pencast PDF that anyone can access (not just those with Livescribe Desktop installed, which was necessary for viewing traditional pencasts). Anyone with Adobe Reader 10 or higher can view a pencast PDF, which syncs words written on the page with recorded audio and you can play it, much like a video recording.

Connect lets you share written notes with a number of digital services and destinations (referred to as Connectors), including Google Docs, Facebook, Evernote, mobile devices, e-mail and your desktop.

“With Livescribe Connect, it is easy to make your handwritten notes and spoken information digital, searchable, shareable and accessible any time, anywhere with a simple tap of your smartpen,” Marggraff says in the press release.

And according to a recent report from Outsell, a research and advisory firm, the ability to easily share notes is key in a smartpen — 75 percent of respondents that digitize notes end up sharing them with others or reusing them in documents or presentations.

The Livescribe Echo, Livescribe’s latest pen model, was originally introduced in the summer of 2010 with 4-GB and 8-GB models. In October, Livescribe teamed up with Evernote, the cloud-based digital note-storing service, for an additional way to share and access handwritten notes.

Livescribe was founded in 2007 and began turning heads with the introduction of its Pulse smartpen in 2008. They’ll be shipping their millionth smartpen sometime this year.

To send a handwritten page using Connect, you draw a short line and begin writing a one- or two-word shortcut above it, like “Facebook,” and the smarten recognizes the shortcut name and instructs you to tap the pages you’d like to include. A double tap (which sometimes had trouble being recognized) completes the function, but notes aren’t actually sent out until the next time your smartpen is docked.

Current pen models have no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capabilities; they rely on a USB connection to transfer data. Marggraff said that in the future, the company plans to produce wireless smartpen models.

So, if you still need a notebook to access your smartpen’s data, why not just bring your laptop to your lecture or meeting and type up notes?

Livescribe Connect lets you create shortcuts so that you can easily share or back up notes digitally when your smartpen is docked

Most people — that is, 87 percent of business professionals — still prefer taking notes by hand, according to research from Forrester. And a couple of different studies proved that students who bring their notebooks to class aren’t using them for in-class note-taking so much as instant messaging and browsing “distractive” websites (I’m looking at you Reddit).

Using a pen and paper continues to be a good way to keep track of information, and the added benefit of synced audio that smartpen models such as Livescribe’s provide means that you can pick and choose what to write, using keywords that can help you jump to a specific point in the audio recording. No more need to manically jot down everything scrawled on a blackboard.

Ned May, Vice President and Lead Analyst for Outsell, a research and advisory firm, says that Livescribe’s audio-syncing capabilities are what separates it from other smartpen manufacturers, and that there’s “no other solution that’s better” at the present time. May believes “the smartpen market is on the cusp of taking off” based on Outsell’s examination of the current smartpen landscape.

I’ve had a chance to check out Livescribe Connect for the past few days, and it works quite well. The main caveat is that data isn’t sent as you write, it’s sent the next time your pen is docked. But you can add shortcuts and personalize it using the desktop program, and the pen itself recognizes those changes quickly and rarely misinterprets them.

If you primarily take notes in darkened lecture halls or write super speedily, the pen (I was using the new 2-GB model) may have trouble picking up all of your pen strokes.

Livescribe Connect is available in two flavors, Premium and Basic. Connect Premium grants you access to all available Connectors and is free for 4-GB and 8-GB Echo owners. Owners of 2-GB Echo and Pulse smartpens have free access to Connect Basic, which provides sharing capabilities for everything except e-mail and Google Docs, but can pay $15 to upgrade to Connect Premium through Livescribe’s online store. The 2-GB Echo smartpen runs $100.