Hasta La Gadget!

It looks like Sprint is hell-bent on bringing at least some kind of iPhone to its network. An FCC filing shows a MiFi like device which not only creates a personal Wi-Fi hotspot but also acts as a cradle for the iPod Touch. It effectively turns the iPod into an iPhone, only without the actual phone part, nor the cameras, nor the GPS. But you sort of see the point.

The “Peel”, as it looks to be called, is an interesting idea, and isn’t outside the scope of Sprint’s iAmbition: remember the free iPad case which would also hold Sprint’s own 4G wireless router? This one would run on the slower but more pervasive 3G network, and use its own battery. It would also do away with the issue of tethering, as you could connect several devices to the hotspot.

If it escapes the FCC’s clutches, we’d expect to see this soon enough. And who knows? Maybe you could also wrap it around the iPhone thus avoiding both pesky dropped calls and AT&T’s flaky data network. Win win!

FCC Reveals ZTE Peel On Sprint, For Apples Perhaps [Phone Scoop via Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee]

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Really, the Panasonic RP-HJE 130 is just another earbud. Price is a good indicator of headphone quality, and after that you choose whether you need noise-canceling or an in-line remote and you’re done. But the real genius behind the RP-HJE 130, the thing that will make people buy a pair, is something that has nothing to do with Panasonic. It’s the packaging.

It’s fantastic, right? The design was done by the Scholz And Friends agency in Berlin, Germany, and shows the two hook-shaped buds as a pair of eighth-notes linked together by a bar formed by the in-line remote. The design was so good that it won a Cannes Lions award this year. These buds, it is certain, would jump off the shelf at you, whatever their specs.

And those specs remain a mystery. A Google search for “RP-HJE 130″ comes up with nothing but articles about this design. Switch to Google Shopping and you get precisely zero results. But then, I guess it doesn’t really matter. After all, it’s better to pick headphones on their quality, not their packaging, which will be ripped open and tossed into the recycling-bin after a few minutes anyway.

Panasonic Earphones: The Earphones Note [Coloribus]

See Also:

• Model-Kit Business-Card Transforms into Plane, Car, Boat

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A while back, the folks at Portland Design Works sent over a couple bike lights, a set containing the Spaceship and the Radbot. After opening them up and almost blinding myself, I set out to test them, with the intent of killing them. Read on to find out if they survived.

The kit consists the Radbot 500, a 0.5-watt red LED powered by a pair of AAA batteries, and the Spaceship, running on two AAs, which shines its white LED through a “German-engineered lens” and will “withstand rain showers and meteor showers,” (according to the blurb).

I started out the test in Barcelona, but it quickly became clear that the hot temperatures, lack of rain and smooth roads weren’t going to tax these lamps. Worse, Barcelona is so well lit at night that you really don’t need lights on your bike (although the law says otherwise). So I took the pair to a rather more difficult terrain: Berlin, Germany.

Berlin is almost bankrupt, which means long stretches of unlit road and teeth-rattling cobbled streets. It is also in the North of Europe, which gives it hot, dry days (up to 40-degrees, or 100º F) punctuated by cold nights and day-long thunderstorms. It is, in short, a very tough place for bikes and bike accessories.

The lamps do their most important job admirably. They’re ridiculously bright: the red Radbot alone can illuminate a whole room at night, and that’s when its still strapped on my rucksack, pointing in the wrong direction. The Spaceship’s tight beam, a mere curiosity in Barcelona, was essential when cycling through the pitch-black Mauerpark at night, picking out a glowing ellipse on the ground in front to illuminate a safe path between the potholes and broken beer-bottles.

The lights are removable. The Spaceship clamps onto the handlebars with a wraparound collar and a finger-operated screw to tighten it. It stays in place, even over the cobbles. The Radbot comes with a few different fixings. I clip it to the Brooks tool-bag hanging from my saddle, but you can screw an adapter to the light-mount on a rack, the seat-stay or the seat-post.

Despite hanging on tight, I managed to drop both lights plenty of times (usually while trying to drunkenly fix them onto the bike, post-beer-garden). They bounced, and neither of them has even a crack (yet. I’m still trying). Both lamps have also sat outside in Berlin rainstorms: They’re waterproof.

Problems? Very few. While the Radbot needs a long, 1.5-second press on the power switch to turn it on and off (to stop it lighting up in a bag), the Spaceship doesn’t, and actually switched itself on in my bike-bag on its air-trip here. Also, to change the batteries, you need to unscrew the lights to open them. A minor pain, as the screw-shut cases are what keeps the rain out. Otherwise, they come highly recommended (especially the Radbot’s cool pulsing flash-mode). The Spaceship even doubles as a handy weapon with which to blind rival bike-polo players (I have tested this).

Available now in a set for $45.

Spaceship/Radbot 500 [PDW. Thanks, Dan!]

Photo: Charlie Sorrel

See Also:

• Hands-On with the Knog Frog Bike Light
• Reelight: Magnet Powered LED Bike Light
• LightLane's Lasers Make an Instant Bike Lane
• Video: Sanyo Eneloop Bike Pedals For You

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

I’m always running out of USB ports. The problem is even worse because I use a MacBook, which has a mere two holes, and those are so close together that anything larger than standard plug will block off both of them. Sure, I could buy a hub, but what about the more convenient option of forcing every manufacturer in the world to make this great Tandem USB connector?

Each plug offers its own socket at the rear so you can simply slot in another cable, daisy-chaining them until your USB port is drained of every last drop of power. It truly would make things a lot easier if all cables were like this, but I’d settle for a cheap set that I could buy myself. Sadly, the near-death of FireWire means that we don’t get to use the daisy-chaining that is built in to FireWire devices. Remember the hard-drives that had another port on the back for sharing?

Over at Yanko Design, where I found this IF Concept Design Award-winning device, writer Radhika Seth points out the one major flaw with this setup. What if you need to unplug the peripheral that sits in the middle of the chain?

The USB Lineup [Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]

See Also:

• Hermaphrodite USB Cords Stack to Infinity

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

The iPad already has a crazy-long battery life, measuring around ten hours whatever you do with it. A good thing, too, as something this portable would suffer from being stuffed into one of those juice-pack type cases. But what of those occasions when you really can’t find a power outlet for days at a time? HyperMac has you covered with a surprisingly neat (and simple) solution.

The answer is to put a battery into a stand. Clever, right? The stand is in the slab’n’slot style, a block with two angled slits (18 and 45-degrees) to hold the iPad in either orientation. The heft of the stand is provided not by weights but by stuffing in a battery which can juice the iPad for a further 16 hours. That, if you are feeling a little slow this morning, brings the total to 26 hours of continuous use. In normal stop-start usage, that’ll probably be enough to last you for an entire weekend.

The stand comes with a USB port into which you plug your existing dock connector-cable. To charge it, you hook it up via its own mini-USB port, and it supports “charge-through” so you can just use it as a charging desk-dock and grab it when you leave the house. Ingenious, nice-looking and even fairly light (12.7oz or 360g), the only problem may be price. At $130, it seems expensive. But then, it may well be cheaper than buying a stand and battery pack separately.

HyperMac Stand [HyperMac via Brownlee]

See Also:

• First iPad Stand Steps into View
• How-To: Gorillapod Doubles as Awesome iPad Stand
• Joule: An Elegant, Minimalist iPad Stand
• Wooden iPad Stand Doubles as Kitchen Accessory
• Wired Bureau Chief Builds iPad Stand from $6 Doorstops
• Compass, an Elegant Fold-Up Stand for iPad
• Quirky's iPad Case With Two-Way Kick-Stand

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