Hasta La Gadget!

If you have $200 you were thinking of tossing in the trash, you could instead send it to me. I promise to waste it on booze and Cuban cigars. Or you could waste it yourself, and buy the Aputure Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder, a tiny, low-resolution screen on a short cable that duplicates the functionality of your camera’s current screen, only with lower quality.

The Gigtube is a 2.5 inch, 230,000 pixel LCD with three hours of battery life. It hooks into your camera (just how depends on the camera you have) and displays the live-view feed from a “distance”. Some cameras will not output a live-view, so you’re limited to reviewing the shot after it has been taken, a rather useless feature on its own. The Gigtube has one neat trick: it can be used to trigger the camera’s shutter remotely (and here “remotely” means up to 2 meters, or just over six feet).

For what might you use the Gigtube? The pictures on the site appear to suggest narcissistic self-portraits and up-skirt-shots. In fact, anything that “bring photography in a new visual angle”. The unit will work with most Canon, Nikon and Olympus DSLRs, along with the Olympus Pen v1 and v2. Sure, you could buy one, but you should really do the sensible thing and let me send your cash up in wonderful, tasty smoke.

Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder [Aputure via Oh Gizmo!]

You know all those lame old camera stabilizers for the iPhone, the ones that promise you “steadicam” shooting? Well, you can forget them. Tiffen, the people who make the real
Steadicam, now offer a little iPhone version. It’s called the Steadicam Smoothee.

The holder works like the big Steadicam rigs used in the movie industry (and also just like the $14 home-made Steadicam
). It puts the iPhone 3GS on a mount which sits atop a dangling counterbalance and pivots on a handle. This counterweight, although just 25 ounces in total, damps any wobbles and allows the iPhone’s video camera to capture the swooping, shake-free shots we all love.

The quick release mounting case into which the iPhone settles can be removed and sat atop a table or screwed onto a tripod. Tiffen haven’t yet announced a price for the Smoothee, but you can be sure it will cost less than, say the Steadicam Ultra 2C, which will set you back $50,000.

Steadicam Smoothee [Tiffen]

See Also:

• Homemade Steadicam Almost as Good as Real Thing
• Shaky-Cam: DIY Bike Tripod

By day, the Airstash is a common, ordinary USB card reader. But by night, it dons the mantle of wireless connectivity, taking to the streets and sharing pictures an images in an ad-hoc, daredevil manner.

The Airstash looks much like a regular card reader, with a USB plug on one end and an SD card-shaped hole in the other. In between you can find a tiny, battery powered 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi router. Slot in a card and it can be reached wirelessly through the web browser of any Wi-Fi enabled computer or phone.

The design is simple, but the uses are manifold. You could use this to wirelessly copy photos from card to computer, but that, apart from saving you a USB port, is a little boring. What about carrying an extra 32GB of movies and music that can be streamed from the built-in server direct to your iPhone? Or creating a fully functional wireless network for sharing, well, anything? Because it uses vanilla Wi-Fi, it works with anything. And because it uses USB, it charges when you plug it into a spare port.

The product was shown last week at CES, and right now has neither a price or a shipping date (”available soon” is the only hint on the product page). If it is cheap, and if the battery in such a tiny case can last long enough to be useful, then this could be a very useful toy. And if it is given away at next
year’s CES in the same fashion as pen drives were at this year’s show, we’ll be very happy indeed.

Airstash product page [Airstash via Oh Gizmo!]

This is the Miniguru, from Guru Board, and it’s the smartest keyboard we have seen in years. We’re stuck with the keyboard, probably forever, so the Guru Board folks have stripped it to its basics and tried to make it faster and easier to use.

The premise is that you keep your hands in one place, with your fingers always on the home row. To this end, the number pad has been removed, and a nipple has been added just like you’d find on a Thinkpad notebook keyboard, so you can mouse around without a mouse or trackpad. Even the cursor arrows have disappeared, moved to be easier to use.

The Miniguru works like this: two “swirl” keys, on either side of the spacebar, change the mode of the entire keyboard. Pressing one with your thumb, for instance, flips the keys into a navigation mode where the i,j,k and l keys work as cursors, with other oft-used functions close to hand. To free up these thumb-keys, the alt keys have been shifted next to the swirls (in the same place as they are on a Mac keyboard) and the ctrl key has been shifted to replace the useless, almost universally hated Caps Lock key.

If you’re thinking that you’ll need to learn a new way of typing, you’re right. Mac users especially will have a lot of muscle memory baked into the Command key shortcuts they use every day. To this end, Miniguru has a clever approach to reprogramming the keyboard layout. Any changes made using the configuration software (and you can change pretty much everything) are saved to the keyboard’s own firmware. This means that whatever computer you plug it into, it will act just as you set it to.

This keyboard-for-life philosophy continues to the construction. When it is available (in the last quarter of this year), it’ll have proper mechanical keys. The keycaps will come in a choice of “clicky, tactile or linear” responses. You can also customize the colors of the caps, the tray and the nipple, along with a choice of vertical or horizontal “return” key.

How much will it be? We don’t know. The price will be announced when the product is ready to ship. As someone who already has too many keyboards at home, I can’t wait.

Miniguru Product page [Guru Board via the Giz]

See Also:

• Just My Type: Hands-On With the Das Keyboard III
• A Tale Of Two Keyboards: Apple Extended Keyboard II Vs IBM Model M …

Quirky is the company that designs gadgets by committee, only the committee consists of everyone on the internet. It specializes in simple, neat and usually stylish solutions to small problems, like the iPod Nano kick-stand or the iPhone Beamer case with a built-in LED lamp. Now Quirky has turned its community-sourced focus on another tech annoyance: USB cables.

If you own a computer (and I’m guessing you do, unless you have a generous friend who prints Gadget Lab out for you daily), then you are fully aware of the problem of USB cables. They tangle and twist, knotting together into a serpentine convolution of wire and plastic. Worse, you never know which is which, and you end up tracing the wire back from the peripheral you want before you can plug it in.

Cable Caps fixes both these problems with characteristic elegance, although without the usual Quirky style. Annoying (”cute”) characters anthropomorphize the usual devices like printers, cameras and, erm, eggs. You slip in the corresponding cable to allow easy identification, and the trailing “tail” of the caricature is a rubber band that can secure a bundled wire.

Like all Quirky products, there is a minimum number of orders required before the production lines are fired up. You can pre-order them for $8 per set of three.

Cable Caps [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany!]

See Also:

• Kickster Adds Stand, Handle and Case to iPod Nano
• Beamer Makes a Case for Flash on the iPhone
• Cute Fold-Up Tripod is Also Rather Tacky
• Powercurl Cord-Winder Makes Magsafe Heatsafe