Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re in the market for a smartphone case and looking for something a bit different than all of the others out there, you might want to check out the JimmyCASE.

The JimmyCASE offers the stylish looks of a wooden case, but also the practicality of a wallet case. The case combines a silicone bumper with a genuine mahogany backing to protect your phone. Wrapped over the wood back is a stretchy piece of custom-designed elastic which can hold credit cards and money.

In my experience, I was able to stack my license and three credit cards, as well as a few dollar bills under the elastic without a problem, and with even a single credit card, it held securely. And even with the wallet loaded up, the iPhone’s camera and flash are completely unencumbered.

The sides of the case offer a nice textured grip to them, and there are openings for the charging port, speakers, headphone jack, microphone, and mute switch. Volume and power controls are hidden beneath silicone, which keeps stuff from getting into them, but still providing enough tactile feel to be usable.

Of course, the JimmyCASE is about style too, so you can choose from four different elastic fabrics at this point, including the navy blue and black striped of my review unit, gray/orange, navy/orange, and a preppy kind of pink with colorful stripes. In addition to the iPhone 5/5S variant, it’s can be had in iPhone 4, iPhone 5C and Samsung Galaxy S4 models.

The JimmyCASE is available for order now, and sells for $39(USD).

If you are in need of a new tablet that has access to mobile broadband, a new offering is available as of today at Verizon. The Google Nexus 7 tablet has arrived at Verizon and you can get it with or without a contract.

If you are unfamiliar with the Nexus 7 tablet, it has a 7-inch screen with HD resolution and 323ppi. It runs Android 4.4 KitKat and boasts a 1.5GHz quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM. The version being offered up by Verizon is the 4G LTE model with 32GB of storage.

The off-contract price for the tablet is $349.99(USD) with month-to-month service. If you need to cut that purchase price a bit, you can opt for a two year contract for $249.99. The tablet is also offered in a bundle, packing some screen protection, a USB car charger, and a Chromecast for shooting your favorite content to your living room TV. That bundle pack will cost $329.96 with a 2-year contract or $429.96 without.

If you want a Bluetooth speaker that you can take with you on the go to listen to your favorite tunes, Bem Wireless has a new offering that is very different from the others on the market. The device looks like a watch, but doesn’t tell time.

The Bem Wireless Speaker Band is a speaker that supports wireless music streaming from your mobile device. It has controls on the side for play/pause, and skipping tracks. Power for the device comes from an internal battery that charges via USB and is good for six hours of use.

One of the more interesting features is that the Speaker Band also has a microphone. That means you can use it to answer calls from your wrist, and use it with apps which support voice commands. It even supports spoken caller ID functionality. The Speaker Band is up for pre-order now for $49.99.

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

Here’s another computer looking for a dumb terminal to mate with. Like the ICE xPC, Tango crams in the main components of a computer into a palm-sized case. It also uses a dock to connect to an HDMI display and other peripherals.

Tango has a 2GHz quad-core AMD A6-5200 CPU with an integrated Radeon HD 8400 GPU. It can have between 2GB to 8GB RAM as well as a 32GB to 512GB SSD. Like the ICE xPC, Tango can be loaded with pretty much any desktop operating system.

Unlike ICE xPC, Tango keeps it simple and only has one dock. That dock has an HDMI port, three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet jack and a Wi-Fi adapter. The dock of course needs to be plugged into an outlet for the whole setup to work.

Pledge at least $349 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Tango PC and a docking station as a reward; there are also separate pledges for additional docking stations.

I still don’t think that this is the best solution to portable computing on a budget. Yes, it has decent specs and is quite cheap, but it’s clunky and messy. You’ll need multiple docks, keyboards, mice and a whole lot of cables for it to be worth it. Windows 8.1 tablets like the ASUS Transformer Book T100, the Dell Venue 11 Pro and the new ThinkPad 8 are more useful than the Tango, but they also cost more and run only Windows. Chromebooks are cheap and come with a keyboard and screen but they might not have access to the programs you need. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.