Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to the inevitable yearly cash-in of Saint Valentine’s Day, a day dedicated to making single people miserable and couples guilty. This year, the romantically-themed object of “desire” is the Galet, a silver pebble which splits open to reveal a 4GB USB stick.

The Galet, which translates variously to pebble, stone, rock and – most curiously – roller in Google translate, is a collaboration between Lacie and French silversmiths Christofle. Christofle takes a metal puck and coats it with silver in a “150 year-old silvering process” and hands it off to Lacie where it is stuffed with electronics, slipped into a plush bag and dropped into a cardboard box.

As USB sticks go, this is certainly a handsome one, but is it really a gift for the love in your life? After all, as fancy as it looks, buying your spousal unit a USB stick is a little like her buying you some expensive face-cream. It’s nice, but you just don’t care. Instead, give her (or him) the $140 you’re just about to waste, and hand her one of your old 4GB thumb-drives a week later.

An that’s it for my traditional Valentine’s Day rant, with just one thing left to say. I will be spending this Valentine’s Day in a high-tech version the same way I have spent almost every Valentine’s Day since I was old enough to buy liquor: at home, alone, with a bottle of Scotch and a copy of the new Playboy iOS app. Who said technology couldn’t be romantic?

Galet product page [Lacie. Thanks, Audra!]

See Also:

• Pink MSI Wind in Cynical Valentine Cash-In
• Gadget Lab Video Blog: Valentine's Day Gadget Guide
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Kensington’s PowerLift is a combo dock, stand and battery charger for the iPhone, with a 1200 mAh battery on board to add a good chunk of a day to the battery life of your phone.

How much extra time? Kensington says 3.5-hours of talk-time, 1.5-hours of FaceTime, 5-hours of video and 20 hours of music.

To fit in this big battery, Kensington ignored skinny-case or tiny pocket-dongle designs and went for a heftier dock. The PowerLift can hang off the bottom of your phone while you use it but if you flip up the stand and drop the thing onto a desk it looks a lot more natural. And if you are using it alongside a computer – or if you should chance across a power outlet on your rare travels through the corporate world – you can flip out a USB cable to charge or sync. What it doesn’t do – despite its name – is toss Alien Queens into airlocks. Available for pre-order, $50.

PowerLift product page [Kensington via Oh Gizmo]

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• Octopus Battery Charger Sucks Up to iPhone
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Oh, man. What is it about clever stationery that gets us geeks in such a froth? Pens, notepads and even – yes – paperclips are all enough to awaken a desire normally only stirred by a hot new slab of electronics from Apple or Art Lebedev.

Thus, I am far too excited by these hanger-shaped paperclips, called “PhotoHangers.” In shape, they’re like regular paperclips combined with coat-hangers. In practice, you combine them with pushpins and you have yourself an instant photo-gallery.

It would also be a great way to keep bunches of paper neatly filed, but close to hand. I say “would”, as these are clearly priced to be fancy display hooks and not practical office stationery: you’ll pay a crazy $9.50 for just seven of the things. That’s $1.36 each. Still, it has inspired me to roll my own. Surely a plain but oversized paperclip could do the same thing without modification?

PhotoHanger product page [Arango via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Pointy Post-It Notes Are Better Than The Original
• Stationery
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Skunk Juice. It’s a name that makes me nauseous just to write, and embarrassed to say out loud. But the earbuds that the company makes are actually pretty neat.

They work a lot like the mag-safe connector on a MacBook, only with two sections. Plug the jack into an MP3 player or computer, and plug the earbuds into your ears. The two sections snap together with magnets, letting them break apart when the cord gets tugged. As someone who has killed more than one pair of headphones by snagging them on a passing piece of street-furniture, I can dig this feature.

There’s another side-effect of this magnetic coupling. The termination of the ‘bud section is double-sided, so you can stick and stack more headphones on top. Thus you can snap your headphones onto your buddy’s headphones and share (up to four people can hook up together).

The idea is a good one, but the Skunk Juice earbuds look cheap, and come in at $36 a pair (extra connector sections are $13 apiece). It’s a better solution for sharing than those two-into-one adapters, though.

Skunk Juice product page [Skunk Juice via Macworld]

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Nixon’s Trooper headphones are worth a look for many reasons, but the one that really stands out is the giant volume-knob. It’s not clear from any of the product shots, but around one of the ear-pieces is a ring that twists and adjusts the volume, just like the one on your dad’s big old stereo back home.

Apart from this big knob, the award-winning design also has some nice portability features. The earpieces hinge in two directions, adding a twist to the usual up-down adjustment. This, combined with a folding band, lets you collapse the cans down for stowing in a back. They also have a jack-socket instead of a hardwired cord so you can avoid braking the cable when in a bag, or replace it when it breaks.

They’re also cheap, if you look in the right place. The Trooper Three Button (with inline mic and redundant volume buttons) are listed at $70 on the Nixon site, but opt for the mic-less version and you can find them for as little as $15 on Amazon.

Finally, they look cool, and as your wear headphones like you’d wear clothes, that’s important. In fact, the only thing stopping me from buying a pair is the stack of headphones I already have. Like bags, it seems you can never have enough.

Trooper Headphones [Nixon via Core77]

See Also:

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