Hasta La Gadget!

If you can’t ride your bike safely with one hand, you probably shouldn’t be on the road. Poor control skills, though, are the excuse for the Seil bag, a bikers’ backpack with flexible LEDs and circuitry applied to the back which lets you make turn signals with both hands on the bars.

The Seil, by Lee Myung Su Design Lab, comes with a removable, bar-mounted wireless controller. Flick a lever on the side and arrows blink on your back to show where you plan to go. When not being used to warn other road users of your intentions, the LED display flashes with cute little symbols: space-invaders, hearts and the like, guaranteed to either distract or infuriate drivers.

Indicators on bikes keep popping up, either as concepts or as actual products, but never catch on. This is likely because anyone experienced and responsible enough will be comfortable with giving good, clear hand signals and would therefore never pay for extra blinking lights. These things are a novelty, and sticking them on a backpack is even worse. What if it stops working and you lurch across traffic thinking without signaling? Or if you don’t have your pack with you one day and (gasp) are forced to use boring old arms to signal?

Happily, the Seil remains a concept, not an actual product.

Seil bag [Lee Myung Su Design Lab]

See Also:

• Ultra-Bright Bike Tail-Light Resembles Star Wars Spaceship …
• Spooklight: Accelerometer Brake Light for Bikes
• Hands-On: Spaceship Bike Light Blinds Puny Humans

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I like Knog bicycle lights. They’re cheap, bright, tough and more-or-less waterproof, and their rubbery bodies make them as easy to mount on the bike as they are to toss in your bag. What I don’t like is buying batteries, whether they’re AAAs or button cells. That’s why I’m excited about the Boomer Rechargeable, a USB version of Knog’s 50-lumen Boomer.

The light was spotted by the good folks from Urban Velo on a trip to the recent Interbike show. The Boomer Rechargeable works like every other Knog lamp: a plastic core containing the electronics and LEDs is wrapped in a stretchy silicone cover. The difference is that when you slip the skin off this one, you see a USB plug which you can jack into a computer or charger. It could hardly be better for a commuter who rides to work on dark winter days.

The regular Boomer costs $35, so expect this to be a little more. The lamp isn’t yet live on the site, but (hopefully) will be soon.

Knog Boomer Rechargeable [Urban Velo]

Knog Boomer [Knog]

Photo: Urban Velo

See Also:

• Hands-On with the Knog Frog Bike Light
• Knog Demonstrates Keyless Electronic Bike Lock

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

If you really, really have to have a physical, clickety-clackety keyboard to get your words onto a screen, the Jorno might be just the thing. The Bluetooth keyboard gives you the full QWERTY experience but folds up into a pocketable package. The keys themselves are just 15% smaller than full-size, big enough for touch-typists with accurate and not-too-fat fingers.

After key-feel, which you’ll have to try for yourself, the next most important specification is size. Folded out the Jorno is 8.5 x 3.5 x 0.3-inches. Concertinaed closed it measures just 3.5 x 3.5 x 0.9-inches, and all the time it weighs the same 8.8-ounces, including the li-ion battery which lasts a month.

A keyboard like this is clearly best suited to the iPhone, as fast typing is pretty easy on the iPad’s larger screen. With this in mind, the Jorno ships with a separate stand for phones. It will of course work with anything that uses the Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR standard, and Jorno has a photo of an iPad balancing precariously on the small bracket.

Small, add-on Bluetooth keyboards seem to be getting more popular, or at least more numerous, since Apple opened up its iDevices to allow them. I have a feeling that the multi-year delay in allowing these accessories wasn’t for technical reasons but for training purposes, to get us used to the soft touchscreen keyboards. It worked, too. You almost never hear griping about the iPhone keyboard anymore.

The Jorno can be pre-ordered now, for $100 (with $20 off until the end of October 2010).

Jorno keyboard product page [Jorno via Cult of Brownlee]

See Also:

• Hack Lets You Use a Bluetooth Keyboard With Your iPhone
• IPad Keyboard Dock Works with iOS4
• ClamCase Turns iPad into Laptop
• IPhone Case Adds Vestigial QWERTY-Slider Keyboard

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

IOS 4.2 will bring AirPrint, the “revolutionary” technology which will let you print words and pictures from your paper-sized iPad onto paper-sized paper. Let’s leave aside that you could already do this using may third-party apps, and that printing is a somewhat backwards thing to be doing with an iPad anyway (like using a remote control to actually push physical buttons), and take a quick look at the tech itself.

AirPrint promises “driverless” printing, which isn’t strictly true. Instead, it works in one of two ways. First, you can print to any printer attached to a computer on the same network as your iDevice. This will work with the next update to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and uses drivers already present on the host computer.

The other option is to print to an AirPrint-compatible printer, which will actually contain its own drivers. Instead of each printer requiring a different driver to make it work, Apple requires the printers to be capable of receiving an AirPrint print-job. This will work because printers these days are really low-powered computers.

This turnaround is quite amazing, and undoes decades of stupid incompatibilities. It also shows us just how wrongheaded were the complaints about the lack of printer support or USB-ports in the iPad. Instead of making a machine that acted like the current hard-to-configure computers, Apple decided to make a machine that just works. If third-parties want to sell peripherals for it, they’ll have to play the game. In this case, that game is buying licenses from Apple to use the dock-connector, the AirPrint spec or AirPlay, which allows wireless streaming of music and video from iOS devices.

It’s clear that these schemes will be a money-maker for Apple, but my guess would be that the original idea was to get rid of annoying drivers.

There’s actually a third way to print wirelessly from an iDevice, and that’s to one of HP’s new printers, the Photosmart eStation, the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus and the HP Envy 100 e-All-in-One. These AirPrint-ready, but they are also email-ready. Each printer is internet-connected, and has its own email address. You just send it a document and it will soon be tattooed across a sheet of dead-tree. How’s that for progress?

HP adds three Web-connected printers to ePrint lineup [CNET]

See Also:

• iOS 4.2 First Look: iPad Gets Multitasking, Printing
• AirPlay

Psych’s bike-bag works a lot like a cowboy’s saddle-bags. It is split into two parts, and when you sling it over your top-tube each part hangs down one side, putting the load in right in the center of the bike for good stability. The bag actually attaches to the bike with ratcheted straps that go around the seat-post and the headset housing. These are pulled tight and act as a kind of spring suspension.

It’s a very smart idea, and if the bags can keep themselves and their contents out of the way of your knees as you pedal, they’re almost perfect as a rack-less pannier replacement. There’s even an insulated compartment inside for a water-bladder, or – if you don’t carry water – your hot or cold lunch. My big worry is just that it will get in the way. When I ride to bike-polo I have a pair of mallets ball-bungeed to the top tube. They’re skinny ski-poles and even they get in the way, so a bulky bag may not work.

If you’re willing to give it a go, there are two models: a small “Trail Bag” for $100 and a bigger “Commuter” model for $150. Available now.

Psych product page [Psych via Urban Velo]

See Also:

• Hand-Made Leather Frame Bag Costs as Much as a Bike
• Hambone Frame-Bags for Stylish Cyclists
• Archie's Grobag, Like a Bag-of-Holding For Bikes

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