Hasta La Gadget!

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.

When you’re a professional gadget blogger, you see a lot of oddities. None of them, though, makes me weep for the future of the human race more than the keyboard case, a sleeve designed to protect possibly the hardiest piece of computer hardware you own.

These two cases, from WaterField Designs, happen to be for the ridiculously resilient, tough and lightweight aluminum bluetooth keyboard from Apple, but their absolute wrongness would apply to any keyboard. But first, lets look at just what perils await a poor keyboard in the horrific depths of your bag.

Let’s assume that you don’t throw in handfuls of grit and half-eaten packs of Cheetos into your bag along with your more valuable goods. Perhaps you may have tossed in some keys? Or a picnic knife has worked its way loose? While a cellphone or tablet computer may risk a scratch to its screen, a scrape on a keyboard won’t make any difference. Who cares if the home keys get a chunk taken out, or the back of the ‘board gets dirtied up? Just typing on the thing with your filthy hands probably does more damage.

And then, why are you carrying a keyboard in the first place? Perhaps you are on a business trip and plan to do some heavy work on your iPad? Then pack the keyboard in with your clothes. Otherwise, you don’t even need that keyboard. Your laptop has one built-in, remember, and you probably aren’t carrying a desktop machine on the road.

Even so, I guess there must be a market for such things, and this is what causes the tears of pity and sorrow to moisten my normally parched, cracked ducts. If you are in fact thinking of wasting some money, you can have the budget Keyboard Socket for $15, cut from the finest “scratch-free material”, or opt for the Keyboard Slip, a $30 case fashioned from ballistic nylon with a padded interior. What’s more, “a piping trimmed edge let’s [sic] you chose [sic] to add a splash of bold color, or to stay under the radar with subdued tones.” Cheeky!

Keyboard Slip [WaterField Designs via MacUser]

Keyboard Socket [WaterField Designs]

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

If you’re using both hands to play a musical instrument, the last thing you want to worry about is turning the pages of sheet-music as you play. The traditional solution was to make somebody do it for you, or to quickly reach up and do it yourself.

Tech has helped. These days a laptop with a USB foot-pedal is the way to go, but there have been all manner of spring-loaded and hydraulic contraptions invented to turn actual paper pages. These were, as you might expect, less than reliable.

Airturn, maker of sheet-music-reading software and hardware, has come up with a solution for the iPad. Apple’s tablet would seem to be the perfect device for reading music: it’s big enough to replace a piece of paper, whilst still slim and light enough to put on a music stand. Combined with Airturn’s new Bluetooth foot-switch, it makes a reliable, wire-free and practical solution.

The BT-105, as it is called, has a pair of switches, one to page forward, and one to page back. The switch doesn’t just work with the company’s own software, either. The video demo shows it controlling a third-party app with a zoom feature. In this case, the switch can tell the app to flip half a page at a time or, more accurately, to show the second half of the page before it flips to the next one.

The switch is in development right now, but should be available in the last quarter of this year.

iPad Bluetooth page turner footswitch prototype [Airturn. Thanks, Hugh!]

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

Livescribe’s Pulse smart pen that can automatically digitize written notes is a big hit among students and business professionals who want to move away from paper.

Now the company has introduced a slimmer version of the its pen called Echo that offers more storage and improved features  including support for PDF files.

The Echo pen has double the capacity of the Pulse and is available in 4 GB and 8 GB models that record 400 and 800 hours of data respectively. The 4 GB version will cost $170 and the 8 GB version is priced at $200. The 2 GB Pulse pen will cost $130, down from $200 when it was first introduced.

Livescribe has also added a 3.5 mm audio jack so consumers can use their own headphones, instead of having to buy specifically designed ones from LiveScribe.

Livescribe introduced its first smart pen Pulse in March 2008. Users write notes on Livescribe’s sheets of paper, just as they would on a notepad. The Pulse pen captures everything the user hears using a audio record feature. As for the notes, they can be accessed by simply tapping the pen at any point on the sheet of the paper or through a computer using the Livescribe desktop software. The only drawback is that the pen will work only with Livescribe’s proprietary paper. The company also launched an app store that now has more than 60 apps including study aids and dictionaries.

With Echo, Livescribe has updated the user interface so it is easier to access apps, added features such as password protection so the audio recorded on the smartpen can have more privacy,  and introduced the idea of custom notebooks so users can group and organize notes more easily.

Later this year, Livescribe plans to add new software called Connect, which will allow users to email notes, audio and PDFs from the smartpen and paper when the pen is is docked to a Mac or PC.

The company also plans to introduce a collaboration software called Paper Tablet, that will allow consumers to communicate directly from a Livescribe notebook to a computer using the Echo pen and a USB cable. That means if you draw an image on the Livescribe notebook then it can directly appear on the screen in real time–a feature that should be very useful for creating graphics and for artists.

Check out Livescribe’s video of the Echo pen and some of its key features:

See Also:

• Livescribe Pulse Pen Garners Notable Buzz at Demo
• Video Review: Smart Pen Records Your Writing, Voice
• For Hardware Entrepreneurs, Getting From Idea to Reality Isn’t Easy
• Entrepreneurs Find Gold in Gadget Startups

Photo: Livescribe