Juice Mobile Charger is Both Functional and Fetching

juice-ingenious-mobile-charger-by-hiroaki-tanaka-for-nobil

Juice is an all-in-one power-pack, a battery-chargin’, USB-powerin’ box which actually looks good enough to take outside the house (those leafy decorations are thankfully on a pair of charging AAs).

Unlike most designs featured on Yanko’s hallowed concept pages, the Juice, by Hiroaki Tanaka, will actually be in shops early in 2010 (in Japan and Taiwan) and coming to the US soon after, made by a company called Nobil.

The plastic box has a pair of adjustable side-slots to charge both double and triple-A cells, and a USB slot on the top will charge just about anything else. The power comes in from a wall outlets and the Juice itself has an internal battery pack which can be used to top of anything you plug or slot into it while on the go.

These kinds of chargers are becoming pretty essential, especially in the age of Kindles, iPod and even laptops having hidden, non-removable batteries. I have a little pocket-sized battery and charger for my iPod and whenever I’m out for more than a few hours it comes with me.

Juice [Nobil via Yanko]


Lacie’s USB 3.0 RAID Drive is Desk-Burning Fast

2big

The folks in Lacie’s hard drive research kitchen have a need. A need (dramatic pause) for speed. And a need that they have managed to sate with the shiny new USB 3.0 2Big RAID drive.

Not happy with the already huge speed-jump gained by switching from boring old USB 2.0, the 2Big throws in a RAID 0/1 setup to open the throttle even further, striping the information across two drives to reach a blistering 275MB/s burst speed. Compare that to USB 2.0’s pedestrian theoretical maximum of 480 Mb/s. Notice the lowercase b in the latter, which stands for bits not bytes. This is, Lacies says, fast enough to throw many HD streams around at once, editing and watching in full resolution at the same time.

For you and me it means less waiting when, erm, borrowing our friends’ movie collections.

The 2Bigs will be on sale early in the new year, for a presumably high price-point, and will come in sizes up to 4TB. Of course, this will be rather pointless unless you have a computer capable of using USB 3.0 peripherals at full speed.

LaCie Partners with Symwave to Introduce World’s First USB 3.0 Dual-Drive RAID Storage Solution [Business Wire]


Airplane Seat-Back Valet Shows Your Valuables Off to the World

valetback

I have mixed thoughts about Hammacher Schlemmer’s Airplane Seat Back Valet. On the one hand, it looks completely perfect for a long haul flight, keeping everything to hand without taking away precious knee-space, and looks like it could be easily rigged to hold a media-player in front of your eyes for some non-censored in-flight entertainment.

On the other hand, it is monstrously dorky, and spreading out all of your belongings for your fellow travelers to see is akin to traveling with your pants off, a kind of physical TMI.

We like that it has slots for memory cards, iPods, cellphones, books, tickets and even a netbook, and while the inclusion of a hidden money-pocket with six credit card slots seems superfluous at first, when you learn that the $40 piece of nylon folds into a shoulder bag for use off the plane, it makes more sense. It should be on sale aboard every plane in the Sky Mall magazine.

I won’t be buying one, as I like to take the aisle seat, jerk the seat back as far as it will go and then load up the flip-down table in front with all my in-flight essentials. Then, when my row-mates need to get up, I first stare at them in irritation, then tut under my breath, clearing the empty whisky miniatures and electronics slowly away before letting them out.

The Airplane Seat Back Valet [Hammacher Schlemmer]


Jelfin Mouse Shaped Like a Soft, Yielding Ball

jelfin

The Jelfin Mouse is a desktop blob, a ball-shaped mouse with a soft gel covering. It is also “designed to fit your hand perfectly”, and “the World’s first ball-shaped computer mouse covered in gel”*. It is, in short, the most pointless peripheral we have ever seen.

The USB mouse comes in an array of pastel hues, and looks like it could actually be some kind of ergonomic innovation, perhaps grabbed with the hand upright as you might hold a gun. In reality, the soft-touch ball is just a tall mouse, and probably about as comfortable to drape your digits over as a tall bike is to throw your leg over.

Any users of Mac OS 9 will be excited to hear that the Jelfin lists your computers as compatible (just like any other plain-Jane USB mouse). Other awesome features include three buttons and a scroll wheel. $35, and obviously destined for the $5 bargain bin at your local megamart. Box includes “travel can”.

Jelfin Mouse [Jelfin]

*Jelfin obviously hasn’t seen my hacked Fleshlight.


Keystick: Collapsing Keyboard Concept Folds Like a Fan

keystick1

The Keystick is less a folding keyboard than a stacking keyboard. The overlapping sections slide over one another to turn a small, oblong bar of plastic into a ridged keyboard, complete with neat pop-out USB dongle to plug into your computer.

Unless you are using a keyboard-ally challenged netbook, we wonder who would actually need a portable keyboard these days — pretty much any laptop has a perfectly good one, and if you’re docking the notebook to a desktop setup at the office, you can just use a real, full-sized keyboard.

This one certainly looks great, though, apart from the weird retro sci-fi text along the bottom (None Bacteria Project refers to the use of personal keyboards and not an anti-germ coating). You can’t buy it, as the Keystick is a concept design. A quick note to designers Yoonsang Kim and Eunsung Park: make one that can hook up to my iPod Touch. I’d buy one of those in a second.

Folding Fan Is A Keyboard [Yanko via Oh Gizmo]


Personalized, Engraved Bike Chainrings

session-ring

Speaking of fixed-gear bikes, one of the most fun (and expensive) parts of riding one is customization. That can be as simple as keeping your alleycat road-race spoke-cards in the wheels, or as expensive as buying imported vintage Japanese frames.

Now your customization can go to the absurd lengths of chainring engraving. Session Sprockets will sell you an aluminum chainring engraved with the message or artwork of your choice. The site even has an easy-to-use Flash-based tool to help you design it. Here’s my awesome effort. I decided to use the supplied high-quality clip-art to represent a giant chick attacking a car:

my-other-bike

Session Sprockets was founded by MIT mechanical engineering student, and the chainrings are milled and engraved in-house. You can choose from two sized rings, standard (130 mm BCD, 48 tooth) or track (144 mm BCD, 49 tooth) for $100 and $110 respectively.

Session Sprockets [Session Sprockets via


Swipe Credit Cards With Your iPhone

wwwpaywaremobile

Apple may have its own in-store, handheld “cash” registers using modified iPod Touches, but what if you, too, want a slick and small credit-card payment system? Sure, you could get one of those chunky, cellular card-readers on loan from the credit card company. Or you could get a dongle for your iPhone.

That’s what VeriFone’s new Payware Mobile is for. The card-reading case hugs the iPhone and an accompanying application runs the transaction. Swipe, sign the screen with a stylus and then send the information in to, well, wherever these numbers are sent. We imagine something like the underground bank staffed by goblins from the Harry Potter books, only with the goblins in cubicles, and endless streams of data instead of actual gold.

So how do you get this device for your own home/store/restaurant/magic wand shop? You need to sign up for a two-year contract with Payware, whereupon the card reader will be tossed in for free. It’s only available for pre-order right now, but we fully expect to see similar solutions from other vendors, not least the Square iPhone Payment System from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Payware Mobile [VeriFone]

JB352T5VSYTP


Small, Fast OCR Scanner Perfect for Expense Account Scams

mobileoffice-d428-by-plustek

We kind of hate scanners, having thrown ours in the trash in favor of a pocket digicam. But with CES coming up the Gadget Lab crew is about to engage in its traditional field-work contest: who can collect the most expense-able taxi receipts?

This game is fun, but the aftermath of scanning and totting up totals is tiresome torture. Better to do it with Plustek’s brand-new MobileOffice D428, set – fortuitously – to debut at the CES show. The device is a super-fast scanner which is also small, just wide enough to fit in a sheet of A4 or legal paper and only 3.7-inches deep. It’s also light, at 2-pounds.

But that wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t quick enough for me to power through Las Vegas taxi receipts. Set to 200dpi (the max is 600dpi) the scanner can scream through a page every two seconds, converting the document to pretty much whatever type of file the accounting department has decided on that day (including Word, Excel and even WordPerfect). It also reads any text using bundled OCR software so I can just copy-and-paste the totals into my expenses.

In fact, it seems perfect for the Gadget Lab crew in our race to scam the man, all except for one thing: It’s PC only, and the Gadget Lab is, with the noted exception of the Jägermeister-and-Red-Bull swilling Priya Ganapati, a Mac-only shop. $350.

MobileOffice product page [Plustek. Thanks, Kaitlin]


Giant, Garish Retro Headphones Work Great With Cellphones

aerial7_chopper2

The retro-styled Chopper2 headphones from Aerial7 may look familiar. Anyone who has seen the wonderful (and hugely popular, if my local high street is anything to go by) Panasonic RP HTX7-K1 will instantly recognize the large earpieces, the adjustable steel-wire sliders, the leather-covered pads and headband and the single-exit cable. Even the recommended price is almost the same, at $70 to the Panasonic’s $60.

Apart from the dubious color schemes, the Chopper2 has one important addition: an in-line mic, for use with compatible cellphones (the iPhone and BlackBerry both work, for example). They don’t have the inline remote to control an iPod, as that requires Apple’s magic chip to work, but for yakking on the phone you’re good.

In fact, on paper at least, the Chopper2s compare well to the Panasonics. The driver is 4mm bigger, at 44mm, the sensitivity is 108dB (vs. 99dB) and the impedance is 32 ohms against 40 ohms. The frequency response is a little narrower in range, giving 5-20 KHz vs. 7-22KHz. Without actually listening, it looks like the main decider is going to be the microphone and the garish color schemes of the Chopper2s. That and the fact that the Panasonics have been around for so long now that they can be had for as little as $30 online.

Chopper2 Headphones [Aeriel7. Thanks, Greg!]

RP-HTX7-K1 headphones [Panasonic]


Keypad Gives Gmail Addicts Colorful Shortcut Keys

The Gboard, a keypad for Gmail shortcut keysHeavy Gmail users know that keyboard shortcuts are the key to mail productivity: I can power through an inbox full of spam and PR come-ons with nothing more than the J, K, X, Shift-3 and Y keys.

For $20, you can put those shortcut keys onto their own, external keypad, with color-coded buttons to make it easy to press whatever you want. The Gboard would be handy for those who have trouble remembering Google’s many shortcut keys (for instance, I had no idea that there were enough to fill out the Gboard’s 19 separate keys). And for power users like me, it might make it even easier to delete messages, much as an external numeric keypad makes it easier for accountants to add up your deductions.

Gboard product page (thanks, Betsy!)