Hasta La Gadget!

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]

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]

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]