Hasta La Gadget!

The Polyply is Andrew Lim’s beautiful custom-built iDevice stand

Oh man, my desk is such a mess. Right now I have my iPad charging, my iPhone syncing, an iPod Nano just sitting there and being annoying, and a stylus, which is plain embarrassing because I swore I would never buy one.

If only I had some kind of pod-tidy to hold them all. Perhaps something with a sleek white acrylic front, and a birch-plywood rear. Something that would stand up on the desk and array all of my iDevices in front of me as if they were pieces in one of those really easy jigsaw puzzles for kids.

Maybe, if I was really wishing hard, I’d ask for something that would fit only a very specific combination of gadgets. Say, the latest iPhone, but a two-generations old Nano and one of those fat, ugly, heavy and slow iPads some of us are still forced to use. Then, if I was to change a single one of those gadgets, my lovely pod-tidy would be rendered immediately useless, too.

What’s that, Yanko Design? You’ve found me just the thing? Look at that! Its the Polyply from Andrew Kim, and it’s not a real product at all, but a beautifully made one-off design to fit Kim’s own iSelection. I just wish I was handy enough to do the same.

Polyply [Minimally Minimal via Yanko]

See Also:

• Wooden iPad Stand Doubles as Kitchen Accessory
• The One Minute Hack: DIY Suction-Cup iPhone Stand
• The (Ugly) DIY Gorillapod

The iPad 2 is only slightly thicker than a pencil. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

When you’re shopping for an iPad 2, you have a dozen configurations to choose from, and some recent discoveries will make this decision much easier for you.

To configure your iPad 2, you have 12 options as you decide on color, storage and, most importantly, data connection — 3G + Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi-only.

It turns out that if you’re one of the millions of people who own an Android phone or an iPhone, you don’t need a 3G model, which will save you a big chunk of cash. Here’s why.

Smartphone hotspots

All U.S. iPhones (upgraded to the latest version of iOS) and the vast majority of Android smartphones now officially support wireless-hotspot capability, which turns the handset into a Wi-Fi connection that can be shared with multiple devices, including the iPad.

So if you go with a Wi-Fi-only model and you want to hop on a cellular connection, you can activate the hotspot option on your smartphone through your carrier, pay $20 per month and connect the iPad to that.

That’s not as seamless as having 3G built into the iPad, but it will save you the extra $130 you’d plunk down on a 3G model. Plus, you’d have to pay at least $15 a month just to use an iPad’s 3G connection anyway.

Jailbreaking for free hotspots

If you’re down with getting a little dirty, you can use your Android phone or iPhone as a hotspot without paying monthly fees by hacking your device.

For Android phones, you just have to root (aka jailbreak) the device with a tool called Unrevoked. For rooted Android phones, there are unauthorized apps called Wireless Tether and Barnacle, which offer free hotspot utilities. You can also flash your device and install CyanogenMod, a different Android skin that includes a built-in hotspot feature. Presto.

For the iPhone, all you have to do is jailbreak with any of the tools out there. (Do note that if you do update to the latest version of iOS, you can’t jailbreak yet.) Jailbreaking will install the Cydia app, which gives you access to the underground Cydia app store. There, you can download the unauthorized app MyWi, which costs a one-time fee of $20, and doesn’t charge you monthly.

GPS Transplant

The Wi-Fi iPad doesn’t have built-in GPS, but if you want to use that beautiful Maps app for navigation, you still don’t need a 3G iPad, so long as you have an iPhone. It turns out that if you hotspot with an iPhone, the connection transfers the GPS to the iPad.

Just connect the iPad to the iPhone’s hotspot, then launch the Maps app, and you’ll see the blue dot tracking your location.

(We’re not sure if this works when hotspotting with an Android phone — if you can confirm, let us know in the comments.)

3G FaceTime

Another surprise is that if you turn your smartphone into a wireless hotspot, you can connect to it with your iPad 2 and use FaceTime videoconferencing.

That’s interesting because typically you can’t use FaceTime over a 3G connection; it’s supposed to only work on a Wi-Fi connection. Because a hotspot shows up as a Wi-Fi connection, you’re basically tricking the iPad 2 into using a 3G connection for FaceTime.

Enjoy the frustrations of unpredictable analog tech with Incredibooth for iPad 2

Photobooth, Apple’s hall-of-mirrors-like self-portrait app for the iPad 2, is fine and all, but does it give you the experience of a real Photo booth? Does it take four photos in row, snapping each one as you least expect it and wasting your hard-earned coins?

Does it combine these photos into a single strip that can be sent up to Facebook? Does it let you filter you pictures through the currently fashionable Holga-style filters, dating them forever to the early twenty-tens? No, it doesn’t. But Incredibooth, from “the guys that brought your Hipstamatic,” does, and it costs just $99, which is less than you’d spend in a real photo booth.

Just hit the switch, crowd you and your friends in front of the iPad’s front-facing camera and hit the big red button. Four shots will be snapped in any of four lens and effect combos, and the strip of photos will be delivered outside the booth.

All you need is an uncomfortable spinning stool and a few nastily colored, pleated curtains and you can pretend that you have traveled back in time 20 years.

IncrediBooth by Synthetic Corp [iTunes via Mac Stories]

IncrediBooth product page [IncrediBooth]

See Also:

• FaceTime, PhotoBooth and Camera Icons 'Confirm' Dual-Camera iPad 2 …
• Photo Booth Grotesques Make Freaky Rubber Masks
• Print-Sending App Turns iPhone Into a Photo-Booth
• $10000 Photo Booth Takes Tiny, Low-Resolution B&W Pictures …

The old saying goes “the early bird catches the worm,” and it certainly appears to be holding true for the insomniacs who stayed up for iPad 2 pre-orders to go live online. We’ve received our own orders that were placed as soon as the switch was flipped, as have several MacRumors forum contributors (as pictured above). With shipping estimates slipping longer and longer, maybe waiting on a real line isn’t the most unattractive option any more.

iPad 2 online orders start arriving on doorsteps originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Side-by-side, the iPad Wi-Fi and iPad 3G don’t look different at all, but under the hood there are a lot of differences. Customers who bought a Wi-Fi model, for example, cannot use the same sophisticated GPS features that the iPad 3G has. For the iPad 2, however, there is a workaround to this.

Not advertised by Apple, an iPad 2 early adopter realized that when tethered to an iPhone via the phone’s Personal Hotspot feature, the iPad 2 was also able to leech off the iPhone’s pinpoint GPS accuracy.

“As we got closer, I decided to get some directions to make sure we were on track. I launched the iPads maps app, expecting to navigate the old fashioned way without GPS assistance — knowing full well that GPS only comes in the 3G iPad models. Imagine my surprise when my iPad pinpointed exactly where we were on the road,” wrote the iPad user who noted the feature, Kyle Carmitchel.

Via Cult of Mac