Hasta La Gadget!

Amazingly, these waves of Crapgadgets tend to showcase some sort of mini-trend. Oftentimes it’s a certain fondness for USB overkill, while other times it just feels like gaudy is the new black. This go ’round, however, we’re looking at a veritable cornucopia of lameness. Eager to drop a Jackson to enjoy one of the most non-ergonomic wooden mice to ever see the light of day? Now you can. There’s also the common issue of not being able to see text in a book while in pure darkness, but rather than just flipping a light switch or changing time zones to locate the sun, there’s a wearable necklace to do the trick. Believe it or not, the list just keeps on getting better, with a machine gun-styled USB drive, heart-shaped telephone and a USB scent flower rounding things out. Dive into dumpster below if you dare, and drop your vote for the worst of the worst in the poll below.

Read – USB bamboo mouse
Read – Wearable hands-free light
Read – Machine gun USB drive
Read – USB guitar speaker
Read – Heart-shaped telephone
Read – USB scent flower
Read – Steering wheel Bluetooth mount

Crapgadget: ‘no rhyme or reason’ edition originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Quirky seems to have found its niche with clever tech gadgets. The communal invention site has marketed several novel products, but only the tech gadgets get enough interest to go into production. The site’s latest offering is the Space Bar, a handy desktop shelf and USB hub.

The Space Bar is designed to sit on your desk and give you a convenient shelf to store things you need often. Rest your post-its or pens there to keep them organized. You can even use it as a monitor stand. At the end of the day, slide your keyboard under the Space Bar to keep your desk tidy. It can house keyboards up to 18-inches long and 1.5-inches high.

The icing is that the Space Bar is also a luxurious six-port USB hub. That means you’ll have all the ports you could need, and you won’t have to crawl behind your desk to reach them.

The Space Bar is currently available for pre-order for $42. When Quirky gets enough purchase commitments, the product will go into production.

By day, the Airstash is a common, ordinary USB card reader. But by night, it dons the mantle of wireless connectivity, taking to the streets and sharing pictures an images in an ad-hoc, daredevil manner.

The Airstash looks much like a regular card reader, with a USB plug on one end and an SD card-shaped hole in the other. In between you can find a tiny, battery powered 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi router. Slot in a card and it can be reached wirelessly through the web browser of any Wi-Fi enabled computer or phone.

The design is simple, but the uses are manifold. You could use this to wirelessly copy photos from card to computer, but that, apart from saving you a USB port, is a little boring. What about carrying an extra 32GB of movies and music that can be streamed from the built-in server direct to your iPhone? Or creating a fully functional wireless network for sharing, well, anything? Because it uses vanilla Wi-Fi, it works with anything. And because it uses USB, it charges when you plug it into a spare port.

The product was shown last week at CES, and right now has neither a price or a shipping date (”available soon” is the only hint on the product page). If it is cheap, and if the battery in such a tiny case can last long enough to be useful, then this could be a very useful toy. And if it is given away at next
year’s CES in the same fashion as pen drives were at this year’s show, we’ll be very happy indeed.

Airstash product page [Airstash via Oh Gizmo!]

Quirky is the company that designs gadgets by committee, only the committee consists of everyone on the internet. It specializes in simple, neat and usually stylish solutions to small problems, like the iPod Nano kick-stand or the iPhone Beamer case with a built-in LED lamp. Now Quirky has turned its community-sourced focus on another tech annoyance: USB cables.

If you own a computer (and I’m guessing you do, unless you have a generous friend who prints Gadget Lab out for you daily), then you are fully aware of the problem of USB cables. They tangle and twist, knotting together into a serpentine convolution of wire and plastic. Worse, you never know which is which, and you end up tracing the wire back from the peripheral you want before you can plug it in.

Cable Caps fixes both these problems with characteristic elegance, although without the usual Quirky style. Annoying (”cute”) characters anthropomorphize the usual devices like printers, cameras and, erm, eggs. You slip in the corresponding cable to allow easy identification, and the trailing “tail” of the caricature is a rubber band that can secure a bundled wire.

Like all Quirky products, there is a minimum number of orders required before the production lines are fired up. You can pre-order them for $8 per set of three.

Cable Caps [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany!]

See Also:

• Kickster Adds Stand, Handle and Case to iPod Nano
• Beamer Makes a Case for Flash on the iPhone
• Cute Fold-Up Tripod is Also Rather Tacky
• Powercurl Cord-Winder Makes Magsafe Heatsafe

‘3-point’ USB 3.0 hub is self-referential fun and functionality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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