Reviews - page 121

The Speck MagFolio Lounge is a slim-fitting iPad case that’s designed for use outside of the office. Its “lap-perfect” design promises to nestle perfectly on your thighs while you reply to your emails or catch up with your favorite shows from the comfort of your living room chair.

Like the rest of Speck’s new iPad cases, the MagFolio Lounge features sleep/wake magnets inside its front cover, and a handy magnetic tab that keeps the case closed when your iPad’s not in use.

This case combines a hard plastic cradle with a soft, “vegan leather” cover to provide you with strong impact protection and a folding stand that boasts two viewing angles. It also offers access to all of your iPad’s ports, buttons, and switches.

The MagFolio Lounge sounds like the perfect case for a couch potato, but is it worth its $50 price tag?

With a built-in waterproof headphone jack, BioLogic says their $20 Dry Bag will keep your iPhone safe, clean, and dry in dirty conditions and in water up to three feet deep — all while letting you use your iPhone like you normally would.

I was wary of the claim, so decided to put it to the test.

This is the SuperTooth Disco 2. It’s the sequel to one of my favorite Bluetooth speakers ever, the SuperTooth, only smaller, a little quieter, and a lot more stereo-er. It also has a quirky little flower-vase style which will probably grow on you, especially if you have small tables.

We reviwed the STM Velo earlier this year, in our first encounter with the Aussie-based outfitter, and came away with the distinct  impression that, wow, these guys really know how to make a great bag.

Our time with the STM Scout ($50), a tablet-specific, heavily-padded canvas satchel, proved that the outfit can make a sharp-looking protective bag for your Thrive, Galaxy Tab or iPad too — though it didn’t blow us away like the Velo did.

Gura Gear’s Kiboko 22L+ ($379) can gulp down multiple DLSRs, two or three lenses, your multitude of other photo accessories, and oh yeah, a 17-inch Macbook Pro, but still fit in the overhead bin of almost any aircraft in the world.

But its tricks don’t stop there.

The Mummy from Loop Attachment — the creators of the wonderful Loop wristband for the iPod nano — is a premium silicone case or the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that aims to provide all-around protection for your device while preserving its identity.

It leaves the Apple logo and the iPhone name on the back of your handset exposed, while providing plenty of protection to shield it from dings and drops.

The Mummy’s key features include an incredibly lightweight design, impact resistance protection for all sides of your iPhone, and easy access to all your buttons, switches, and ports. Its design even allows you to slip a credit card or two in the back of the case before you rush out.

The Mummy is available in a range of pretty colors — ten in total — and costs just $25. But is it worth your hard-earned cash?

When I first glimpsed the Highline, I teased, calling it “an almost spectacularly misguided idea.” The Highline is a curly cable which hooks into your iDevice’s 30-pin dock connector and keeps it safe from drops and attempted snatch-and-grabs. Despite my conclusions, the kind folks at Kenu sent one over to the Cult of Mac test labs to check out. And while I’d probably never have a use for one, it turns out that it does its job just fine.

You’re an American, and you’ve just watched your athletes come away with a barrel full of gold medals in London. Maybe you’re feeling a little patriotic; maybe a little like you want to go out and train for Rio de Janiero. If so, then Monster has created the perfect earphones for you: A special edition “USA” version of their impressive, washable, iSport IEMs.

The Mini Boombox ($100) is Logitech’s entry into the hotly contested Bluetooth micro-speaker contest. Like its contemporaries (the Jawbone Jambox and Monster iClarityHD are two prime examples), the Boombox supplies big sound in a tiny, wireless, battery-powered package — only in this case with Logitech’s signature sleek, stylish approach and a futuristic control panel. Let’s take a look at how it stacks up.

If you’re like me, you like to watch a lot of movies and trailers. As a bit of a self-proclaimed movie buff, I’m always doing my best to stay on top of the latest developments in Hollywood, and I like to follow favorite directors and actors as they move from project to project. I’ll often see a trailer for an upcoming film and think, “Oh, I’ve got to see that when it comes out!” More often than not, the movie will come and go in theaters and I’ll forget to see it. Very rarely will I then stumble across it in Netflix later, and that’s mainly because there are a ton of movies I want to watch that aren’t available for instant streaming.

When I stumbled across Taphive’s TodoMovies app, I anticipated finally being able to keep track of the movies I wanted to watch on my iPhone. With a beautiful and simple interface, the app did not disappoint.

In these days of smartphones and small, mirrorless cameras, the venerable camera bag can all too often be looked upon as a vestigial sack designed for a more cumbersome age, in which the only way to take truly great pictures was to carry around a skull-sized SLR and myriad lenses, flashes and fongs. The truth is, though, that for photographers amateur and pro alike, there are some kinds of shots you can only get with an SLR, and if you want to get them, you need to have a lot of gear at hand… and toting it around is not only uncomfortable, but more often than not, pretty unfashionable.

But that’s not the way it has to be, as Ona has proven with their latest camera bag, the Brixton. This isn’t just a functional camera bag, or a great laptop bag (although it’s both): it’s a bag to set pretty much anyone slavering.

Admit it. You took one look at the tiny Satechi Bluetooth speaker up there in the photo and thought “This is going to be a piece of junk.” It probably won’t help your hastily formed opinion if I tell you that it costs just $30.

Don’t worry. I thought the same. I only had the PR people send me one so I could tease, and write a mean but hilarious review about this obviously crappy little speaker. It turns out that I was dead wrong.

Yesterday, if I had suffered a grievous accident involving some kind of heavy farm machinery, and my fingers were mangled to leave only a single, stubby nubbin where previously I had sported ten beautifully slender digits, I’d still have been able to count the entirety of half-decent iPad blogging apps on one hand.

Today, though, I’d have to start counting on my toes, as Black Pixel software, the company behind Apple award-winning app Versions, had launched Posts, and you might like to call it the Reeder of blog publishing.

The WanderFolio is a new iPad case from Speck that combines a form-fitting cradle with a sleek, faux leather cover. Its special feature is that its front cover opens up to reveal a series of six “hideaway” pockets, designed to house your documents, cash, and credit cards while you’re on the go.

The Tiki, from Blue Mic ($59), is a compact USB microphone designed to give you great audio for Skype calls and voice notes in rooms with even moderate ambient noise. And while Blue is known for creating mics that sound as good as they look, the Tiki’s beauty is only skin deep.

Twelve South is really good at making attractive, beautifully packaged and well marketed accessories for Apple lovers.

Often, their accessories seem born from a small idea — what if your MacBook could look like a book, or what if you could attach your iPad to an arm connected to your Mac — but through excellence in execution, these small ideas quickly become indispensible.

The BackPack, first released in late 2009, is such an indispensible small idea: a little shelf to for your iMac or Apple Display. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve ever struggled with a way to manage the external drives or devices connected to your desktop, that little aluminum shelf quickly became such an integral element to your Mac that it’s as if Apple had built one into every Mac.

Now here comes the BackPack 2, and it’s better than the original in every way.

It has the word “cox” in the name, and you can play with it whilst naked in the bathroom, but that’s where the childish jokes end. The ECOXPRO is a waterproof speaker with a snug and safe chamber inside that will fit your iPhone or iPod, along with your cash and keys, all the while blasting out the tunes to everyone trying to relax on the beach.

If there were ever a medal for Most Staggering Misnomer, the iPhone would find itself in serious contention for gold; the little glass slab is so stuffed with useful functions it makes the “phone” element of its name ridiculously misleading. Consider the action-packed roles my iPhone has filled over the years: Bicycle computer; running partner; navigator; wilderness scout; survival guide; weather advisor; and visual story-telling tool, not to mention being able to score all these adventures to music. And yeah, it makes calls too.

The iPhone is the most indispensible piece of hardware since man discovered sharp rocks. Problem is, the iPhone is also a fragile weakling, easily damaged by sharp rocks, gravity or water — things that exist in copious amounts around precisely the places you’d want to use the iPhone to adventure with.

The people at LifeProof, however, have recognized this paradox, and they think they have a solution. They’ve come up with a quiver of clever, well-designed, mission-specific exoskeletons that work as a seamless, modular system, all designed around the core armor: a lithe, shock-resistant, fully sealed (yes, waterproof) iPhone 4/s case. And for the most part, it works brilliantly.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, the only thing I was hunting down more than free drinks and after-parties, was power outlets. Yes sir, I love my purdy white iPhone 4S, but on days of heavy use, I find I need to charge it two times or more before the day is through.

The Dual USB Power Bank from Verbatim (about $65), provides a a massive amount of portable power that should keep anyone from outlet-hunting in the inky-shadows of Vegas convention halls. But the question is, how does it perform while charging two connected devices or the power-hungry new iPad?

The new Zaggfolio keyboard and case for the iPad 3 is a very weird little number. At first glance it looks like any other folio case, a protective book which holds the iPad in one side and has a keyboard embedded behind the front cover. But this one is modular, with a removable keyboard. And it comes in colors, although the plastic used to do this looks like it has been cut by (a shaky, alcoholic) hand.

And if you want to use the case without the keyboard (which is actually possible, as they’re available separately) then you’re going to end up with the dumbest-looking case around.

Despite all this, the Zaggfolio is actually pretty great.

This isn’t the smallest headset. In fact, Motorola’s Elite Sliver Bluetooth Headset ($130) is actually bulkier than many other personal BT headsets. Its trick, though, is to hide most of the bulk behind the user’s ear, leaving just a sliver — hence the name — of technology visbile.

But the Sliver isn’t just a one-trick pony; its case also doubles as a battery that will top off the Sliver when the headset is housed in the case (which actually does triple duty as a charger).

It’s hard to believe that it was just a little more than a year ago that Apple released OS X Lion. Only twelve months later, and we’re now staring right down the maw of Apple’s ninth major release of Mac OS X: Mountain Lion.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion signifies a new approach on Apple’s part towards OS X updates: instead of going years between major releases, Cupertino is trying to take the rapid release approach that has worked so well for them with iOS and apply it to the Mac.

Mountain Lion, then, feels in many ways less like OS X 10.8 than OS X 10.7.5: a smaller, more tightly focused update continuing what OS X Lion started, taking iOS’s best ideas and bringing them to Mac.

Thanks to major breakthrough features like iCloud syncing, Notification Center, Sharing, AirPlay Mirroring and more, there’s less of a distinction in Mountain Lion between the Mac and iOS than ever. But is that a good thing, and how will it change the way you use your Mac?

Few camera bags are built keep your camera gear safe while you hike, bike, and conquer the wilderness like the manly man that you are. But the Flipside Sport 15L All-Weather camera bag from Lowepro ($135) was designed to do exactly that, and comes standard with some tricks you won’t find on your everyday camera sack.

This is the uNu Ex-Era battery case for iPhone 4 and 4S. It offers a degree of flexibility you won’t find in most other battery cases, although that flexibility comes with a drawback – namely that the case doesn’t feel as robust as some of its less flexible rivals. But you can’t have everything, all the time.

We bumped into neophyte Australian headphones-maker Audiofly in January, during a press-only event at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and gave two models in the four-model lineup a whirl. Their mid-level AF45 set sounded great for $50; but the next one I tried — the top-of-the-line AF78 ($200) — left me slack-jawed with disbelief; its sound knocked my socks off, even amid the cacophony of noisy journalists.

What makes the AF78 unusual is its speaker arrangement.

Many mid-to-high-end canalphones are powered by tiny armature speakers, while moving coil drivers are found pretty much everywhere except the very high end. Armatures are generally better at producing clean highs and mids, but can lack deep bass; moving coils, on the other hand, are generally not as good at reproducing the clarity of an armature. But the AF78 is part of an elite group of models  — like the Scosche IEM856m I reviewed last year — that employ both a moving coil speaker and a balanced armature in each ear, in an attempt to give the listener the best of both worlds. And it works spectacularly.