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A blog dedicated to the interesting, scandalous, useful and cutting edge in the world of men’s style, fashion and grooming.
We usually stay pretty far away from smokeless cigarettes—the “chemical kazoo” aspect kills it for us—but the pushback against public smoking may finally have created a device so strange, we have no choice but to take notice. Here’s a summary: there’s tobacco, and there are drags, but there doesn’t seem to be any smoke.
We’re not much for the high-profile gadget hustle, which is why we’ve given the iPad circus a pretty wide berth this week. But we will say that, as men of style, we’re glad its’ not pocket-sized.
The past couple years have seen a flood of slightly-too-large plastic bricks arrive on the market, each indispensable enough to pose a serious threat the shape of the American pocket. In case you’ve forgotten, we’ll say it again: the less you have in your pants, the better they look. You’re running a risk with anything larger than a RAZR. (Remember those?) But that kind of logic doesn’t do very well against the draw of an iPhone.
Which is why we were happy to see this year’s gamechanger is too large to fit into anything other than a bag. Surely this time around, we could have a gadget that didn’t deform the world’s pant legs or violate any unspoken laws of decorum.
Then, of course, we saw this…
When we ran across this hand-powered charger, we were foolish enough to think it was actually the first of its kind, but it turns out there’s a slightly chunkier emergency charger that’s already shipping.
The Yogen (hat tip) charges up with a string-pull mechanism that might be a little bit easier than finger spinning, and if you’ve got $40 handy, you can get one before the month is out. We’re not wild about the see-through case…but if it’s staying in your glove compartment, we doubt it’ll be a problem.
This week’s CES has already provided a potentially phone-saving piece of gadgetry, but it looks like there are a few more telephonic tricks up its ample sleeve.
The next time you run out of juice just as you’re calling for directions—or in the middle of any declarations of undying affection you may have coming your way—you can spin this doohickey around your finger and get a few minutes of power to finish things off in a suitable manner. Keep it in a desk drawer or a glove compartment, and you may never go flat again. So far it’s still a concept, but with a little luck we’ll have it in our pockets before too long.
While everyone else is thinking about the latest, greatest smartphone (excuse us, superphone), we’re more concerned about all the gadgetry we’ve left in the backs of cabs over the years. Fortunately, it looks like there’s a gadget for that.
The ZOMM is a silicon-packed keychain that sounds an alarm whenever you move an unhealthy distance from your brand new phone. The wireless leash works via Bluetooth, so you can also use it as a speakerphone, but the real point is to get a priceless wakeup call just as you’re leaving the coffee shop—or, depending on your luck, just as the cab pulls away.
If you left Inglourious Basterds with a free-floating desire for Nazi blood…you’re not alone.
Stranded without a game version—something about “cinema,” we’re not sure—a group of free-floating basterphiles has taken a vigilante approach to the problem, creating a side-scrolling scalpfest for the iPhone that allows players to shoot and slash their way to 100 Nazi pelts. Sadly, they aren’t working their way towards a theatrical finale—really the setting and scalp fixation are the only things in common with the film—but it should still be good for keeping any holiday flights interesting…and bumping Tarantino a few notches up in your yearly top 10 list.
The road trip is one of the most enduringly low-tech pastimes—all you need is gasoline and patience. But if you had an iPhone handy, it probably wouldn’t hurt.
On the Road is a website/smartphone app designed specifically for highway meandering, offering location-pegged blogging tools to map out every last memorable spot for in a 21st century travelogue. You’ll be able to upload pictures, video and whatever musings you can muster via their iPhone and Android apps, or just blog-worthy text messages for the low-tech. Fair warning: This does not mean you’re too cool for postcards.
Flash sequencers like this one were one of our favorite time-wasters of 2009, but they’ve been remarkably slow making their way to the tangible world. The first big step was the Tenori-On, but the thousand dollar price tag and cryptic controls were enough to scare away the casual fiddler market.
The Bliptronic (hat tip) offers a fifty dollar version of the same, putting it well in the reach of less ambitious bleepsters. The controls should be familiar to internet denizens, and—should you be struck with a flash of inspiration—there’s all manner of fun to be had by hooking multiple models up together, running them through effects modules, or even a little light circuit-bending. It’s definitely on the lo-fi end of things, but that’s just part of the charm.
Polaroid devotees tend to be a pretty crafty lot, and it looks like all that tinkering finally paid off. The Austrian experimentalists at Polar Premium just released a limited edition set of film called Fade to Black that does a whole lot more than the average strip of film. Over the 24 hours after exposure, it, well, fades to black.
There’s an extra chemical cocktail alongside the usual film, so it cycles through a series of increasingly dark exposures after you take it, before eventually blacking out entirely. It’s a pretty smart trick for a camera that’s ephemeral to begin with, and we wouldn’t be surprised if the resulting snaps got a lot more attention than otherwise. The lesson is something like “live in the moment”—or at least 24 hours at a time.
Of course, if you’re particularly attached to the snap, there are a few tricks you can use to stop the march of time…but where’s the fun in that?
The iPhone’s been ruling the gadget world for upwards of two years now, but it’s finally got a worthy competitor. As of today, it’ll be splitting the gadget-obsessed market share with the Motorola Droid, a Google-powered, open source contender for the title of Best Phone Ever.
The big additions are a Blackberry-style physical keyboard for those tired of touchscreen tapping, along with a supercharged navigation system courtesy of Google Maps, but the real pull is a chance to get a little techier. Unlike the iPhone, the Droid lets you customize just about everything about the interface, with the help of third-party apps, downloadable skins and old-fashioned tinkering. If you feel like making the gadget your own, it’s easy to do—unlike the iPhone, which will always belong to the folks at Cupertino.
If you’re looking for a more thorough blow-by-blow, we recommend this one…but at this point, you might as well just see it for yourself.
The cigarette case might be the perfect accessory. It’s palm-sized, functional, and leaves lots of room for cool design touches. The only problem: As you may have heard, those things’ll kill you.
But there may be a replacement in the works. These slim leather-and-steel hard drives from Brinell fill the same empty spot in your jacket pocket, but they manage to fit 160 to 500GB in there. That means that instead of a pack of Nat Shermans, you’ll be carrying around your resumé, Miles Davis’ first eight albums, and the entire third season of The Sopranos with a little room left over for any crucial Flickr pics you may run across. Not bad for a trinket.
We warned you before, and now it’s happening. Google is taking over your voicemail, and even though resistance isn’t exactly futile, we’re not sure why you’d bother.
As of Monday, you can import Google Voice to your current phone number, which means that, among other things, you’ll never have to listen through your voicemails again. Once you’re plugged into the Google Voice network, you can convert all your voicemails to text and sort through them like emails, which means you won’t have to skip through Aunt Gladys’s dictation of her travel arrangements before you hear from your Thursday night date. It’s simple, easy, and it’s the first step in a long road that most likely leads to the end of the phone bill.
But for now, let’s take it one step at a time.
In the wake of our earlier etiquette lesson, you may still be wondering what in the world Google Wave actually does. Luckily, the internet’s tendency towards one-note regurgitated jokes has produced what may be the ultimate user’s guide to the ornate messaging tool. Instead of a dry tech demonstration, this video walks you through one of the most memorable scenes in Pulp Fiction via Google Wave, offering an effortless, Rosetta Stone-style explanation of embedded image searching and conversation replay and various other previously confusing gadgets. It’s everything you need to know…and it’s hilarious.
Photo via Eric TrineIn a heartening bit of news for retro gadget fans, Polaroid has announced they’ll resume production of instant film and the iconic one-step camera. We’re not sure what brought on the year-long production stutterstep, but we imagine the wave of nostalgia-driven art and digital filters made them realize they were giving up a pretty good thing. Not everyone wants their photos on Facebook…
The first Google Wave invites went out late last week, which means the next couple weeks should see the ground breaking email/instant message/document sharing hybrid spreading through the public at a buzzworthy rate. On the off-chance you’ve missed the hype, we’ll sum it up for you: Wave reinvents email as a long string of chatroom-style reply-all messages, viewable all at once to everyone involved. TechCrunch is calling it the dawn of passive-aggressive communication (they seem to think that’s a good thing), but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In the interest of progress, we to suggest updates to email etiquette. It’s an incomplete list, but it should keep you safe for long enough to figure out what’s kosher in the new medium.
Prepare your eulogies. The button is not long for this world.
TechCruncher and professional prognosticator MG Seigler just rounded up a few recent Apple and Microsoft advances and came to one solid conclusion about the future: it involves a lot of touchscreen-tapping. Keyboards and remotes are being replaced by tablets and smartphones, and the first casualties will be the strangely pleasing mash of buttons that’s sitting in front of you right now. We’ll miss it—hey, we still have a typewriter somewhere—but we’re not about to stand in the way of progress.
Just savor every keystroke.
Chalk it up to the long tail if you want, but niche tastes are starting to get their due on the iPhone. It started with ambient museum pieces…but now developers have worked their way around to something a little more fun.
Outsider troubadour Daniel Johnston just released his first iPhone app, a Mario-style platform-jumping game featuring characters from his artwork, music from his recordings and the same sense of addled optimism that pervades just about everything he does. The froglike main character should look familiar from a mural or a t-shirt or two, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen him jump.
If you’re looking for it in the iTunes shop, the game is titled “Hi, How Are You,” after the mural’s inscription. (We’re guessing “Jeremiah the Innocent” wasn’t catchy enough.)
These EarPollution Timbres have been out for a few months, but they’re just now rising to the top of our audiophile pile, for a couple of reasons. For one, those wooden nubs aren’t just for show: They act as anchors for the mini-speakers, providing acoustic backing that allows for a thicker mid-range, bass that’s present without being overpowering and…well, better sound.
But more importantly, they’re equipped for the new generation of player/phones. If you’ve got the Timbres plugged into your iPhone and your boss happens to call in the middle of a drum solo, you can carry on talking thanks to a microphone planted on the cord at chin level.
Which leads us to the most recent addition to the gentlemanly code: As with all Bluetooth headsets, if you aren’t using it right this minute, you should probably take it out of your ears. Consider yourself warned.
The world of Flickr photography is massive, but it doesn’t take much browsing before one wishes for something a little more tangible. But that’s nothing the internet can’t solve…
The UK-based Biscuit Tin lets you interact with online snaps the way you would with developed stills: you can spread them on the floor, check inscriptions on the back, and generally get the kind of object-pleasure that’s so hard to come by in the virtual sphere. And since you’re drawing from your entire flickr feed, you’ll have a very big tin to sort through.
Inboxes are pretty cluttered these days, and there are more than a few startups clamoring to clean them up. The latest is one called Gist, which aims to integrate email and social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to give you a beefed-up version of your Outlook Contacts. But as often happens with Big Picture tech ideas, there’s a side effect that’s rapidly becoming the main story: You get to rank your friends.
Instead of arranging emails by time like every other PopMail app, Gist uses the power of social media to rank your contacts from most important (boss, date, tailor) to the somewhat less important (chain-mail loving aunt, tech-savvy president). The good news: you’ll get a head start on the next meeting request. The bad news: If it catches on, getting a foothold in a new contact’s inbox will get a whole lot harder.
Maybe you could send them a telegram?
We’ve gotten lucky with the latest batch of smart phones, but don’t be fooled: Good-looking tech is in extremely short supply. And while external hard drives are finding their way onto more and more desks, this is the only one we’ve seen that won’t throw off your modernist feng shui.
LaCie has named it the Little Disk, but the design comes courtesy of British industrial designer Sam Hecht, moonlighting from his day job at Muji—which might explain the Japanese simplicity at work. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is drooling.
Good books get all the press but a good sentence is worth quite a bit on its own, especially if you’re trying to get through it on an elevator ride. And with tweets, status updates, and email signatures popping up just about everywhere, a perfect one can get surprisingly far.
That’s where Words Move Me comes in. Ostensibly a twitter clone, it’s devoted to those perfect turns of phrase that would be read aloud to the living room in simpler times. Nowadays, they’re posted on the internet and—once synergy catches up with things—auto-tweeted, transformed into Facebook quotes and generally set loose into the many-splendored world of social media. Even better, the site was set up by Sony to promote their new Kindle clone, which means you’ll be able to direct the whole affair from a handheld device about the size of…well, a book.
Unless you’re an unusually big fan of the radio, traffic information can be remarkably hard to come by. Luckily, anyone with a smartphone is about to get a new secret weapon.
Non-smart phones have been having a pretty bad year, but it’s nothing a few good designers can’t fix.
This Vertu concept model, dubbed the void, wouldn’t be much use on your email, but it should be eye-catching enough to make up for it. The functional guts of the phone are tucked behind the screen, so the buttons can be spooled out over the bottom half like a roll of electrical tape without losing out on anything important.
We’re skeptical about it reaching the market—who would bankroll it?—but phones like this could be the last best hope for the simple cell phone. If they’re going to survive, they’ll have to make themselves cool somehow…
With Netflix, on-demand streaming and torrent sites on the march, the pool of movies you could watch tonight has grown to a truly bewildering size. Now you just need help finding the right one…
Luckily, as with the vast majority of your problems, the internet has this one covered.
It’s the human condition: We spend our lives in pursuit of happiness with no guide or direction as to what will fulfill us spiritually. We waste time on shallow pleasures, stumbling blindly towards a suggestion of joy, but lacking the means to even comprehend our own needs.
Clearly, this is a job for the iPhone.
Track Your Happiness (via PSFK) is an iPhone app that spot-checks your general well-being at random points throughout the day and after a few months, produces a fully rounded assessment of your emotional hot spots. You may discover you’re fairly reliably buzzed a few hours after a gym visit. After a six-hour Twilight Zone marathon? Not so much.
Use it right, and it might just lead you to a more balanced and fulfilling life…provided you can stop playing Tetris long enough to work it out.
You can usually count on Apple to be at least one gadget ahead of everyone else. So now that iPhones are rendering the average iPod obsolete, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ve got a third item up their sleeve ready to change the game yet again.
It’s all still guesses, but the smart money is on a tablet computer dropping just in time for Christmas, codenamed Cocktail and resembling either an enormous iPod touch or a hyper-intelligent dinner tray. (The above pic is an unofficial rendering, naturally.) It’s a gadget type that’s been seen at press events for years now, most notably from Microsoft, but they’ve never quite made it into stores. More importantly, it’s the ideal tool for the artsy endeavors Apple specializes in—graphic design, software editing, digital collage, and so on—provided they can convince their users to get rid of that keyboard.
It was fun for a while, but the thrill of social media is not what it used to be. After enough idle time, it gets to be a pain having that Facebook page that following you around—and not just because it still lists Clerks as your favorite movie.
With the help of augmented reality tech and facial recognition software, that pesky feeling is about to become very very real. This Augmented ID concept from Tat hones on a person’s face and proceeds to surround them with their various online simulacrums, from professional LinkedIn pages to the occasionally ill-advised Facebook quote. You’ll be able to tailor what shows up—Tat even goes so far as imagining separate “work” and “play” profiles—but we can’t help wondering if you really want all that following you around.
On the bright side, you won’t have to worry about remembering anyone’s name.
Edison-style inventing keeps a pretty low profile these days, but there’s still a lot of would-be Qs out there, and they’ve got some ideas to show you.
The James Dyson Awards (hat tip to The Awl are going on right now, gathering thousands of engineers and inventors to compete for a chunk of sweet vacuum-cleaner money by sketching up personal railway systems and inventing new ways for doors to open. There’s a few days left to vote, but we’ve already found a favorite.
This German heads-up windshield display is called the Bionic Cockpit, and it brings augmented reality into the automotive world, along with a pleasantly botanical design motif and a lot of downright useful information conveyed in a simple and effective way. Detroit’s in no condition to buy them out…but maybe Munich’s interested?
Over the past decade, the internet has left a long trail of upended industries in its wake—most notably music, publishing and feline photography—but so far the phone companies have skated by more or less untouched.
There have been a few attempts at startup telephony, most notably Skype and the recently revived Ooma but one of the heavy-hitters is about to give it a shot too. We’ll give you a hint; it starts with a G…
Navigating a major sporting event can be pretty bewildering if you don’t have the right equipment. But it’s nothing a Smartphone can’t solve.
This Android app from IBM gives you a guide to every taxi stand, restaurant, and bathroom, along with live feeds from every court giving a blow-by-blow for each match. And, in case you want something a bit more direct than Google Maps, it gives you all the info in a heads-up display through the phone’s camera. Think of it as the difference between “north-northeast” and “that way.”
Computer peripherals tend to be a bit lacking in the way of design sense, but there’s always the exception…
This brushed steel optical mouse from VAIO is one of the better-looking pieces of computer equipment we’ve seen so far, at least among those without an apple on them. And given the amount of time you spend moving a mouse around each day, it’s worth it to get one with a bit of style to it.
Unfortunately, like most enviable gadgets, at the moment you’ll only find it in Japan.
Apple just finished their annual developer conference, where they rolled out a new line of MacBooks and the iPhone 3GS, but otherwise the pickings were pretty slim.
There were a handful of new features that non-Apple firms have been refining for years (voice commands, MMS, and remote medical tech among others) along with a long string of incremental updates, but the most impressive function was something they picked up from a 30 Rock episode. Absent-minded techies: your time has come.
Internet radios like this one have been a favorite with the CES crowd for some time, but they haven’t quite had the content to break through to the mainstream. A box lets you stream audio feeds through something a bit more lush than computer speakers, but so far, most of the feeds come from FM stations, which isn’t quite tempting enough to make us toss out our antennas.
But it’s coming along. Amazing Radio (via PSFK) just launched in the UK with a roster of all unsigned artists. The artists get the lion’s share of the mp3 sales, but mostly they get some much-needed exposure and a chance to get their songs on the airwaves…or audio streams, as the case may be.
Of course, the jury’s still out on their choice in bands…but at least they won’t have to worry about keeping their signal clear.
Radio has had a lot of fun jumping into the internet age, but Sirius XM has come surprisingly late to the game. Their satellite radio app is gradually making its way to the iPhone, which is good news for anyone who’s already a subscriber, but the timing could be a bit better.
By now, Pandora and a few web radio apps have already staked out the iPhone’s music section, along with the iTunes, which enjoys a pretty serious home-court advantage. Sirius has volume on their side—hundreds of channels broadcasting 24 hours a day adds up to a lot of tunes—and enough resources to put together something genuinely exciting. As to what they’ll come up with…we’ll have to stay tuned.
When it comes to headphones, we’ve always preferred keeping things simple, black, and as hi-fi as possible.
All of which makes us very partial to AiAiAi’s new pair of DJ headphones. They’re professional-grade, which means they’re designed to overpower noisy club speakers…so the gabber next to you in line at the coffee shop won’t stand a chance.
We suggest christening it with a little mid-70s Bowie, just like the professionals.
Google’s been showing a healthily geeky interest in astronomy ever since they turned Google Earth skyward, but we never thought of what they could do with a smartphone…
Consider us pleasantly surprised. Google just capped off its annual Searchology conference with a sneak peek at a new mobile app called SkyMap, a constellation-finder program that makes finding the big dipper as easy as holding up your phone.
The app gives you a mobile map to the stars that’s responsive to the location and direction of the phone, which means you should always know exactly what you’re looking at. And if you’ve got a particular constellation in mind (Capricorn is always a crowd favorite), the app will point you directly to it. Of course, it’s not the first electronic map to the stars, but it’s the first one that’s integrated so smoothly with the actual sky.
It’s still pretty far from mass production, but when it makes it through, it should be one of the more impressive mobile apps around…and a potential killer app for Android phones.
