Up until recently, Apple accessory makers were unable to make Lightning cables with plugs as thin as Apple’s — they were required to use thicker plugs that sometimes had problems connecting to cases. At the 2015 CES, Just Mobile showed AluCable LED ($25), which uses newer Apple connectors to create the thinnest metal-jacketed Lightning cable yet, removing case compatibility issues while adding metallic style. Markedly improved over the prior AluCable at the same price, the new gold version matches the latest iPhone and iPad colors, as well.
The USB plug notably has a MagSafe-style LED built in that shifts color to indicate charging status, just like Apple’s laptops. Photos of that feature, plus details on a new reversible USB car charger, a new iPhone battery pack, and a golden version of Just Mobile’s iconic Encore stand, are all below…
As a particularly interesting addition to its very wide new range of cases, Incipio today debuted Prompt Notification Folio for iPad Air 2 ($90) — the first iPad case with an integrated OLED screen capable of displaying phone-style notifications, shared either from an always-connected iPhone or the iPad inside. Head below for a closer look. Expand Expanding Close
Having effectively challenged Jawbone with Jambox- and Big Jambox-sized speakers, Braven today introduced a collection of new models designed to directly challenge popular speakers released by Bose and Harman/Kardon. Balance ($150, above) is a relatively slim, highly attractive extruded oval speaker with two large front-firing drivers and two even larger side-mounted radiators. Offered in a variety of colors, it directly challenges Bose’s SoundLink Color with an ultra-simple design and surprisingly powerful sound.
Although Apple’s AirPlay wireless speaker technology has pretty much faded out of public view, there are still companies producing new designs to support the standard. Moshi today announced Spatia, a particularly attractive design combining respectable speakers, amplifiers, and fancy external materials including metallic and fabric accents. Standard AirPlay features such as lossless audio streaming and router-free Wi-Fi Direct are included, enabling Spatia to operate independently or on an existing Wi-Fi network.
The all-in-one system contains twin 1-inch tweeters, two 2.75-inch drivers, and a 4-inch downward-firing subwoofer, notably in a housing with a stand that keeps all of the speakers floating above the surface of a table. Moshi hasn’t compromised on the audio processing hardware, either, as it includes two DSP chips and two Class-D amplifiers to separately drive the high/mid and low frequencies. Audio can be adjusted by a Spatia speaker app, downloaded for free from the App Store. Moshi has not yet announced pricing or an availability date for the speaker.
A MagSafe charger smaller than Apple’s but made by a third-party? Ruggedized rubber hard drives from a company known for Mac-matching aluminum enclosures? Synchronized stereo speakers with color-shifting mood lights for your bedroom? Yes, the annual pre-CES Pepcom event took place in Las Vegas last night, and these were just a few of the products we spotted on the floor. Read on for more details…
Separately, Seek Thermal – maker of the $200 Seek Thermal Camera reviewed on 9to5Mac last month – has just shown a second version of the temperature-sensitive camera that’s set to be released in the next few months. Currently unpriced but planned to sell for a small premium over the original model, the Seek Thermal Camera with Zoom will be capable of zooming in up to three times by using a twisting front lens. More details and photos follow…
How often is merely showing up with a working lightbulb enough to attract a crowd? At a dimly-lit event held tonight by the Bluetooth SIG ahead of the 2015 CES, Avi-on demonstrated such modest magic using an early implementation of Bluetooth mesh wireless connectivity.
The company’s upcoming Bluetooth light switches ($30-$35), light dimmers ($40), and lightbulbs ($20) will be the backbone of an upcoming home lighting system with General Electric branding, and promise to eliminate the need for in-wall light switch wiring.
Every year, top-ranked Apple speaker maker iHome comes to CES with an impressive array of new products — including something to show off Apple’s latest technology — and it isn’t disappointing at the 2015 CES. In an advance briefing before the show officially opened, iHome revealed its first Apple HomeKit product, SmartPlug ($40), as well as some daring new speaker and headphone designs…
…like the first speaker we’ve seen hidden inside a beautiful drinking flask. It’s called SoundFlask, and comes in coat pocket- ($50) and home bar-sized ($100) versions. Even the smaller version sounds really good given its size, and the flask cap twists to adjust the volume. All that’s missing is the ability to actually hold fluids. Read on for more.
It’s that time of year again: CES, the mega-event in Las Vegas where every company except Apple releases its upcoming product roadmap. 9to5 has six people on the ground this year, and we’re covering big ticket items, as well as searching for the sort of hidden gold nuggets only the massive CES can deliver.
Qardio, maker of award-winning, smartphone-connected healthcare accessories including the already-available QardioArm wireless blood pressure monitor, was nice enough to sponsor us this year. And we’ve just had a chance to see two seriously smart new products it’s releasing in the spring, as well as its software platform for delivering health data to doctors.
If I had to choose one word to describe how Incipio’s past iPhone offGRID battery cases felt, it would probably be “svelte,” as they were all impressively thin and gently curved. Starting today, Incipio is shipping its first offGRID case for the iPhone 6, and it notably trades “svelte” for “edgy” design. Offered only in matte black, it’s called offGRID Express ($80), and Incipio claims it’s the first Apple-certified iPhone 6 battery case that’s actually available for consumers to purchase. This time, the back is somewhat angular, due in part to a larger battery pack than prior models, and the sides are equipped with the fancy metallic button protectors rival Mophie has only offered in its most expensive Juice Packs.
Incipio’s message is clear: by offering 3000mAh of power at an $80 price point, offGRID Express is practically daring Mophie – and any other Apple MFi-licensed manufacturer – to step up and take a swing at its value proposition. Yes, comparatively unknown vendors are selling cheaper options, and Tylt offers a 3200mAh, Apple-licensed alternative called Energi for $100, but offGRID Express actually matches it in recharging performance for a lower price. It’s positioned directly at consumers who care about both quality and cost, not just one or the other. Expand Expanding Close
Seagate and its LaCie subsidiary have announced five new hard drives just ahead of this week’s 2015 CES, including two new iOS-compatible wireless models and three new Mac-only disks. All except one will be available in January from the company’s web sites.
Seagate Wireless
Seagate Seven
Seagate Personal Cloud
LaCie Mirror
LaCie Rugged RAID
For iOS, the 500GB Seagate Wireless ($130) is an economical and portable, battery-powered hard disk designed to compete with G-Technology’s G-Connect and Western Digital’s My Passport Wireless. Just under 4″ on each side and less than an inch thick, Seagate’s version is designed to look fun, with your choice of green, blue, gray, red, or white matte housings, and uses integrated Wi-Fi to connect with iOS devices and Macs for media playback as well as Android/Windows/Chrome. It runs for nine hours between charges and can connect to 3 devices simultaneously.
Seagate Seven ($100) is a Mac-only alternative that promises to be the world’s thinnest portable hard drive. Made from 100% stainless steel, the enclosure is only 7mm thick and includes a USB 3.0 cable for connecting to a computer, giving up wireless in order to achieve its small size. In a break from traditionally boxy or rounded hard drives, Seven is actually slim enough to let you see the contours of the traditional hard disk mechanism inside. Three additional drives are discussed below…
As we begin 2015 — the year Apple has promised to release the Apple Watch it showed last September — there’s a somewhat comical debate underway in the media: how big of a success will the Watch actually be?
Although I’m not personally planning to buy an Apple Watch, three decades of using Apple products and over a decade of reviewing them have taught me that Apple now has only three types of launches: gigantic hits, hits, and near-hits. And those phrases are all relative.
Two of Apple’s “least popular” product families, the Apple TV and iPod, have sold in quantities most companies would kill for. These are devices that haven’t been meaningfully updated in several years, and many people have called the iPod “dead,” despite sales of 14 million units in the past year. Even as a semi-successful “hobby,” the Apple TV reached around 10 million customers in the last year, a larger group of users than the typical company can achieve in a whole lineup.
So it’s hard to call any modern Apple product a “flop,” but it’s also true that a few of its major releases — most notably the Apple TV — were particularly close to being misses in their first generations, requiring major price and/or feature changes before succeeding in the next generation. Where will the Apple Watch fit in Apple’s history? Today alone, we’ve seen predictions ranging from “2015 is the year of the Apple Watch” and “could change the way people live” to a somber prediction that it won’t be “the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.” Similar opinions have been circulating for months.
After reading both dire and overenthusiastic predictions, as well as measuring demand several months out from the release, my belief is somewhere in the middle: the Apple Watch will do better in its first year than the first-generation Apple TV, falling somewhere between the first-generation iPhone (6.1 million units, below Apple’s target of 10 million) and the original iPad (14.8 million units, wildly surpassing most estimates). The iPhone is huge now, but it wasn’t a “gigantic hit” in its first year, while the iPad roared out of the gate and has stayed pretty strong since then. Below, I’ll explain why I think the Apple Watch will wind up between them.
As 2014 comes to a close, there aren’t a lot of iPad Air 2-specific cases on the market, and some developers are already taking shortcuts — cutting extra holes in old iPad Air cases — just to get “iPad Air 1+2” products out. So when new cases are supposedly tailored just for the iPad Air 2, I’m interested in seeing how well they actually fit and protect Apple’s latest tablet, even if their designs are otherwise highly familiar. That’s why Skech’s Base ($45) and Skechbook ($40) are here.
They’re both fabric folios with iPad Air 2-sized plastic hard shells inside. Offered in black, blue, or pink, Base has rounded corners and feels like waxed canvas, while the black-only Skechbook has boxy, hardcover book-like edges and is wrapped in “vegan leather.” Just like Apple’s more expensive iPad Air 2 Smart Case, neither accentuates the Air 2’s thin body, but they work as basic protective and stand solutions.
Professional video editors and filmmakers have raved about G-Technology’s hard drives for over a decade. These users — day-one adopters of Apple’s Mac Pro and MacBook Pro computers — need a lot of hard disk space, fast interfaces, and above all else, reliability. Losing part or all of a project can kill a movie, so nothing is left to chance on the storage side. I’m not a video professional, but as a father, my family photos and home videos are some of my most valuable possessions, and I don’t want to lose them to a hard drive failure. Numerous recommendations led me to Hitachi GST subsidiary G-Technology’s G-Drives years ago, and now there’s a new entry-level model that’s affordable enough for everyone: G-Drive USB ($160-$400, available here for $150 and up).
G-Drive USB offers all the capacity, speed and reliability G-Tech drives are known for, but in a smaller enclosure with fewer ports on the back. I’ve been testing one for the past month, and it’s as excellent as the five earlier G-Tech drives I’ve used since 2006. G-Drive USB isn’t the cheapest hard drive around, but when you care about long-term reliability, it’s worth paying a premium for peace of mind.
The average iPad keyboard case sells for $100 or less, and there are now hundreds of options, mostly from companies based in China. But several developers have been selling deluxe iPad keyboard cases, using upscale metal housings and premium features to command $130-$180 asking prices. To that end, Belkin has debuted very early iPad Air 2 options called the QODE Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad Air 2 ($130, available now) and QODE Ultimate Pro Keyboard Case for iPad Air 2 ($150, currently available for pre-order).
As their “Ultimate” branding suggests, these are supposed to be Belkin’s best iPad keyboard cases, though only the Pro version really succeeds at justifying its price this time out. Below, we’ll explain why.
We take utter simplicity for granted when choosing wall chargers for Apple devices. Apple’s adapters each have one USB port and a relatively clear label identifying the device the port will charge. Most of RAVPower’s largest multi-port chargers are very clear about what their multiple ports can do: each port is either iPhone (1-Amp) or iPad (2.4-Amp) enabled, period. But SwitchEasy, an infrequent dabbler in electronic accessories, has overcomplicated its new four-port charger Power Amp ($50), sometimes styled PowerAmp. While it cosmetically looks almost as if it could be an Apple design, its ports are packed with confusion.
On the positive side, it’s relatively compact, and if you can look past its confusing labeling, its performance isn’t bad. Read on for more.
It’s Christmas Day, and if you were especially nice this year, you may have just found a new iPad under your tree. Apple’s tablets are able to do incredible things right out of the box, but they’re also easily damaged, and there are accessories that really help to expand their capabilities. If you want to make sure your iPad performs at its full potential, it’s a good idea to protect it and accessorize right away.
That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help new iPad owners choose the best accessories across a variety of different categories. Our top picks range from stands and cases to speakers, keyboards, game controllers, and much more. We also explain what’s near-mandatory, what’s optional, and what you can safely skip. Read on!
There are few things better than finding a new iPhone or iPod under your tree on Christmas Day. If you received an iPod, you’ll find enough in Apple’s box to start enjoying music, videos, and/or apps right away. iPhone users get all of those great features plus cellular telephone and Internet access. But these devices suffer from the same weaknesses: they’re fragile — the reason roughly 80% of iPhone owners use cases — and they depend upon external accessories for quite a few things. If you want to make the most of your Apple device, you’ll want to accessorize (and app-cessorize) it right away.
Our best iPhone accessory recommendations are similar across all current models. But they vary considerably from small to medium to big iPods. Read on for all of our top picks!
The first time I picked up Spigen’s overly-bulky Tough Armor case for the iPhone 6 Plus, I knew there was going to be a major new consideration when reviewing iPhone 6 Plus cases: the quantity and shape of case materials added to the already large device’s back and sides. Apple’s designers succeeded in crafting a really big iPhone that somehow still felt thin, smooth and comfortable enough in large hands — when bare — but Tough Armor’s hard edges and chunky frame made the 6 Plus feel awkward in even a large adult male’s hands and pockets.
Slimmer solutions were needed for the iPhone 6 Plus, and today, we’re looking at three of them: Griffin’s Reveal ($20, available here for $13), STM’s Dux ($30, available for $30), and Verus’s Damda Slide ($40, available here for $24). Reveal and Dux are highly similar to one another, differing mostly in texturing and corner protection, while Damda Slide is like Tough Armor, only more thoughtfully constructed and useful. It’s somewhat rare in that it offers “playthrough” or full-time access to the iPhone’s screen and side controls, while also including a wallet that can store three cards behind the iPhone. Most iPhone wallets require a large front flap that adds thickness and makes instant screen access inconvenient.
Over the past decade I’ve been reviewing cases for Apple devices, people have occasionally asked how I can find new ways to write about products that are so similar to one another. My answer: I focus on the differences, and sometimes find fascinating how something that worked or didn’t work for one Apple device has flipped for another device.
SwitchEasy has been making cases for almost as long as I’ve been reviewing them, and quickly developed a reputation for outstanding value across budget-priced options. But something changed over the last couple of years, and the cases have shifted from mostly clear hits to a mix of hits and misses. The company’s latest releases for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPad Air 2 are so numerous and up and down that I’m not going to cover all of them. But for different reasons, two new models — Numbers for iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus, and Rave for iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2 — are worthy of a quick spotlight today.
Last week, we reviewed the first iPhone 6 Plus battery pack we’ve tested, MOTA’s unauthorized but value-laden Battery Case for iPhone 6 Plus. Now a maker of stylish charging accessories called Tylt has debuted what it says is the first Apple-authorized battery case for the iPhone 6, the Energi Sliding Power Case ($100). Officially shipping in mid-January, Energi continues the sled-style battery case design we first saw years ago in Mophie’s original Juice Pack (below), though with two critical differences: for the same price, it includes a 3200mAh rechargeable cell, and a detachable case that can be used alone when you don’t need spare power.
While it’s not the perfect battery case for iPhone 6 due to some small issues, Energi comes very close. Read on for all the details.
Olloclip isn’t the only maker of lenses for iPhone cameras, but after testing options from a dozen vendors, it’s the one I’d call the best at delivering reliably good combinations of quality and practicality. Its latest accessory is the 4-in-1 Lens for iPhone 6/6 Plus ($80), an updated continuation of its longest-running and most popular series of iPhone lenses. Bundled with everything from a lanyard to a set of three colored plastic clips, this version of 4-in-1 now works with two different iPhone 6 sizes, as well as both front FaceTime and rear iSight cameras.
This cross-model, twin-camera versatility comes at the cost of some added complexity, however, and an issue from earlier Olloclip lenses — the lack of broad case compatibility — is still a factor here. But if you’ve been looking for a way to add wide angle and macro capabilities to your iPhone, the 4-in-1 is worth considering. There are plenty of details and illustrative photographs below.
The secret to understanding USB battery pricing is that you tend to get what you pay for: cheap batteries lose their charges faster and can bulge and leak over time. Other companies specialize in selling atypically nice batteries that last longer and work better. Just Mobile is a leader in quality batteries: for the past six years, its Gum series (shown below) has spanned every Apple device type, size, and speed, but it has never built a Lightning cable into a battery before. That changes with the January release of TopGum ($80), which advances the company’s prior state-of-the-art Gum++ model in two ways: an authentic Lightning cable’s integrated into the battery’s left edge, and a matching magnetic battery charging dock is included.
Of course, these features – and a choice of gold or gray metal exteriors – come at a premium over typical all-plastic batteries, so if you don’t need the cable or dock, you’ll be equally well-served with the company’s earlier batteries. Read on for the full story.
I’ve reviewed a lot of iHome clock radios over the past nine years. They weren’t all formulaic, but there was a very clear evolutionary line from the original 2005-vintage, iPod-only iH5 to the iPad-ready iDL95 released last year: take two speakers, stick a clock in the middle, center a dock on the top, then make the enclosure sort of flat but pleasantly curvy. iHome had a winning general concept and look, which it updated annually with small feature, color, and shape tweaks. But its new $120 model iBN10 breaks the mold in several ways.
The dock’s gone, the clock has been glammed up and shifted to the right, and there are four speakers inside, rather than the standard two. iBN10 is also atypically handsome, built and billed as an “executive music system” by discarding the faux metals that iHome’s midrange speakers have become known for, and adding speakerphone functionality. This isn’t iHome’s first Kleenex box-sized speaker, but it’s definitely the most sophisticated.
