Leaving the home with your keys, your wallet and your phone is usually all you need. But what if you worry about your own safety. Muggings happen, and they’re not usually as entertaining as when it happened to that girl in that TV show with the city and all the fashion and stuff. Packing some pepperspray is never a bad idea, and the SmartGuard case for the iPhone features a special compartment to do just that. A specially shaped can of Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) fits right in there, and a special plastic tab prevents accidental discharge. As soon as you take the can out of the case, it’s ready to shoot 6 half second bursts of OC, at up to 5 feet away.
This unfortunately appears to be available in Germany, Switzerland and Austria only. It’s €37.50 for the case, and additional pepperspray bottles are €20.
We posted about an iPhone case with handgrips back in December, but that thing was ugly and looked cheap and guess what, it didn’t meet its Kickstarter funding goals. But today there’s something similar, only this one’s a real product and you can buy it now. It’s called the M-27 from iSteady Shot, and is a solid aluminum case with an detachable “crystal clear” 37mm wide angle/macro lens which gives you a 130 degree view. The handgrips let you steady your shot somewhat, and there’s also a standard camera mount for true stabilization. This is for iPhone 4/4S only.
And you can actually purchase this now for $99. Hit the jump for a bunch of pictures and links.
So for some reason the Internet is in love with Victorian-era steam-powered science-fiction. We call it Steampunk and endless instruments have been made in the style. Some clearly still love it, others, like me, don’t. Depending on which side you fall, the above iPhone “Victrola” amplifier from Etsy seller Will Rockwell (will he really? lulz anyone?…. no?… ok…) may make you smile or cringe. It’s entirely passive but the fact that it’s essentially a brass instrument does mean that it imparts a particular tone to your sound. Better yet, a little handle lets you open a vent that changes this tone at will. It’s of course really hard to speak of these without hearing, so take a gander at the below video to see what we mean.
The opening for your phone is lined in leather so no worries about scratches. And the horn comes from an actual trumpet, so the horn section in your songs will sound particularly interesting.
This is all fine and dandy until you realize that his creation is $500. That’s almost the price of the phone itself, so we imagine that you have to really like steampunk for this to make any sort of sense.
If you buy this case and some accident damages your iPhone 4/4S while being protected with the case, the company will try to fix it. If it doesn’t manage, it’ll send you a new phone. We’re not sure what’s to stop someone from buying this once their phone has broken and claiming it happened after. The only precaution taken seems to be a requirement to register the Cellhelmet within 30 days of purchase, but we’re not sure just what that’s supposed to stop. At $40 a pop, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a new phone. And even if there is some way to prevent fraud that we’re not seeing, the idea is pretty neat nonetheless. It’s not everyone who has carrier issue insurance, so for one year of peace of mind, $40 is not a lot of cash.
The Cellhelmet is a Kickstarter project that has already been funded. The cases look alright, but lets face it, the real product here is the insurance.
Remote controlled cars are really old tech. But what’s relatively new is the replacing of the controller with an iPhone. These little HotWheels iNitro SpeedCars use an application that gives you a total of 5 different ways to control them. The first is using regular on-screen analog sticks. According to CNet, this causes the car to be herky jerky, with fine tuned control being difficult. Another one uses the iPhone accelerometer and does allow for a little bit more finesse. A third option involves a trackpad like operation, where dragging your finger on screen will cause the little car to move accordingly. A fourth is a set of predefined shapes, like a figure 8, that the car is able to reproduce. The final option is the most interesting, as it lets you draw a pattern (any pattern) and the HotWheel will follow it.
You should know that the iPhone connects to the cars via an IR adapter which is cumbersome to setup but works well once it is. The cars come in 8 different models and will set you back a modest $40. For what looks like tons of fun at any age (even if it’s squarely aimed at 8 year olds…), it’s not a whole lot of money.
The market for iPhone docks is crowded, to say the least. Most of the ones we’ve come across simply show endless permutations of various features, but very few do anything other than being a dock. Well, if it’s going to be in the house, shouldn’t it be able to do more? Take JVC’s NX-BX3 for instance. It doubles as a little table. It’s got all the usual dock-y things, like SRS StudioSound HD and an FM tuner, but it can also be used to do a variety of other things like: putting a vase on it, putting a glass of milk on it, tossing your keys when you come home from work. The sky’s the limit, really.
We don’t know how much it’ll cost, but it will be available in Japan later this month.
The POPA accessory might have made a bit more sense back in September 2011 when it first appeared in the Amazon store, since iOS 5 hadn’t been released yet. So the idea of a standalone button to trigger your camera was appealing. But in a way, it still is now, if only because it’s big and red and so conspicuous. It has to work with its own picture taking app, of course, since the iPhone’s native one isn’t compatible with it.
The only problem is the price: $75. You gotta ask yourself just how badly you want a big red button and a grip…
There may be occasions where you want to see what’s going on on both sides of the iPhone 4/4S’s camera. Say you’re filming a dialogue. One way you can accomplish this is with a simple device like the one you see above. Some plywood, strategic grooves, and a mirror and suddenly you have “the world’s first handmade video mixer.” This is about as low-tech a solution as you can get, though the result is elegant if not professional looking. Sadly, the asking price is $90 for something that really looks like it could have been made in shop class. There’s some kind of attempt at justifying the it, what with it being a limited edition of 100 units and also the fact that it was “Conceived in Paris whilst recording a documentary about love and love after love.” So yeah, cute little product there. $90.
The list of textures you can get for the back of your iPhone is just as long as the one of cases you can purchase for it. In that sea of choice, every now and then we come across something that stands out, and we think this is certainly the case with these Material 6 wooden backs. These have been around for a couple of years so don’t go knocking on us for the tardiness, but we’re still certain some of you might enjoy knowing about Swirly Walnut, or Lacewood or even Figueroa back covers that this company makes. Now, they are complete back cover replacements, not stick on, which might help explain the $90 to $100 prices.
Related Tags: Cases, defense, iPhone
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By David Ponce
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