Poundland iPhone/iPad Docking Station

March 24, 2012 | Comment

I am a big fan of gadgets and gadgeting bargains and regularly frequent Poundland to satisfy my need for gadgets on a budget so I was interested to see this docking station on a visit today. Having parted with my hard earned pound I am beginning to see that sometime there is very much truth in the old adage that you get what you pay for!

On the face of it the docking station looked good with a standard male iPhone port at the front plus a pass through female port at the back, along with a standard 3.5mm jack … Read the rest

PDair iPad Leather Case

March 23, 2012 | Comment

The nice people over at Gearzap, knowing my love of gadgets and iPads in particular, have sent me over a new iPad cover to review. I was particularly excited to see that it was a case from PDair, a brand that I am familiar with having first bought one of their cases for my Dell Axim 50 many years ago.

For those not familiar with PDair they concentrate on making quality cases for a variety of gadgets with distinctive white stiching. This one for the iPad is no different using a high quality leather and has a really nice … Read the rest

Cregle iPen for iPad

March 16, 2012 | 1 comment

So finally my iPen for iPad arrived after quite a few false starts. For those that don’t know the iPen was a project that was initially funded through crowd-funding site Kickstarter and is a sophisticated stylus for the iPad. Where this differs to traditional styluses is that this has a dongle that you plug into the iPad’s port and this allows the iPen to get a much better accuracy than normal. In theory it should be possible to do natural handwriting and drawings as if you were using paper.

So far all I have been able to do is open … Read the rest

iPen on its way

March 10, 2012 | Comment

After a much longer delay that had been expected in getting approval from Apple (now there’s a surprise) the iPen is finally on its way. Got this update this morning:

This tracking update has been requested by:
Company Name: Cregle Inc.
Name: Cregle
E-mail: [email protected]
________________________________________________________________________________

CREGLE of CREGLE INC. sent NEIL THOMPSON 1 FedEx International Economy package(s).
This shipment is scheduled to be sent on 03/09/2012.

I look forward to receiving it and reporting on just how well it works.… Read the rest

iPhone Tripod Adaptor

December 14, 2011 | Comment

Everyone’s talking about iphonography – taking pictures with your iphone rather than a standard camera. As the now well worn phrase goes “The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You”.

The iPhone camera is pretty good for a phone, particularly on the 4S, and it is always in my pocket so available in a way that my “other” camera isn’t. That said there are times when I just want to do things other than point and shoot and that is where this little gadget comes in.

It’s serves two purposes as you can see from the pictures below. Firstly … Read the rest

iPad 2 and the smart cover

July 1, 2011 | Comment

So I have finally succumbed and swapped my iPad 1 for a sleek new iPad 2. The most noticeable change is the performance boost. My old iPad was beginning to get very sluggish and on apps that I use regularly, such as Pulse, it was becoming unusable. So it has become usable once again.

With it I also picked up a smart cover, the magnetised, folding cover come stand designed just for the iPad 2. And so far I just don’t know what I think about it. On the one hand it covers the screen offering protection, although only to … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Now This is Getting Ridiculous

November 7, 2010 | Comment

I wrote a while back about the stupid amount of time my iPad backup was taking and moaned that it had taken a ridiculous three hours. My solution to this was to use BackOff to disable the automatic backups during sync. However, this means that if there is ever a problem you cannot do a restore so it is important to do the occasional backup, which is what I did yesterday afternoon and now, some, 16 hours later is still only 75% of the way through!

Let me repeat that…

My iPad backup is going to take a massive 21 … Read the rest

Orientation lock becomes mute button on iPad iOS 4.2

September 19, 2010 | Comment

There are lots of posts on the net right now about the first beta of Apples iOS 4.2 and you can read a Top 10 new features here.

One of the changes is to turn the orientation lock button on the iPad to be a mute button. Well hold on a minute who checked with me that was something I wanted? Where’s the friendly but terse email from Steve Jobs checking that was going to work for me? I use that button A LOT and if I need to mute I press the volume down for a second and guess … Read the rest

The Ultimate iPad Travel Kit

September 11, 2010 | Comment

I have found my ultimate iPad travel kit that consists of:

– An Apple wireless keyboard
– 3 mifi
– Portable, adjustable, folding stand from eBay

It’s like having a Macbook that you can break down into its constituent parts. I just sling them into my case and off I go. I am finding that I am using my laptop less and less and now never use my desktop at home. Who said the iPad was just a big iPhone?

… Read the rest