Apple did a great job with the AC adapter for its laptops, which allow you to wrap the cords around them for more organized travel. Alas, the company passed on that opportunity with the iPhone, leaving no great options for tucking away its Lightning cable, an issue others have tackled. The I’m Tidy is a small silicone covering for Apple’s standard iPhone wall charger that allows you to wrap your lightning connector around it. As a bonus, it will support your iPhone upright atop the wall charger when it’s plugged in. The bit of silicone is expected to ship in June 2014 for backers for $25 CAD after the early bird tier runs out.
Tag: iPhone
An early Kickstarter success story was the olloClip, a nifty add-on lens kit for the iPhone that earned more than four times its campaign goal in 2011. Since then we’ve seen other successful lenses. But for the Moment, one team is using its cinematic lens design chops to devise a 2x telephoto and wide-angle lens that it claims will offer unparalleled quality. Alas, their output and perhaps honor has been tragically degraded by Kickstarter. As one might expect, they’re starting off with the iPhone but are working on a Galaxy option as well. Other phone users are out of luck as the right match of size and weight was paramount in the design process, according to the interview-centric pitch video. With great quality comes great aversion to cheapness. The lenses could be improving your iSight by February 2014 at $49 for either or $99 for the set.
The Premise. As smartphones have grown exponentially more powerful, battery life has been incapable of keeping up. Active smartphone users often have to charge their phone once or twice a day, and that means bringing a charger to wherever they need to go. The problem is, these chargers aren’t as portable as the devices they give life to.
The Product. A followup from the Portland team that delivered the similar Twig charging cable that gained over three times its funding goal, the Torso is the spork of charging devices. This all-in-one charging device is an extremely portable charging device for both iPhone and Android devices. At about the length of a thumb and the thickness of a Samsung Galaxy S4, the Torso can easily slide into your pocket discreetly with all your other essentials. The Torso also has moldable legs that allow it to double as a cord-wrapping device and triple as a tripod that props up the phone vertically. (And you’re not one of those folks who take vertical video, right?) Likely due to the thinness of the iPhone Lightning connector — which was not supported by the Twig — the iPhone version has a small grippy head to hold it steady; this reduces the flatness of the form factor somewhat.
The Pitch. The simple campaign video gets the point across straight away. It starts off by demonstrating the issue we’ve all faced with tangled cords and charging cables, and comparing that to the simplicity that the Torso provides.
The Perks. Backers can pick up the miroUSB verison of the Torso for Android and Windows Phones for $17, a 30-pin version for older iPhones and iPods at $17, and the Lightning version for $25, a bit of a premium over the relatively similar to the $19 price tag of the 0.5 meter charging cable from Apple. Shipment of the Torso to begin in April 2014 — a pretty decent bet considering the team was just a couple of weeks late delivering its first Kickstarter project to which the Torso is so similar.
The Potential. The Torso is a refreshing perspective of what used to be a one dimensional product. There are cheaper and smaller on-the-go charging cables, but particularly for those up for a quick video chat, it’s a versatile bridge between a nearby USB port and your smartphone.