A round-up of this week's gadgets
Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera
With this latest launch from the erstwhile home of instant photography, the worm has turned. The last 10 years of mobiles has delivered phones with increasingly better cameras, with some phones now greedily gobbling up 20 megapixels and more. Polaroid’s new Smart Camera is almost like a camera with a phone built-in.
It’s an Android camera, so to speak, with the full connectivity, sharing and app- flexibility that that suggests. No calls, of course, but all the rest in terms of seamless wireless connection to social media. It has Bluetooth and optional 3G too. Its camera chops are what would be expected of a top-of-the-range point and squirt digital compact, with an optical zoom, scene presets and geotagging. And being a Smart Camera, it’s got a whole suite of editing features such as red-eye removal and cropping to finesse those 16 megapixel snaps before sharing them with your world.
Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera $299 (€225); available from polaroid.comnext month
Mu Foldable USB Adapter
This developed from a design challenge a couple of years ago to re-engineer the needlessly bulky three-square pin plug we and the UK use as standard.
In fact, this probably makes a little more sense than the eventual folding plug solution developed then, as the saving in our homes might be marginal, but being able to squeeze a USB adapter down to its minimum is a travel boon.
The Mu folds away to a barely credible 14mm thickness, like a small stack of business cards. Then with a simple click to open and twist, it’s a proper square-pin powerpoint, aimed at USB-powered mobiles.
The Mu reduces the space taken up by conventional adapters by 70 per cent. You can stick it in your pocket and, because the plug's pins are folded away, it's less likely to scratch a touchscreen in your bag or case. Plus it's an elegant slip of a design. Input AC 100-240V, output DC 5V 1Amp Mu Foldable USB Adapter £25 (€30) from themu.co.uk
12 Jot Stylus
Apparently one of Steve Jobs’s non- negotiable mantras (among many, it has to be said) when designing the iPhone was that the touchscreen wasn’t to need a stylus. Other PDAs and phones, like Palms and Sonys, had danced around this, but he wanted us to be able to use the device with our 10 built-in styluses (er, styli?).
It was yet another revolutionary call that we can hardly imagine any other way. But it has meant the exclusion of finer precision drawing on tablets in particular, despite their capability to handle it.
The Jot changes that, with a precision stylus that lets you write or sketch on all the main touchscreen phones and tablets including Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry as though you’re using a regular pen.
The trick is a tiny clear disc at the ballpoint tip of the Jot which lets you see where you’re writing, so now the tablet is a real notebook or sketchpad when you’re on the move. Steve probably wouldn’t welcome it, but he might approve of its pared-back aesthetics of aluminium and steel.
Comes in a range of colours. Jot Stylus $20 (€15) from adonit.net