Beamer, an iPhone case with a built-in LED light, will only be available for purchase if at least 500 people preorder it.
(Credit: Quirky.com)It's not like us to get too excited about an iPhone case, but this one shines--literally--because it's the very device I was wishing for last month while traveling in Europe.
This iPhone day shot of the Leaning Tower of Pisa turned out just fine, but my night shots didn't work at all. Beamer would have helped.
(Credit: Michelle Meyers/CNET)Beamer, as the name connotes, is an iPhone case with a built-in LED light you can turn on to use as both a flashlight and a camera flash. Just the thing I needed when I wanted to shoot the Leaning Tower of Pisa at night with my iPhone, having left my real camera back at our hotel.
And it sure would have helped in Paris when we returned at night to our historic apartment building and had to climb six flights up a pitch-black spiral staircase. (I did light the way with my iPhone, but this would have been much better.)
Beamer has a hard-plastic, two-piece design, equipped with a replaceable coin cell battery that provides about 10 hours of illumination. Pressing the silicone button once will turn the light on for 10 seconds. Pressing it twice in a row will leave it on indefinitely, or until you press it a third time. It comes in an array of bright colors.
The case is just the latest design from Quirky, a relatively new collaborative design community that also conceived of the super-cute DigiDude tripod and that cool Watt Time light-bulb shaped alarm clock.
In line with Quirky's crowd-sourced production model, the Beamer won't be available for consumers until 500 orders have been made, at which point those who have committed to buying it will be charged $32. Right now, 44 prospective Beamer owners have preordered.
(Credit:
Quirky)
LugeCubes are water molds for creating stackable cubes of ice 8 inches wide by 8 inch high by 8 inches deep. When stacked together, a channel in the ice created by the molds allows you to pour whiskey vodka Jager fruit punch through the ice and out a removable and reusable spout. The mere thought of this product makes my stomach hurt.
It's being sold through Quirky. Well, sort of being sold. You see, Quirky, a site that launched in June, takes products that spring from the minds of its community and drives them from idea to sales, all the while letting the community vote, rate, and influence the product ideas through the entire process. Before a product gets produced, though, it has to hit a presale threshold, which in the case of the LugeCubes is 300.
A majority of the products up for sale or presale on Quirky are tech-related, like the Split Stick, the DigiDude, and the Watt Time.
But then there's the LugeCubes. If you're interested in it getting produced, the whole set (pictured below) is up for presale for $22.47.
(Credit:
Quirky)
(Credit:
Quirky)
Good thing the lightbulb-shaped Watt Time alarm clock (Watt Time, geddit?!) isn't made of glass or it could pose a hazard when annoyed sleepers roll over to smack the snooze button located on the top of the socket.
Instead, the gizmo is constructed of high-gloss, hard plastic that illuminates the bright blue LED time display. If you don't like waking to sound, you can set the bulb to light up when it's time to crawl out of bed.
(Credit:
Quirky)
While the Watt Time features a sleek, simple design (all set buttons sit discretely on the back of the bulb), the product might not appeal to those with meticulous interior-design taste. After all, it could appear at first glance that you just left an old bulb on your nightstand when you went to change the one in the reading lamp.
Still, it's a bright idea for people who like their products infused with a touch of playful.
Watt Time comes via Quirky, a relatively new collaborative design community that also conceived of the super-cute DigiDue tripod we told you about recently. The Watt Time is currently on presale at Quirky's online store for $24.99.
Choose from five DigiDudes: Pinky Scorsese, Snot Buster, 1iChomp, BoltBot, and G-bling-Money-Son. 'Sup cuz?
(Credit: Quirky)
(Credit:
Quirky)
I'm a photographer. As a photographer I've owned a number of tripods and keep a mini tripod in my camera bag at all times. None of them, however, have ever qualified as "cute." These tripods, though, are exactly that.
Meet the DigiDudes. The portable camera tripod/keychain combos are little monsters most of the time, but when they need to do some work you twist off their heads and pull down their retractable legs and they're suddenly tripods. They have a standard screw mount that you put on the bottom of your camera. Now you know what that little screw hole is for, don't you?
The DigiDudes are made by Quirky, a sort of freelance production house for neat product ideas. It takes an open-source approach to product design, and these 'dudes are the results of just such a project. Think of it as a social R&D platform or something.
Quirky has some other projects, but these tripods (for a limited time, $19.99 on preorder) are far and away the cutest. Keep it up, Quirky.
(Credit:
Quirky.com)
I've seen a lot of designs for USB drives: the nerdy one, the credit card one, the key one, the prosthetic finger one, and the San Francisco cable car one. You've probably seen even more.
Now there's another one to add to the repertoire: a double-sided USB drive that's called the Split Stick.
Announced Thursday by Quirky, the Split Stick does just want its name states: it splits its storage into two. This is essentially two storage drives put into one housing. You can use one side for personal files and the other for work-related files.
Quirky is a community that engages participants to collaborate on product creation, where people can summit their ideas about different products. The Split Stick is the sixth product designed and developed by the Quirky community since its debut on June 2.
The drive combines two 2GB drives to make a total of 4GB. The USB drives are retractable and each come out of one end of the housing, which takes the regular shape and size of a typical USB thumb drive.
The Split drive comes in many different colors.
(Credit: Quirky)The Split Stick is made of an anodized aluminum body and encased in a protective rubber membrane. It comes in a range of colors: orange, blue, pink, red, black, violet, gray, or green. It has a plastic button on top that allows for easily navigating between the two sides of the drive.
Personally, I think this design is rather useless as you can use folders to organize different type of data. And if you forget what folder is for what purpose, chances are you'd mistake one side of the drive for another. Also, splitting the storage means you can't carry larger files with it. For example if your "personal" drive is 1.5GB full, you can't put another file that's 600MB on it, even when the "work" drive is still empty.
It would be a much more useful design, though, if the two drives were combined into one storage source and one of the sides allowed for read-only access, while the other side allowed for both writing and reading. This keeps you from accidentally erasing data or catching viruses when using the drive on computers you don't know are safe.
So, that's my first Quirky submission. Until it becomes reality, you can get the Split Stick now, and it costs $20.
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