External hard drives are commodity items. They can be found anywhere, have similar performance, and differentiate themselves mostly though capacity and visual appeal. How about one that can withstand a house fire be submersed in water for three days? The ioSafe Solo is simply that – a place to store your digital valuables.
Company: ioSafe [ Buy It Here ]
FINDmyTIME is a project that joins wireless and satellite technologies, mobile phones, PCs and GPSs into a single function giving people a new way to access a great quantity of useful and interesting information and at the same time, giving museums, cultural centres, associations new way to communicate. There are two bits to this concept.
Designer: Daniele Gualeni
Maptor is this wonderful combination of a map and projector that (predictably) projects the desired map onto any surface. Palm of the hand, floor, and walls included. What I really fancy about it, is its size. Small enough to pass off as a lipstick (or a chapstick for you guys), the device is discreet enough for you to quickly hop into a quiet corner, check for directions and make your way forth. All this without anyone knowing that you are lost or need help!
Designers: Jin-Sun Park & Seon-keun Park
You’re blind, I mean sight impaired and the situation is that you wanna read Harry Potter but the Braille version is not available. So you pop out the “Haptic Reader”, place it on the front page, and allow it to scan the contents. Almost magically all the letters get converted to Braille, which dot the surface of the reader. Want more magic? Turn on the voice system, to hear the story instead.
Designers: David Lee, Yuna Kim & Hansub Lee
Touch Color is the combination of a Thermal digital tablet and a Rainbow Color picking ring that allows a blind person to paint colorful pictures with his fingers on the tablet. The 24 colors on the ring are differentiated by Braille dots and varied temperature generated by the embedded LED bulbs. Artistically inclined or not, this concept of “Blind Color Painting” sure sounds like technology is heading in the right direction.
Designers: Yun Li, Guopeng Liang & Ke Zhao
Old fading photographs and analogue memories have no place in this hard cold digital world. “Life Amplifier” is the answer to upgrade your nostalgia to the modern sensibilities of digital displays. It comes with features that are user friendly and functional. The main function is to magnify the old analogue photographs in your albums and then digitalize them. You can capture certain portions of the pics and view a blown-up version on the hand-held display. This ones for the older generation, so young-guns keep your acid comment to the minimal.
Designer: Wei Chung Lee
E-book readers, emails and other such digital facilities are making paper redundant to an extent. But the one area that I’m not ready to compromise is the Newspaper. My morning ritual of fixing my coffee and curling up with the papers is under threat from the In Newspaper. Yeah, yeah, it does have the perks of an inbuilt alarm clock and fresh content from a choice of global papers, but imagine carrying the flexible display to the loo, where many of us read it while we take a crap!
Designers: Seon-Keun Park & Byung-Min Woo
From the innately elegant design sensations of fuseproject comes this technologically and aesthetically candy-coated little device. It is a hands-free bluetooth device for your ear. Telephone and etcetera. With colorway names like this, how can one resist? Yello, Drop me a Lime, Lilac You Mean it, and Frankly Scarlett. These are the next level earbone pieces after the one we reviewed last year.
Designer: fuseproject
Is your phone a camera or the camera your digital player as well? Confused? You ought to be! As newer generations in gadgets and devices come out, the clear demarcation of their lineage gets blurry for the sake of multi-functionality. In the name of salvaging individual identity, mintselect @ mintpass has designed a range of devices in the typographical form of their function. Called the “Used as Read” series, the stackable lineup includes a speaker, a remote control, a woofer, a music player and amp, a radio and a lamp.
Designer: mintselect @ mintpass
One of the reasons behind developing the Animate project was to motivate the obese-TV-Video Games-addicted-generation to move their butt and get some exercise. I don’t buy that theory. My point is, if Wii Sports couldn’t get me toned and slim, then nothing can! However, besides this Animate is cool gadget that kids on the block would love. It’s got a camera, MP3 player, watch band, communication feature and videogames.
Designers: Hugo Kretz & Marc Haldemann
Apologies to Yiran and all those who play music, but many of us YD-ers may be ignorant on the nitty-gritty of music composition, play and practice. So before I launch into a full detailed explanation of the Lyra project, I must get some basics clear. Musicians often use a metronome to help them practice their sessions however this device does have its limitations. And apparently musicians also have heightened peripheral vision in comparison to us normal folks.
Designer: Yiran Feng
Downloading videos from the net and watching them on small computer screens is a pain. The R 2 2 Media Player Media Player gives you the convenience of downloading content in any of the available formats to it and playing back on your LCD/Plasma big screen TV. Its high-speed Wi-Fi compatibility transfers the files in a jiffy plus the accompanying programmable touch screen remote compliments the device perfect-o. More on the remote after the jump.
Designer: Gordon Yeh & Jason Su for Iota Creations
Trademark of the Coach: his ever-present Clipboard and whistle. A little twist however, the whistle stays, only the clipboard gets modern; its the E-Ink Electronic Coach Playboard. Using E-Ink technology (for longer battery life), the clipboard can be used to draw out strategies for multiple games like baseball, basketball, football, soccer, etc. Templates of the field/court come pre-loaded, just choose your game and start drawing out the moves using your finger.
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