Whiteboards that you actually write on? Like, with pens? Wait, what are pens? I just use this Boogie Board LCD Writing Tablet ($40), which lets me write and draw on it with literally anything that I can find – my finger, a stylus, popsicle sticks, my cat’s tail – if it doesn’t mark, you can use it on the Boogie Board. If I press harder, the line gets thicker. If I press a single button, it all gets erased. It runs on a watch battery, and lasts a darn long time. And you use dry erase markers. Silly you.
$40 Get it.
(Via Utility Journal)
Make-your-own-magazine apps have become the way du jour to read your favorite sites, blogs and newspapers on your computer or mobile device. These apps (good ones, anyway) take the content and fold it into a good-looking magazine format that you can flip through and read just like the good ol’ days. Times was one of the first of those apps, and it might still be the best. There’s no Google Reader syncing, which is a bummer, but it’s a gorgeous app, it’s easy to add feeds, read and share content, and it’s the prettiest news reader you’ll find for Mac or the iPad.
$7.99 iPad/$30 Mac Get it.
You’ve got a bunch of different devices that get you on the Web – phones, computers, mind-controlled devices, and all manner of other things. Xmarks (Free) has one job, and that’s to keep your open windows, passwords and bookmarks synced across all those devices. XMarks recently jumped into the mobile world, coming out with an iPad app as well as a mobile site for accessing your bookmarks on the go.
I use Xmarks on my home computer, cell phone, work computer, and iPad – any time I change a bookmark or edit a password, the change pops up everywhere I’d need it. All your favorite sites, in sync, available wherever you go. XMarks hits the spot.
$0.99 Get it.
The successor to the first great Android phone, the Droid 2 ($199) is a powerhouse. It’s got a 3.7-inch touchscreen, a better keyboard than the original Droid (which everyone hated), 3G Mobile Hotspot (which turns your phone into a WiFi hotspot that can connect other devices to the Internet), a great camera and camcorder, and oh-so-much more. Oh, and decent battery life, bucking what seems to be the current Android trend. If you’re on Verizon, and in the market for a new phone, the Droid 2 is king.
$199 Get it.
The Madden franchise has been, consistently, the best sports game produced every year, and this year’s no different – in fact, there are some cool new additions. This year’s model, Madden 11 ($12-$60) has new gameplay and management controls, and fear not, still has the great John Madden saying things like “when you throw the ball down the field, it’s either going to go well or badly.” Madden 11′s best new feature, though, is that it’s available on the iPad.
$12-60 Get it.
Remember your desk? You know, that thing underneath the piles of paper, cables, and the half-bag of Fritos you spilled last week? It’s begging to be let out. Give it some breathing room with the SpaceStation ($80) from BlueLounge. The SpaceStation is a desk organizer that’s not quite as cool as the real Space Station, but it’s close. It’s got room for you to prop up your laptop, great ways to organize all your cables and 4 USB ports worth of space to charge all your gadgets,There’s also a page holder, so you can read and type at the same time – if you’ve ever tried to copy a document onto your computer, you’ll know why that’s awesome. No place for the Fritos, though.
$45 Buy it.
There are a lot of good reasons to put your laptop on a stand – it lets the laptop cool itself, it’s a better angle for your hands, and it makes for way better awesome pictures of your desk. Common solutions to this problem: books, cats, knees, and pieces of trash. The Mini Riser ($7.95 for two) is a slightly more elegant solution. It’s a wire-looking thing that holds up your laptop, iPad, or whatever else at the perfect angle for typing. It won’t take up much space or cost you much, is adjustable to fit whatever device of yours needs standing, and it does its job admirably. You might have one of those cool, awesome-picture-worthy desks after all.
(Via Wired)
$7.95 for two Buy it.
There’s really no perfect messaging system out there – good ones are always on a single platform, and all the cross-platform ones tend to be 1995-era awful. Hello! Messenger (Free) isn’t the perfect solution either, but it’s six steps ahead of everything else.
It’s an app for Blackberry, Android and iPhone that uses your data connection to send messages, so you don’t pay the crazy texting fees from your carrier. Hello! also lets you chat with a group, send pictures, and use status messages to let everyone know where you are.
If you’ve got a group of smart phone-toting buddies you want to be in constant contact with, Hello! is where it’s at.
Free, Most Smart Phones Get it.
As much as I don’t want to call a $140 purchase an impulse buy, the Kindle 3 ($140) is getting closer and closer to being just that – a way to read as many books and newspapers as you want, all in one light and cheap device. The new Kindle lasts longer (up to 10 days of regular use), works faster, holds more, and clicks quieter so you won’t wake up whoever still wants to sleep next to you after you’ve wasted years reading the 3,500 books it can hold. All that in a lighter-than-a-paperback form that’s finally nice to look at? Sold. At least, when it’s available August 27.
$140, Pre-order Buy It.
For the most part, if you want to buy music, your only option is to dig through iTunes or Amazon, find 30-second samples, and try to decide if you like the record (or whatever it’s called now) enough to buy it. Which would be fine, except that iTunes is slow, annoying to navigate, and mostly just terrible. That’s what Preview.fm (free) is for. Search for an artist or album, and you’ll get a clean, speedy way to browse their music – you can listen to all the samples of a record in succession, or just poke around. Find an album you like? One click and you can buy it, or share a link to it with a friend. It’s the best way out there to poke around and scope out that artist you’ve been meaning to look at.
Free, Web Get it.
There are lots of ways out there to take notes, but nearly all are either too simple and hard to keep up with (pen and paper) or potentially too complicated and difficult to deal with (Evernote, Springpad, and others). Simplenote (Free) walks a perfect balance. It’s one, long string of notes that is accessible via apps on your phone, desktop, and browser – accessible everywhere, easy and fast to find and add notes with, and a favorite of both Gizmodo and Lifehacker.
Free, all platforms Get it.
There’s no Facebook app for the iPad just yet, but there’s finally one that’s close. From a company called Sobees, My Friends ($3.99) lets you write on friends’s walls, comment and like things, update your status, see photos, chat, and much more. It also makes a magazine-type-thing out of your wall, showing you the pictures, links and the like that your friends are sharing. It’s a little confusing to navigate at first because it’s just different from Facebook, but it’s cleverly put together and a perfect way to keep in touch. And to subtly let them know that you have an iPad, and they don’t.
$3.99, for iPad Buy it (iTunes).
I tested these headphones standing in London’s Heathrow airport. You learn a lot during layovers, ya know? Anyway, these are legitimately the first headphones I’ve ever had to take off because the music is so loud and so clear that I think I’ve unintentionally cranked the volume for the whole store to hear. I didn’t – I was just using the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones ($120-$350). Their rich, huge, clear, dynamic sound makes them worth every penny of the price whether you’re listening to classical music or head-banging to rap in the London airport. Specially designed to sound great at high volumes, they’re perfect for jamming anywhere. Trust Dre – he’s a doctor.
$120-$350 Buy it.
Bookmarking is an all-too inexact science. You pull together a list of all the things you want to save, and then every time you want to find something you have to wade back through all your bookmarks to find that one sentence from that one page that you can’t really remember where it was. Historious (free), a new Web app, hates that too, and they make finding what you’re looking for a lot simpler. If you save a page (a single click on the Historious bookmarklet), all the contents of that page become searchable. Build a database of bookmarks, and you can search not only your bookmarks but the content of those bookmarks. Makes finding that epic Winston Churchill quote for your English paper a little easier.
Free, Web Get it.
The worst thing about the iPad (other than the nervousness associated with taking it out of my bag, because everyone wants a demo) is the angle it sits at. If you’re typing, the flat-on-the-table bit doesn’t work all that well, but neither does holding it in your hand.
If you’re not into big, noticeable cases like the Apple case (which I had, and didn’t love), the SportShell Convertible is a great way to go. It’s got four fold-out feet, so you can prop it up at perfect typing angle or at a vertical, propped-up angle. It’s unobtrusive, doesn’t even look much like a case, and serves all the purposes a good case does.
