This week’s roundup of accessories includes two devices brought to you by BiteMyApple, a clearinghouse for Apple products produced with Kickstarter help. Plus: Batteries galore.
The $30 Stem is a 2200-mAh portable external battery charger, covered in gold and offering enough backup power to add six hours of talk time, 11 hours of video, or 44 hours of music playback to your phone. And again: It’s gold.
The $45 ChargeLight is billed as “the most powerful and compact LED flashlight and battery pack ever.” The lithium-ion battery will hold a charge for up to a year, providing light in the darkness and backup to your phone when you’re otherwise powerless. And it’s plenty small, making it easy to carry around in your backpack or handbag.
The $60 Vaavud is a wind meter that plugs into your iPhone, letting you take precise wind-speed measurements on the go. You’ll need the accompanying app to make the whole system work. When you’re done? Unplug it and stick it back in your pocket.
The $130 Road Boost XL is pretty impressive: It can recharge your iPhone, or your iPad, or … your entire car. Really. Bracketron notes the 12,000-mAh battery “comes with jumper cables and doubles as a flashlight and SOS signaler to ensure you’re prepared for any emergency situation.” That’s a lot of battery.
The $50 Amp I Right? portable speaker is pretty straightforward: Just slide your phone into the speaker, landscape-style, to create a pairing that looks rather like an old-school clock radio. Amp I Right? Watt else is there to say?
The $90 Tablet Cover is designed to hold and protect your iPad Air: It has hard cover and a padded rubber lining to keep the iPad in place; it also holds a 96-page notebook, meaning you can easily shift from analog to digital and back again without ever putting down this product.
The $150 Space Pack for iPhone 6 is a double-duty device: It serves as a backup battery, of course, doubling your phone’s life. It also serves as an external hard drive, giving your phone an extra 32, 64, or 128-GB of extra space for movies, music, or other files. Your super-sized iPhone just got bigger on the inside.
The iXpand Flash Drive also lets you expand storage, by increments of 16, 32, 64, or 128GB. It comes with both a Lightning connector and a USB port, for transferring files between an iPhone and your Mac. See you local retailer for pricing details.
I’ll let my colleague Jared Newman introduce the $89 Wipowerband: “While the Apple Watch isn’t launching until later this month, a bulky battery case called Wipowerband is already promising to turn Jony Ive’s design masterstroke into an eyesore. The Wipowerband snaps underneath the watch body to connect with Apple’s magnetic charging contact, and stuffs a 250mAh battery into a wraparound wristband. … In exchange, Wipowerband says it can nearly double the Apple Watch’s estimated 18-hour battery.”
Author: Joel Mathis
Joel Mathis is a regular contributor to Macworld and TechHive. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and young son.