Guys. Seriously. This is a nice phone. This is like the HTC HD2 with a future and it has some amazing speed, screen size, and network capabilities. If you’re up in the air about the Droid and aren’t tied to a carrier, get this.
I’ll do a full review next week.
Music by Closely Watched Trains
I’m a bit of a smoker – cigars, mostly, and only when I feel like alienating all my friends – so I figured I’d try out some of these “electronic” cigarettes. I’ve already reviewed one similar to Green Nicotine, the SuperSmoker. However, Ploom is a bit different.
Ploom uses a little butane heater ignited by a piezo spark generator that heats the smoky goodness and vaporizes it. Obviously you have to use the pods so you can’t put your own stuff in there – I’d use fiberglass, personally – and the flavors include Cafe Noir and Blue Tea. Pretty hippy dippy.
Ploom is aiming for the fancy pants alterna-crowd – it costs $39.95 and pods cost about $5.95 for 12 – while GreenNicotine is going for the “folks who want to smoke on a plane” crowd. It costs $149 and each 10-pack of replacements costs $39. They also have a disposable cigar model for $40 which comes from crazy town.
If you’re a smoker and you’re trying to quit or you’re a smoker and you’re jonesing for a cig, these things make work for you. Check local laws and bylaws before you start blowing Blue Tea fumes into cops faces, however, friend.
As a bonus, I’ll send the GreenNicotine kit to a random commenter. I won’t send the Ploom because I already sucked on it.
Video music by The Underscore Orkestra.
I’ve been interested in gadget manufacturing for a while now and, as I reported a few months ago, things are pretty bad but they’ve been worse. Now, however, we’re seeing clusters of suicides at Foxconn as well as an undercover “report” from Foxconn’s “Hell Factory.” I’m calling bull.
First, consider that Foxconn has 400,000 employees in Shenzhen alone. Cleveland, Ohio has 478,403 residents as of the 2000 census and I suspect that’s gone down. You’re not amazed by the number of suicides in Cleveland, right? It’s par for the course. People go nuts in Cleveland, even though they have a great meat market and the Cleveland Clinic is really nice. People don’t want to live, sometimes, right?
As for working conditions – the dead eyes, the exhausted employees, the beatings – well, that happens in Cleveland, too. When a mass of humanity coalesces into one place all sorts of things happen. People get tired. People die. People are abused. People abuse.
Look: we built Foxconn. Sure, Taiwan build the factory proper, but we build the demand. We want free feature phones and we want them now. We want $500 laptops. We want 60-inch TVs for $999. We want, we want, and we want. Steve Jobs isn’t standing on a table with a whip, exhorting these employees to apply the ceramic back to the iPhone HD more quickly. These people, as many reporters better than I note, (read Factory Girlsand Country Driving) need these jobs and they do everything we do to get a better deal. Foxconn is successful because it can mobilize an army to manufacture your cellphone. But China is changing and they won’t be able to pull many more shenanigans. The workers are gaining power and when that happens, watch out.
Manufacturing is a shitty business. It really is. Every factory I’ve visited, from fine watch factories in the mountains of Germany to a place where they make promotional USB keys, is soul-taking and deadening. Those who lament that manufacturing jobs have left the US never worked in manufacturing. Ten out ten college graduates don’t want to sit and solder 5,000 USB connectors to 5,000 PCB boards a day. Heck, we can’t even get Americans to work in slaughterhouses.
But the factory gives the employees a living wage, offers them respite from the poverty and strictures of the countryside, and creates the potential for advancement. They didn’t have that before they walked through the factory gates.
We used to manufacture things in America until we got smart. Then we sent manufacturing further and further afield and, I would wager, none of us understand the true nature of manufacturing. Two generations have gone by since the last real steel barons led the world in production and we look back on those days with nostalgia. My grandfather Herman worked in the Wheeling Steel plant. They lived in company housing, ate company food, and lived a company life until they made a little money and moved into town. I doubt he was fulfilled, but it was a job. His step-son, my father, graduated from college and went to work for the government at a warehouse – one step away from manufacturing. Now I, his coddled son, get to dick around on the Internet all day. Give the Chinese another fifty years and they’ll have shipped all their manufacturing to Mars and they’ll dick around on the Internet as well.
Go ahead: Cry for the folks at Foxconn. Rail against the injustice. But if you follow the money, you’ll realize the injustice stems from our desire to have more in more ways. So much crap comes out of China it boggles the mind. But someone is buying that crap. Someone, somewhere, is taking what China makes and they’re taking it every second of every day.
Our neophilia knows no limits. The Evo 4G just came out today. Hoopty doo. It’s another phone that was built by another person on an assembly line in China. Want to know why more amazing stuff doesn’t leak out of Foxconn? Because the employees don’t care. A phone is a phone is a phone and they can’t afford a new one anyway.
I always say this: vote with your dollar. Don’t upgrade your phones every five months. Don’t throw away your old PC. Work with what you have. There is no sane reason for a laptop to cost under $300. But they exist. Manufacturers figured out that people who see devices as disposable will buy more and more of them. Do research, buy what you think is best, and hold onto it. Then Foxconn can shut down.
Then what happens to those 400,000 people? I don’t know, but we’d better be ready for them because they kicked our ass in manufacturing and they’re about to kick our ass in everything else as well.
Short Version: Sony has always had a way with big laptops. Their F-Series, starting at $999 and going all the way up to about $1700 on a good day, is a monster but doesn’t feel huge and his heavy without being a boat anchor. With only about two hours of battery life you’re not going to enjoy the uncut, 207 minute Criterion Collection version of Seven Samurai, but you will be able to play a game or two and watch most of a Blu-Ray blockbuster.
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Netbook lovers can stop reading right now. Like a steak at a mid-range chain restaurant, the Sony Vaio F Series offers a lot of meat, sizzle, and some flash but at $999 you’re not getting quite a bit of fat. First off, this laptop is huge. Coming from an era of the thin and light, slapping this on your desk will visibly shake your coffee cup and don’t even think about taking this on the road. Just leave it at home, on your kitchen table, and you’ll be good.
That said, I can honestly say that this laptop isn’t quite a desktop replacement nor is it a travel notebook. Desktop replacements are just that – you throw away your desktop and buy one to do everything including video editing, gaming, and SETI@Home processing. This laptop, on the other hand, is sort of just big-boned and has enough chops to run a few things and enough battery life to be dangerous. Think of it as a Cafe computer, one you can take down to Starbucks to get a little work done on – provided Starbucks is within walking distance and you have a hand truck – and then you take it back to the home or office and set it back up with all of your USB devices.
The laptop can play games – it hit 2424 on Geekbench, a more than acceptable benchmark number especially among other i7 laptops – and the numeric keypad makes it great for keyboard/mouse gamers.
Interestingly, this laptop supports near-field communications with some Sony cameras, a feature that is not mentioned anywhere on the case.
The laptop does get a bit hot on your lap, but this really isn’t designed for the lap. Your best bet is to put it on a table and leave it there.
The laptop maxes out at 8GB RAM and holds up to 640GB. Sony also offers a solid state drive option and Blu-Ray costs $100. In all honesty I wasn’t amazed by the screen when watching Avatar on Blu-Ray so you may be a bit disappointed if you’re expecting things to really pop.
The Bad
Ports. Come on, Sony! Ports! The laptop has two USB ports yet features an HDMI and eSATA port prominently on the right side. Heck, there’s even a Firewire port. However, if this thing is going to sit on my desk for most of the day, you couldn’t sneak in a few more USB ports? There’s enough real estate on here, even with the rounded hinge at the back, to allow for a bit more expansion.
Finally, the F Series is definitely not the most exciting-looking laptop I’ve seen. It doesn’t look as bad as some of the other guys’ “fleet” laptops – the ones your IT department buys for you – but this won’t win any beauty prizes.
Bottom Line
At $999 at its cheapest model, it’s easy to tell who this laptop is aimed at. It’s a lower-priced gaming machine for a lower-priced market and it performs as advertised. It’s not so orotund as to be unacceptable and it’s not so small as to be portable – it’s almost just right. If you’re looking for a stable, strong laptop for a high schooler or someone who just wants a workhorse, this is an interesting consideration for your stable.
Baby sandwich.
We’ve all had plenty of time to digest the iPad and all its magical wonders and in the few months we’ve had it it has sold over a million units. But that just means another few billion people are still on the fence about it! Here are a few things I’ve discovered about the iPad in my travels thus far and I hope will help you make your iPad buying decision.
1. It’s a great e-reader
The iPad is a great ereader. It’s easy to find books on any one of the various stores available to you – Kindle, Nook, and iBooks – and the screen is clear, bright, and eminently readable. It’s great on the train or plane – just get a case and hold it in one hand. You can also grab formatted text like PDFs and open it in GoodReader. There is one caveat, however, which we’ll discuss later.
2. It’s great for games
The games made specifically for the iPad are great. Civilization Revolution is my favorite by far (except when it crashes constantly) but, contrary to my earlier assessment, Plants v. Zombies is fun as well. As Nicholas noted, Nintendo should be scared.
3. It’s a great netbook replacement
Throw away your old netbook. This is the new hotness. Don’t worry about the keyboard. It works fine as long as you have a box of baby wipes handy to clean the screen.
4. It’s a great couch-surfing device
Picture this: you’re watching TV. The iPad is on your coffee table. Don’t pick it up or you won’t be able to put it down. While we really shouldn’t be spreading our attention so thin, do you really need to dedicated every single one of your neurons to Modern Family? It’s a good show, but there’s Twitterin’ to be done!
5. The 3G model is probably your best bet
This kind of doesn’t fit in this list, but if you’re up in the air I think the 3G model is the best. While you can turn off the 3G, you’re going to want to use it on the road and, barring the chance of download of 800MB of data and getting a $18,000 bill, you’ll find it very useful.
Incidentally, carriers suck. If you do start running up your bill you’ll get an SMS notifying you that you may want to slow down but they won’t cap you. They’ll keep pounding out data until you run up $1,000 or more for looking at maps of Paris.
6. It’s excellent for movies
If there’s any reason to get Apple’s iPad stand – or the Joule iPad stand for that matter – it’s so you can watch Netflix and movies on it. This is, literally, Apple’s new Apple TV. It’s a little TV. It’s great.
7. It’s great for photographers
If you’re a photographer, grab one of these. You can sit there and show off your portfolio with a few flicks of your finger. You can even run presentations so you can add music and animations.
8. It will be great for restaurants and fancypants hotels
You just know that next wine bar, probably called iWine, will have iPads available for folks to place their order. It will also be funny when those things shatter at a rate of one per day.
9. It’s fun for kids – but be careful
As we note below, the iPad seems fragile but kids love it. My 18 month old slaps through the pages and tries out apps while my four-year-old is a champ at almost all the games. Kids love it and you can read from it to them although – and this is a big thing with me for some reason – I don’t like reading bedtime stories on it mostly because you’re dealing with a brightly lit screen and an antsy toddler.
10. It’s a great primary travel computer
If you’re going on to a meeting in another city or country and you don’t need to run much of anything except email, a little note-taking, and some movie watching, take the iPad. You can do all of this – and more. Would I say the same thing about the iPod Touch or iPhone. I don’t know. The iPad is more comfortable for all of these things and makes for a good hotel room companion. Don’t take my word for it, though. Talk to Joel Johnson. He knows.
Now for the bad news…
1. It’s not a good bedside email companion
For some reason I still use my iPhone or Blackberry to check email when I wake up. The fact that I’m reading email when I wake up is a different problem entirely. I should take up smoking.
2. It’s not the best device for writing longer documents
I really tried to edit a huge document using Pages and other editors but it just didn’t work. Pages is still too nascent to work well for folks who want to write the Great Armenian Novel, Իմ Մայրս, Իմ այծ նախիր.
3. It’s no Kindle/Nook
The iPad sucks in sunlight. There’s no two ways about it. If you plan to read your ebooks out on the veranda with a mint julep, you’d better get a tent.
4. It’s doesn’t make a good tennis racket
When you first get the iPad you’ll be amazed by its size – it’s amazingly skinny and light. Then, when you have it for a few days, you realize you’re holding a big piece of glass. While this may my useful in a bar fight, it’s going to freak you out to use the iPad without a case. It’s like you want to cover this delicate creature in a second skin.
5. It won’t make you popular on the train/plane/bus/boat
Contrary to popular belief, the ladies and men of mass transit won’t notice your iPad. The Kindle has spoiled that approach for PUA nerds as many ignore the device and think it’s just an old, boring ereader. Note: this may work in places where the Great Urban Aloofness Field has not penetrated, like your nearest retirement home.
Everyone has a book in them, right? Well Barnes & Noble wants to give you the opportunity to push that book in front of a few million people using their PubIt! service.
The new service allows you to upload a document, convert it to epub, and sell it on their B&N reader system, including on the Nook and iPad. It’s coming this summer and is currently accepting sign-ups.
Interestingly, they’re focusing on independent publishers, which suggests that we won’t see too many scrawled treatises on alien mind control in the Carter cabinet or the how the ghost of Jack Ruby is coming to inappropriately touch an older man in Boca Raton.
There will be a “competitive royalty model” but they’re not announcing specifics right now.
Stuff like this should have old guard publishers making Willa Cather in their pants. If an independent house can get good distribution, albeit electronically, their chance of hitting the “long tail” reader is infinitely higher. Amazon allows for this sort of thing as well – you get an ISBN and sell through their store, often using a print on demand model – and it’s fairly simple to get onto the Kindle store without many hiccups. This doesn’t add much in groundbreaking functionality to B&N but it does put it closer to parity with competitors.
Barnes & Noble Announces PubIt!™,
An Easy-to-Use Digital Publishing and Distribution Platform
for Independent and Self-PublishersPubIt! Enables Independent Publishers and Self-Published Authors
Access to Sell eBooks and Content to Millions of Readers
on Barnes & Noble’s Online and Digital PlatformsNew York, New York – May 19, 2010 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, is extending its deep and longstanding tradition of supporting authors and publishers with PubIt! by Barnes & Noble, an easy and lucrative way for independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through BN.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. The easy-to-use publishing and distribution platform offers qualified independent publishers and authors of self-published works expanded distribution, visibility and protection that only Barnes & Noble can offer.
The announcement marks Barnes & Noble’s latest move to continue to build one of the world’s largest digital catalogs, spanning eBooks, journals, periodicals and other types of reading material. PubIt! titles will be distributed through BN.com and Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of dedicated customers in-store and online.
Independent publishers and writers will appreciate PubIt!’s simple and competitive royalty model and compensation process, the details of which will be available in the coming weeks. Content owners’ intellectual property will be well-protected with Barnes & Noble’s best-in-class digital rights management technology and offered in the industry standard ePub format that allows publishers’ works to be enjoyed by millions of Barnes & Noble customers on hundreds of the most popular computing, mobile and eBook reading devices.
“As a company that has achieved much of its success by building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and authors, Barnes & Noble’s new PubIt! service represents an exciting evolution and significant opportunity in the digital content arena,” said Theresa Horner, Director, Digital Products, Barnes & Noble. “Barnes & Noble is uniquely positioned to support writers and publishers and bring their exciting digital works to the broadest audience of readers anywhere.”
Whether online or on-the-go, Barnes & Noble customers will have access to PubIt! titles with the opportunity to browse, sample, buy and download the digital content in seconds to their devices with free BN reader software. Using Barnes & Noble’s breakthrough Read In Store™ technology, NOOK™ customers can also browse the complete contents of PubIt! titles while in Barnes & Noble stores.
PubIt! is a convenient one-stop-shop, allowing publishers to get their content in front of consumers for purchase and reading on the most widely adopted mobile devices and software platforms. By following simple steps to upload their content in an industry standard format for electronic titles, content creators can reach consumers on hundreds of devices including: NOOK by Barnes & Noble, PC, Mac®, iPad™, iPhone®, BlackBerry® and others. For more information on free BN eReader software and apps, please visit www.bn.com/ebooks/download-reader.asp.
More information on PubIt!, which will be available this summer, and the benefits of joining Barnes & Noble’s expansive and trusted digital content catalog can be found at www.bn.com/pubit.
ARRRRREEEE YOOOOOU REAAADDY TOOOO play a copy of Armored Core: Last Raven on the PSP? Well I have 10 free download codes. I’m going to pick five winners at random and pick another five Twitter folk. Isn’t that so Raven?
So I’m picking five commenters, below, and I’ll tweet a first-come-first-served code to twitter.com/crunchgear or twitter.com/johnbiggs every few hours. Plop over and follow those accounts and I’ll spit out the codes at random times.
The game is now available on the PSN and includes:
Features:
• Ad Hoc multiplayer mode allows up to four players to battle against each other
• Over 500 mecha parts to build your own AC unit, including some remake parts from past Armored Core games
• New AC opponents
• Branching story and multiple endings
• New game features: part breaking and a replay save system
• The game save from Armored Core 3 Portable and Armored Core Silent Line Portable can be transferred to this game.
We’ll close the contest on Thursday, May 20 at noon.
Skullcandy has officially announced the availability of their Roc Nation Aviator headphones, the only headphones officially sanction by Jay Z. Jay Z is a rapper who raps about, among other things, his 99 problems, New York, and detritus under your ear.
The headphones actually look quite cool and they’re completely portable. You also have a mic and 40mm drivers with 20-20K Hz frequency response and nylon braided cabling.
Remember – Jay Z approved these headphones and did not, in fact, carve them in his small mountain workshop out of plastic the way Dr. Dre does for his beats. This is could be a bit of a problem for true audiophiles who require their headphones to be made completely by hand by the artist in question.
I know you’ve been wondering what’s in the Kin Two since it first came out and now you can see the phone’s delicious innards up close. iFixIt tore it up and found an Nvidia Tegra processor, which is nice, and “two very cool springs.” Where did they hide the magical unicorn hoof shavings?
* The Kin Two is 19.05 mm thick. That makes for a bigger bulge in the pants, given that the iPhone and Motorola Droid are 12.3 mm and 13.7 mm thick, respectively. (Enter “Is that a Kin Two, or are you happy to see me?” jokes here.)
* The Kin Two has two very cool-looking (to a mechanical engineer) springs that keep the phone’s halves either fully-open or fully-closed.
* For being able to shoot all of 8 megapixels, the camera only eats up about .5 cm^3 of space inside the Kin.
* The digitizer is a Synaptics unit, and the main controller chip is labeled T1021A1 0939 ACOM755.
* Samsung’s moviNAND KLM8G4DEDD package supplies the 8GB of storage space for the Kin. It features a very advanced thirty nanometer architecture, and can transfer data at speeds up to 52 MB/s.
* Avago has two chips inside the Kin Two: an ACFM-7103 CS/Cellular/S-GPS Qunitplexer and an ACPM-7353 dual-band power amplifier.
* The camera is the Sony IMX046. The IMX046 is fabricated using a 90 nm CMOS process. The camera’s resolution is 8.11 effective megapixel (8 active megapixel), 1.4 μm sized pixel, 1/3.2″ optical format. Samsung was the first to use this camera in the M8800.
* Taking a cue from the iPhone and Zune HD, the Kin Two has an accelerometer. It’s an STMicro 331DL 3 Axis nano MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) device.
This weird monstrosity is the Penthouse watch phone. It’s creators claim that it is the “smallest” watch phone available, which is, as we see, a lie. It’s not even smaller than the crazy Kempler & Strauss W Phone, another good idea gone bad.
What’s worse, this has nothing to do with Penthouse, which was my favorite magazine to furtively look at when my parents went out of the house!
The phone is available here for about $113 and at least it has real buttons as opposed to on-screen abominations. Regardless, don’t be tempted. You’ll just cry.
Watch out, Joe’s Bait and Tackle, you better not have a big, open glass door with light wooden tables along the middle and light wooden shelves lining the walls on which you will display your wares, including, but not limited to laptops and computers. Apple has that entire color scheme and layout on lockdown, so don’t even think about it.
That’s right: Apple trademarked their retail stores. Here’s the skinny:
The correspondent listed for is LISA G. WIDUP of APPLE INC., 1 INFINITE LOOP, MS 3TM, CUPERTINO, CA 95014 . The trademark is filed in the category of Advertising, Business & Retail Services . The description provided to the USPTO for is Retail store services featuring computers, computer software, computer peripherals, mobile phones, consumer electronics and related accessories, and demonstration of products relating thereto.
Retail store services featuring computers, computer software, computer peripherals, mobile phones, consumer electronics and related accessories, and demonstration of products relating thereto
Mark Description: The mark consists of distinctive design and layout of a retail store.
My question is this: if I build my house to look like an Apple store – I’d sleep on the shelves, probably, and make breakfast at the Genius Bar, would I be sued? Is that fair use of a trademark?
Apple also trademarked the new iDisk icon, which is pretty exciting as well.
There’s an old O. Henry story, The Gift of the Kisai that recounts a tale of a young man who sells his Kisai Round Trip LED pocketwatch to buy his wife a hairbrush and his wife cuts and sells her hair to buy her husband a pocketwatch chain. The story, a classic in the oeuvre of “how-the-other-half-lives” fiction, is heartbreaking in itself, but fear not: you’ll never have to go through those privations. There are plenty of $72 LED pocket watches to go around and their affordable for even those in relationships bathed in irony and penury.
This new Tokyoflash watch charges via USB and clips to your bag or pants. You’ll also notice the maddening fact that to check the time you have to press a button and the time is told in Tokyoflash’s inimitable WTF fashion. Some specs, in case you’re curious:
Displays the time
USB rechargeable*
LED animation mode
Stainless steel case and key ring included
Case dimensions: 41 mm x 50 mm x 11 mm
Weight: 58 grams
Water resistance: 3ATM
Japanese and English instructions
One year warranty
Battery: LIR2032 standard rechargeable and replaceable watch battery
Pocket watch, key ring, USB cable and spare USB cap included.
* Charging time 3.5 hours. Each charge should last approximately 1 month. Battery lifetime will vary depending on use but is estimated at approximately 300 charges.
While the LA Times noted that Hulu would soon be offering Hulu plus by May 24, the $10 will apparently not be rolled out by next Monday, thus allowing you unfettered access to the intellectual produce of thousands of studio employees for a least a few more months.
As you recall, Hulu Plus:
… will be the source for streaming TV. The company is a joint venture of NBC, Fox, and ABC and, as such, has become a clearing house for popular broadcast television. The question here is what constitutes a more comprehensive selection – I suspect full seasons as well as almost immediate simulcasting of broadcast programming – but that has yet to be decided.
Look, I love my iPad as much as the next guy and, just like the next guy, if I had to make the choice between food and water and the iWork suite, I’d probably go for the iWork suite. However, I would not tattoo the Apple logo onto my shoulder.
Billy Hime, a self-professed “iPhone Owner,” “shameless flirt,” and “Youtube Video Blogger” filmed himself getting his tattoo with his mom. He also wrote on Twitter that “Lotion=burning my Apple,” a comment on what we can only assume to be the effects of the antiseptic on his tattoo and not a euphemism for something else.
Regardless, let poor Billy’s example be a lesson and a warning to all of you of how far a young man will go to satisfy his Apple addiction and, next time you get the urge to call us fanboys, I’ll remind you that my only tattoo is of Ernest Borgnine circa Airwolf on my left upper thigh. It’s for religious reasons.
Qualcomm, makers of just about every comm chip in existence, are holding their annual Uplinq conference in San Diego this year and would like to invite you folks to roll on down for a bit of mobile fun in the sun. Check out their site and if you think the event is for you hit the jump for a coupon code to get 20% off.
The first 100 CrunchGear readers who register for the conference will receive a 20% discount off the $375 registration fee – an offer only available for the blogger community. Your readers just need to enter the promo code “CRUNCH123” upon registering (in the Registration Code box) and if they are within the first 100, they will receive the discount.
The registration site is right here and don’t forget your coupon code.
At this point in the game I’m pretty much bored with the whole iPhone HD leak meme. In a twisted way, the run up to Apple launches was a lot of fun. There was endless speculation but no real data and all of a sudden a guy in a turtleneck and jeans pops out and, like Mephisto, springs something new on the world. Let the rest of the CE manufacturers leak like sieves. I want my dance of the seven veils, damn it!
Anyway, another day, another Vietnamese site with pictures of the iPhone HD. Nothing much to see except for shots of the proto-OS running on the handheld which seems to be called Inferno and does nothing but boot into that screen we saw in the previous leak.
I’m spitballing here, but could Vietnam be picking up China’s manufacturing slack and, as a result be leaking gear to the world now? It’s a tantalizing thought: China has gotten so professional and held in so many leaks that they’re too expensive and the onus now falls on Vietnam to manufacture – and leak – iPhones HD. Thoughts?
Are you the kind of person who has to have the best of everything? Two-ply toilet paper? Nice plastic plates? The best mixture of Alpo and brown gravy spread liberally onto your chest as a libido suppressant? Then you’re going to need the Calypso Crystal iPhone stands.
These stands, which range from $199 to $349 for the Aurora model, are made of leaded crystal and take “15 days to make” in Central Europe. The sad thing is that these are actually probably made in Poland where leaded crystal is actually quite popular (my mom collects it, incidentally, but I doubt she wants these.)
The difference between crystal and glass is that the former contains lead oxide, which adds magnificent optical effects, a special breaking of the light and certain softness. Crystal can be cut, polished and further processed, since it does not chip as easily as glass. Because of the added lead, crystal is surprisingly heavy, which gives it even more appeal. Cutting makes crystal beautiful, while polishing makes it shine even brighter – it is truly something special.
I mean God bless you if you need this. I’m just wondering if a broken bottle and an iPod cable couldn’t perform the same trick.
