It’s been a while since we did a roundup of good peripheral devices for your smartphone, game consoles, laptops, and other assorted tech gadgets, so let’s get right to it. This time around, we’ll be looking at a mouse that looks more like modern art, a gaming peripheral that’s absolutely ridiculous (and not aimed at the Wii), and some really cool speakers.
It’s not enough to call these latest speakers from Libretone “speakers”. They’re technically gadget in their own right and support Apple4‘s AirPlay, so you can beam tunes to them wirelessly from your MacBook, iPhone, iPod or other iDevice. They come in four assorted colors, feature an edgy avant-garde asymmetrical style and produce decent quality sound.
The two models are named Live and Lounge. The Live is a 150 watt machine which even has a 3.5 millimeter jack for those of us without AirPlay enable music boxes. The Lounge is basically the same thing crammed into a smaller package (picture above).
Both models are designed to perfection and Libratone promises they’ll deliver a full 360 degree audio experience. They should. These puppies cost between $1,800 and $2,000 a piece.
If you’d like to window-shop these bad boys a little more or if you’re thinking about dropping all that hard earned pocket change on one, visit the official Libratone website.
Or should that be DiskMouse? I’m not quite sure how you pronounce the name but this little mouse is guaranteed to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It is cone shaped—like a coffee filter—and flattens to form a disk which you can then insert into your disk drive (hence the name) for storage purposes. Right now, this thing is only a design concept but the technology does exist to make this thing a feasible physical product. The question is: Is there a market for this kind of thing?
I foresee two problems with the Disk Mouse. #1) netbooks and even some new laptops and desktops don’t come with optical drives, #2) it’ll be hard to convince traditional mouse users to convert. However, the designers behind this Frankensteinian monster (Yanko Designs) say that the main focus of the project is to deliver an authentic mouse experience with a novel new form.
If you’d like to see this or more of the crazy designs that might just be defining your future, head over to the Yanko website.
Yes, that does say blow-up gameboat.
Just when you thought that Nintendo’s Wii had the market for stupid and utterly useless gaming peripherals cornered, Atomic Accessories decided to take a stab at the Kinect Market. The whole idea behind Microsoft’s Kinect system for the Xbox 360 is that you don’t need a controller or any other device (save for the Kinect sensor) to play games. Why then would a company think that players would be willing to buy such a monstrosity?
I’ll leave that up the psychologists.
The Kinect Game Boat is an inflatable rubber raft designed to be used with games like Kinect Adventures to add a sense of realism to jumping about the white water rapids in the game. However, I can see that the smallish design of the thing will easily result in twisted ankles, broken furniture, and (judging from the expression on the kid’s face on the box art) “extreme” hair.
Official word from the company is that the Game Boat will hold up to two players (though I don’t believe that for a minute). I’d pass on this one but I know that somebody out there will actually buy this thing. When they do, I foresee it ending up either buried in the garage/bedroom/closet or taking a dip in the pool. There’s just no reason to add peripherals to the Kinect system. If you wanted to do that, you’d be playing with a Wii.
I won’t say that Atomic Accessories makes crap; some of their peripherals actually look cool (they even have Lamborghini phone cases!), but this rubber raft is bound to fail.
If you’ like to take a look at some of the company’s better offerings, hit up their website.
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