GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

To the Japanese, the crack of splitting apart a pair of chopsticks is apparently as satisfying as the splitting the membrane-like seal on a jar of instant coffee is to us. More, it signifies the start of a meal, even if that meal is the kind eaten with disposable, takeaway cutlery.

This has led to the slow uptake of a “‘my chopsticks’ movement”, which encourages people to reuse their own sticks, saving trees and so on. And this is why the Stickpecker exists – to bring that satisfying crack to regular chopsticks.

They manage it by putting a pair of magnets into the acrylic shafts. These require a good, hard yank to snap them apart, presumably an adequate placebo for the fulfilling fracture. The design – a stylized woodpecker and tree is supposed to evoke the wood that these sticks aren’t made of.

I think they’re cool, and the magnet part definitely sounds like fun to play with. They can be had for 3570, or a jaw-dropping $44.

Stickpecker [Microworks via Book of Joe]

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The Bottoms Up beer dispenser can pour up to 44 pints a minute, with just one person using it. Add a few helpers and it can reach 56 pints per minute, not far off one per second. That’s impressive enough, but take a look at how the glasses are “poured.” The machine fills them from the bottom:

This would be a fantastic addition to English pubs, where the 19 and 20-year old bartenders lack motivation and brains to the extent that one pint a minute is a miracle, and then the glass will be half-filled with foam. And that’s if you can get their attention to begin with.

But how does this magical machine work? Obviously, the cups have holes, but how do they reseal? Magnets. The plastic glasses have a floppy fridge-magnet inside, a circle which sticks itself to a corresponding donut-shape strip around the filling-hole. Here’s a birds-eye view, grabbed from a video on the product site.

So, the Bottoms Up pumps are fast, can hook up to any keg and provided you have the rest of your gear clean and properly adjusted – you won’t waste beer via foam. But there is an obvious problem: waste of those glasses. Instead of a glass glass, which can be re-used over and over, these are designed to be disposable, to the extent that the little magnetic discs are pushed as an advertising opportunity:

A magnet on the fridge of the American household gets 20 impressions per day per person in the household, making this ad space the most viewed souvenir taken home from a venue. That also means it is taken home from the venue!

Still, who cares about that, right? After all, with beer coming at you at nine-times the normal speed, it’s hard to care about anything else.

Bottoms Up [Grinon Industries. Thanks, Mr. Abell!]

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Roland Heersink had a problem. He wanted to use his iPad in the kitchen, but his wife vetoed any and every space-hogging countertop stand. So Roland, smart Gadget Lab reader that he is, decided to make his own. And not only did he come up with the The Original Kitchen iPad Rack. he turned it into a business.

Roland’s rack takes up precisely zero space on the countertop, instead suspending the tablet from the overhanging kitchen cupboards. The rack comes in two pieces of clear acrylic. One attaches permanently, out of view, beneath the cupboard. The other hooks onto this mount and forms a sloping or vertical stand for the iPad, keeping it handy, but out of the way of spills. When you don’t need it, just toss it into the cupboard above.

The rack will cost you $30, and should you have a big kitchen, you can choose kits with two or three mounting brackets, at $5 extra per bracket. I think Roland’s idea is pretty ingenious and, if coupled with my own low-tech waterproof iPad case, would make for an almost indestructible kitchen iPad setup.

The Original Kitchen iPad Rack [Kitchen iPad Rack. Thanks, Roland!]

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Often the best kitchen gadgets are the cheapest, or at lest the most basic. Royal VKB and Nikolai Carels’ Boomerang Wok, though, tries to make the case that fancier can sometimes almost be better.

A cheap, carbon-steel wok from your local Chinese supplies store is the best wok you can get. It’s tough, it has a rounded bottom for gas (the only place you’ll get it hot enough) and it skips non-stick coatings, which burn-off or go bad at the kind of temperatures a wok likes. Properly seasoned (ie. not cleaned) it will become completely non-stick and last forever.

The Boomerang Wok commits the usual fancy wok sins: Teflon, a plastic handle, a stupid price ($150!). But it has a lip at the far end which lets you toss the food with a flick of the wrist, only to return safely into the pan’s center.

Any half skilled cook can manage this most basic of chefs’ techniques, which involves jerking the wok (or saut pan) away from you, flicking the wrist to launch the food and then catching it. But then, the kind of person who would spend $150 on a non-stick wok is not the kind of person to learn a basic cooking technique. Still, I guess the Boomerang will look nice on their countertop, right next to the block of Global knives they use to open their mail.

Boomerang Wok + Saut Pan [A Plus R via Uncrate]

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In London, it’s hard to find a restaurant without a gimmick. And Inamo has probably the biggest gimmick of all. If you’re a hungry, tech-loving nerd, that is.

The restaurant, which just launched a new venue on London’s, tries to do away with almost all waiterly duties, apart from actually carrying plates around. A projector sits above each table and turns the table into a computer-screen (the projector is hooked up to a Windows XP machine). Using a touchpad, you can browse the menu and place your orders, and when you select a dish, a picture of it is projected onto an empty plate already on the table.

Whilst dining, you can choose various “wallpapers” (table-cloths?) to be displayed on the table, and there are even some games, although not any you’d actually play – the folks from UK tech blog Pocket Lint headed over to a pre-launch party and report that one of the games is Battleship. Really?

When you’re done, you can order up the check and call a cab, all from the comfort of your table.

I just hope the bosses at Inamo have some fallback plans. Tech has a way of failing in the catering industry (I was in the game for 15 years), and that’s robust, purpose-built gear. Imagine the poor customer trying to place an order and getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. On the other hand, at least a PC can’t come to work drunk.

Inamo hi-tech restaurant hands on [Pocket Lint]
Photos: Paul Lamkin / Pocket Lint

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Check out this amazing kitchen appliance from Berlin-based designer Christoph Therard, a human-powered cabinet of mechanical wizardry which lats you crank normally electric-powered gadgets with nothing but your leg.

A machine like this needs a suitably cool name, and the R2B2 has one. The R2B2 works thusly: You hit pump the pedal and a big, heavy flywheel starts to spin up to 400rpm. Once moving, it can provide 350-watts of power for up to a minute. Gearing, switched with a big knob on the front, spins one of two shafts on the surface, one fast and one slow.

Therard’s research showed that the food-processor, coffee grinder and hand-blender are the most used gadgets, so he made them. The processor and grinder dock with the shafts, while the hand-blender gets its power from a flexible, twisting cable. A transmission lets it spin at up to 10.000 rpm. When not in use, everything can be stowed inside the main body.

It’s wonderful, and also almost silent in use, compared to the screaming blender-motors we usually tolerate, at least. I also like the idea of burning off some extra calories as I prepare my dinner. If Christoph ever puts this into production at the same time as I move into an apartment with a big enough kitchen, I’m buying one.

R2B2 project page [Christoph Therard via Core77]

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You know the Nespresso, the home espresso machine that makes great – if rather packaging-heavy – coffee? Now there’s a version that does the same for tea.

It’s called the Special T, a nice combination of pun and rap-star name, and it works exactly like the coffee versions: pop in a capsule (0.35 or $0.50 each) and hit the button. Boiling water passes through the tea and you end up with, presumably, a lovely cuppa.

Or do you? Although making tea is about the easiest thing to do in the world, it is also easy to do it wrong. The Special T gets one thing right: the PDF instructions tell you to tip away any remaining water in the reservoir after use, recommending freshly drawn water each time. Boiling water knocks out oxygen, and this results in a flat-tasting cup.

But unlike espresso, which needs a careful balance of water-pressure, tamp-pressure, temperature and time, tea is simple: pour the still-boiling water over the leaves (or bag) in a pre-warmed pot and steep for around 4-5 minutes. After that, it’s hard to go wrong, making me wonder why you’d need this 130 machine to boil the water.

The Special T is launching in France, not the UK, and will be available only by internet order.

Special T product page [Nestle (Warning: Flash and French) via Oh Gizmo]

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This donut-shaped mincing knife is meant to be used for finely chopping herbs or anything else that has to be cut down to an almost paste-like texture. It’s pretty, has a blade-cover that protects you from the sharp edge and the sharp edge from the other knives in the drawer, and it is most likely useless.

The curved blade design is modeled on a mezzaluna, literally “half-moon”, which has a much shallower curve and often (but not always) has two handles to make rocking it back and forth over the leaves a much less strenuous affair, taxing your strong arms instead of twisting one wrist in an unnatural fashion.

This uni-tasker, named the Chop, comes from Normann Copenhagen, Denmark. The colorful exterior is at least made from rubber to add some grip, but you’re better off using a regular chefs’ knife, with all its multi-functional goodness.

There is one good use for the Chop, though. Imagine grabbing a pair of these, one in each hand, and squaring off with your fists in front of you like a boxer. Now you’re getting the idea. As a deadly weapon, the Chop is wonderful, turning its user into a kind of domesticated Wolverine-lite.

Chop product page [Lucidi Pevere via Core77]

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Yes, better than canned beer. Those are the sacrilegious words of MEDEA co-founder Matt Sandy, speaking in this wonderfully chintzy spot on ABC about his company’s gimmicky vodka bottle. The hook? The bottle has a scrolling LED display on the side, with messages of up to 255-letters programmable by the user. If you’re a fan of low-quality TV, and awkward-looking men in badly-fitting suits, take a look:

At first the idea seems doomed. Who on Earth would pay $40 for a bottle as tacky as this one? And then you realize just how dumb and horny people get when they drink. You see the shot in the promo video where the guy walks off with a girl under one arm and a bottle in his hand? That’s what this is all about: getting laid. The boys will order this in a bottle-service bar for a few hundred dollars and start sending messages to the ladies. Here’s the proof, in the form of the tagline from the MEDEA site: “Unleash your inner poet, your inner poet, your inner philosopher, your inner flirt.” Terrifying.

Here’s where you expect me to point out the flaws, and you will not be disappointed. I give you exhibit A, the programming instructions. As you read, remember that these steps need to be carried out whilst intoxicated:

Step 1: Press the ON/OFF button

Step 2: Press the ENTER button to enter programming mode

Step 3: Press the P-U (UP) to select line (1-6) to save message in

Step 4: Press ENTER to confirm the line where the message will appear

Step 5: Press the P-U and P-D buttons to find the first character of your message, and press ENTER to save after each character selection. Note: space can be found after the letter Z.

Step 6: To finish, after you have selected the last character, wait until you see a blinking A, then press the ON/OFF to save the entire message.

Youre all set! Your message will now begin to scroll on the ticker.

Note: Do not leave the display on in the programming mode. Press either the P-U (DOWN) or the ON/OFF button to exit the programming mode.

What could possibly go wrong?

The vodka inside comes from Holland, a country well known for its vodka, and is triple-distilled like any other premium vodka. The ‘Worlds first customizable, programmable bottle’ is available in South Carolina and tacky bars all over the US.

MEDEA product page [MEDEA. Thanks, Valerie!]

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The Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter is eight-and-a-half inches of awesome. The zinc-alloy body is chrome-plated and the saucer-section is a laser-etched stainless-steel blade, all in the shape of the original NCC-1701 Enterprise. It will, as the blurb goes, “boldly cut pizza where no man has cut before.” It costs $25.

It is also the most obvious kitchen-accessory / sci-fi-spaceship tie-in ever, although it took the fine folks at ThinkGeek to actually come up with it. And it makes me immediately ponder what other sci-fi kitchen gadgets might work. A stick-blender in the shape of 2001’s Discovery? A Millennium Falcon canape-tray? A Land-speeder soap-dish? Come on, Gadget Lab readers: You can do better than me. Spaceship-shaped kitchen-accessories ideas in the comments, please.

The Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter [ThinkGeek. Thanks, Jessica!]

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Quirky’s Boil Buoy is a floating chime that lets you know when a pot of water boils. It also has a pun in the name which only really works if you speak English with an English accent.

“Buoy” is pronounced that same as “boy” on my side of the pond, instead of “boo-ey” in the US, a vocal contortion that has nothing to do with the word’s spelling. Further, a “ball boy” is the young lad that runs across the court to pick up stray tennis balls during a match, which has nothing to do with boiling water.

The Boil Buoy is a floating, weighted mini-buoy with a bell in the middle. When the water boils, the rising bubbles make the buoy jiggle and the bell rings. Simple, ingenious and foolproof. Here’s the video of the prototype stages, complete with excruciating pronunciation of the name included:

The traditional method for warning yourself of boiling water is to drop a few glass marbles into the water. They start to rattle as the pot starts to boil dry: hardly helpful for pasta, but great when steaming a home-made Christmas-pudding (or “plum-duff”) for hours at a time, as I do every year. Another favorite is the coffee whistle, which sits on the top of the exit-tube of a stovetop espresso-maker and toots a warning when the coffee is done. This will stop you falling back to sleep after dragging yourself into the kitchen of a morning.

The Boil Buoy will be just $10, and will trip into production when the requisite 1500 pre-orders have been placed.

Boil Buoy product page [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany]

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Fun fact: Did you know that if you take a tinfoil-covered item from even the hottest oven, you can remove the foil with your bare fingers quite safely? Just don’t touch anything other than the foil. This handy trick works because the foil is so thin it cools almost instantly when you remove it from the oven.

Of course, this doesn’t work with the oven shelves, but if you upgrade them with these neat Silicone Oven Shields, you can toss the oven-mitts away (don’t toss them too far, though, as you’ll need them to get the actual pot out of the oven). They are safe up to 450-degrees, and because silicone is so non-conductive, they stay cool-ish to the touch.

Even if you don’t want to drag the shelves back and-forth with bare-hands, these shields are a good idea. I have lost count of the cigar-shaped burns I have seared into my thumbs and the backs of my hands whilst turning food or just poking in an instant-read thermometer. These shields would have stopped my branding my hands.

Available in kitchen stores like this one for around $10. And one more thing: in the product picture, somebody is cooking a pizza. Shouldn’t it have a stone or metal tray underneath it?

Silicone Oven Shields For Forgetful Chefs [Oh Gizmo!]

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Gadget Lab reader John Costello sent in his ingenious invention, one of those ideas so simple that you slap your forehead and wonder why it hasn’t been done before. John has designed an induction hob which uses LED “flames” to stop you turning it up too high.

While induction hobs give the instant control of a gas flame, there is no way to see how high you have set the heat (there are numbers on the knob, but that’s hardly intuitive). John noticed that people would set the controls too high, so he decided to fix it.

His hob uses LEDs arrayed around the perimeter of the heat-rings. these project a light onto the pot which varies in height depending on the amount of heat dialed-in. As the power creeps higher, so do the “flames”, giving visual feedback that can be read by anybody, even from afar.

I love it. I still use gas, as I like to melt the plastic handles off my stovetop espresso pots every few months, but if I went to electric, it would certainly be induction, and I’d like to have John’s electric blue flames licking up the sides of my saucepans.

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In Asia, everything from scaffold to lunch is made with bamboo. Anywhere else the tough, fast-growing grass is always marketed as being environmentally friendly (even when it houses a the toxic wasteland that is a modern computer). Today, we see the Bamboo Bottle, a water-bottle that makes the same world-saving claim.

The most environmentally water-bottle is probably the plastic one your Evian or Volvic came in. Long lasting and recyclable (into fleece-jackets, sadly), they are also cheap and come with a few free liters of water thrown in. This is my choice, and a quick rinse with boiling water once in a while keeps things hygienic.

The Bamboo Bottle is made from Bamboo, of course, but has a glass lining, which is removable for cleaning and is a lot easier to break than either plastic or aluminum. There are also plastic parts: a cap, a bottom cap and a top retaining ring. While it might not be as easy, light, cheap or durable as a regular plastic bottle, it is at least better-looking and all the parts can also be recycled. It will be available soon for $25, and will hold 17-ounces (half a liter) of liquid.

Bamboo Bottle [Bamboo Bottle Company via Uncrate]

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The BottleBob Bottle Cap Punch is a gimmick, a gee-gaw, a single-purpose uni-tasking tchotchke. But despite this, what it does is pretty awesome. It cuts holes in the metal caps of soda-bottles so, when you insert a regular plastic straw, it looks like you somehow punched that thing right through it, you old tough-guy you.

The plastic and metal punch also falls firmly into the category of “tat”. For those unfamiliar with this word, it comes from British English (aka “quaint” English) and has the following meaning in the New Oxford American Dictionary: “tasteless or shoddy clothes, jewelry, or ornaments”.

Still, imagine what this little widget could do for your reputation. If you can pierce a metal cap with a flimsy plastic tube, you could probably also… Well, I’ll leave that up to your imagination. $27, available now.

BottleBob Bottle Cap Punch [Epaulet Shop]

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Yes, what you see above is real. It is also, not surprisingly, from Japan, the land of the crazy gadget. The Tama-chan is a watermelon-cooler, a 14-pound roll-along case which will keep your fruit chilled in summer or your rice warm in winter. It gets its power via AC or DC cables, and can be plugged in to the cigarette-lighter socket in your car.

To be honest, the gadget would look more at home in a sci-fi B-movie, filled with the brain of a hyper-intelligent super-being and rolled around by a tough-but-stupid minion. As an actual real-world device, it seems almost pointless. As the Lady commented when forced to give her opinion, “You’d have to have a lot of space at home” before buying one of these.

More astonishing yet is the price. The melon-cooler (or brain-preserver) is 20,000. That’s $230. A fortune for the melon-lover, but a real bargain for a body-less super-brain intent on ruling the world.

Portable hot and cold storage [Joybond via Switched]

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Over in Britain, a nation of binge-drinking alcoholics, there’s now yet another way to get a booze-fix. Marks and Spencer, the kindly uncle of national department stores, is selling a single-serve glass of wine.

The glasses, actually recyclable plastic, come pre-filled with 187ml (6.3-ounces) of Shiraz, Chardonnay or rose and have a peel-off foil lid. They cost 2.25 each ($3.37), which makes them more expensive than buying the same wine by the bottle (four glasses add up to 9, whereas the bottle is 4.50).

The product was invented by an Englishman named James Nash, and ironically his idea, before being picked up by M&S, was laughed off UK reality business show Dragon’s Den by its foolish, short-sighted panel.

The idea of single-serve wine could really take off. In-flight beverage service is the obvious market, doing away with the wastefully separate bottle and cup, but picnics for one could also work well. Sitting in the park with a sandwich, a bottle of wine and a glass will draw in some stares, even if you aren’t dressed like a wino. But with a cold glass (plastic) glass of Chardonnay to accompany your smoked salmon bagel, you’ll be the most sophisticated bum in Union Square. Chin-chin!

Wine Innovations product page [Wine Innovations]

Wine-in-a-glass entrepreneur ridiculed in Dragons’ Den toasts M&S success [Daily Mail via Crave]

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