Have an iPhone 4S (or iPhone 4) and want to protect that delicate back glass when you lay it on the table?  Many people usually use a variation of Zagg’s InvisibleShield or Skin for their iPhone.  But I would also like something more durable and luxury looking.  That’s where Luxe Plates come in.  Luxe Plates are stainless steel stick-on covers that protect the back of your iPhone.  These Luxe Plates are all precision etched with art from premium artists or you can design your own art for them to etch.  The great thing about Luxe Plates is that you can feel the texture and grooves of the etches.  It costs only $26.95 direct from Luxe Plates.

Filed in categories: iPhone, iPad, iPod related, News

Tagged: Cover, iPhone, protection

Give your iPhone 4S a stainless steel backing with Luxe Plates originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on December 1, 2011 at 9:05 am.

Have you ever been to a concert and then spent the next day listening to the ringing in your ears?  That sound indicates that your ears were exposed to possibly damaging sound levels.  ”The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders states that about 15% (26 million) of Americans between the ages of 20-69  have high frequency loss due to loud sound exposure, work-related noise, and leisure activities.”  Effective hearing protection can be hard to find and hard to keep with you.  EarPeace has a solution that is proven to protect your hearing by Michael & Associates, the leading independent lab in the country for measuring hearing protection performance.  EarPeace hearing protectors are made of strong, reusable, hypoallergenic silicone.  They protect your hearing by reducing sound pressure by 75%, but they maintain high-quality sound fidelity.  They come in three colors to match skin tone, so they’re discreet.  They’re always with you, stored safely in their aluminum cylinder clicked to your keychain.  At only $12.95, they’re affordable.  The holiday gift-giving season is close – why not give someone the gift of good hearing with EarPeace hearing protection?

Filed in categories: Gear, Health Related Gadgets, News

Tagged: hearing, protection

Save Your Hearing with EarPeace originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on October 6, 2011 at 8:21 am.

We love our electronics, don’t we? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have, at the very least, a notebook computer and an MP3 player.  Most of  my friends add in an iPhone or other smartphone.   I, personally, have always used Invisible Shield products for my more important electronics and have gotten quite good at applying them and have been fairly happy.  While the clear skins have always done well by me, what if you want to add a bit of style to your device while adding a reasonable amount of protection?

MusicSkins provide “the premier music and music related device skins on the planet” according to their website.  In my research I can say with confidence that:

A. They seem to have more artists represented than any other brand I could find.

B. They support an obscene number of device types.

I selected two products (at first) for review.   I started off with a 15″ laptop skin.   These are sized to fit many different laptops and, instead of covering all exposed surfaces, seem to focus on giving you a chance to show some love for your favorite band instead of providing maximum protection.

The skin, once pulled out of it’s protective shipping envelope, is remarkably bright and high quality.  Given that I selected a mostly gray image, I was surprised at how vivid the colors were. I consider myself a stickler for photo print quality and with the 15″ skin I received, I was extremely satisfied.

As you can see, the quality of the printing is very high and colors are vibrant and sharp.

Application was far easier than any such product I have ever worked with.  Far from the nightmare of nerves that applying a “wet” application skin can be, this was practically like applying a static cling sticker!   I made sure to clean the surface of my aluminum unibody MacBook Pro with a spritz of alcohol and a microfiber cloth before applying the skin.  Though I was unable to find any instructions on application in the package from MusicSkins, the instructions on their site are very straightforward:

• Clean Your Device
• Examine Your MusicSkin & Apply Your MusicSkin
• Take your time. It might take a couple tries to get your skin on perfectly. Be gentle you don’t need to pull hard to remove the skin. It will re-apply very easily.
• Pick a starting point on your Skin on the edge (preferably the largest area of the Skin).
• Line it up over the top of your device as closely as possible. A good guide is to find a couple of buttons on your device close together and start applying the Skin there.
• Carefully apply the Skin to the device making sure it lines up with all the button openings and curves on your device.
• If the Skin does not line up correctly, carefully peel it off and try again. Repeat this process until you are stylin’!

The skin is made of vinyl and peels off of the backing quite easily. Though I had to use my fingernail to peel up the skin, there was no damage done to it in the process – or any of the next four times I decided to position it.   The material they use is made by 3M according to the backing and is very easy to work with.

As you can see, the material is, while not rigid particularly, at least thick enough to hold its shape a bit. It makes applying as seen above quite easy!

Smoothing out the skin revealed a fantastic surprise. You don’t have to worry about bubbles at all!  As seen in this close-up, there are diamond shaped channels running under the surface that don’t especially show up once the skin is applied, but greatly help in smoothing out any trapped air bubbles.

And what does our final product look like?  I think it came out very very well.  As I said before, this generic size skin is more for looks than for protection, but it looks really nice.  Aside from a VERY slight alignment issue, it went on perfectly as you can see:

Some of you might be thinking what I was thinking just the moment I finished this.  As a hint for our Windows users out here, here’s a photo:

This photo inspires totally different reactions in the few people I’ve shown it to.  Some folks are over the moon that their beloved Apple logo shows through.   Others (such as myself) would far prefer to see the design without the branding.  My solution:

The thinnest, totally opaque material I could find was a sheet of aluminum foil.   To keep the foil in place, I applied a single drop of water to the foil then peeled up the skin, applied the foil to the Apple logo and reapplied the skin.   Problem solved!

A surprisingly cool addition to the MusicSkins site is an area to download matching wallpaper for your device.   Unfortunately, I was not able to find a notebook resolution version of my skin, but I did find an iPhone sized version.  I might be buying the matching iPhone skin soon.

Now that I’ve gone through the basics, I’ll talk about the second product I got from MusicSkins.

For the second skin, I tried out their custom skins and selected another laptop skin, this one intended for a generic “small” netbook.   Taking a look at the dimensions on the site, I was confident that the larger size would not have looked quite right on my Dell Mini 9.

For their custom skin line, they include a flash based skin editor that includes options such as adding text and photos to any base color.  I chose to use a photo that I found on Flickr using the Creative Commons search feature.  I have long been a fan of the big trees at the Sequoia National Park and a fast search found the perfect photo.  As you can see below, their skin editor is fairly straightforward.

About 90 seconds later, I was checked out and all done!

How do custom photos compare to the stock images they supply?  Here are some photos I took of the custom skin, applied using the same methods as my first skin.

On the one hand, the image appears slightly lower resolution than I would expect as I supplied a very high res (8 MP) image. On the other hand, the photo still looks quite good and does NOT suffer from the number 1 issue that most black and white photos suffer from in digital printing – a green cast.  Though my camera may have added in a bit of a nasty hue, I assure you the photo looks very nice in person.

All told, I am very happy with the MusicSkins products I’ve gotten so far and will almost certainly choose them over other options for my iPod Video and my iPhone, both of which could use some protection.

Filed in categories: Laptops and Gear

Tagged: notebook, protection

MusicSkins Laptop Skin Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 8, 2009 at 7:47 am.

The package from UPS weighed over 15 pounds! I don’t get to review a lot of things that go THUD when I put the box down, so I was excited from the start to review this drive that claims to keep your data safe in fires and floods. Plans for barbecuing the hard drive flitted through my mind as I plotted how to best destroy a nearly indestructible hard drive! I was sent the IoSafe Solo 500Gb USB Hard Drive with Disaster Protection to review.

The basic specs are:

• Quiet forced air cooling.
• Multi-platform compatibility: Windows, Mac and Linux
• USB 2.0, 7200 RPM, up to 480Mb/s
• Size: 5.0″W x 7.1″H x 11.0″L, weight: 15 lbs
• Fire protection — 1550° F, 1/2 hour per ASTM E119
• Tested per UL, FCC and CE Standards
• Flood / submersion protection — to 10 feet water depth, 3 days.
• Proven data protection and recovery. Tested to ASTM E119 standards for fire exposure.
• Physical theft protection
• Box includes: Drive, USB cable, power cable, instructions

System Requirements are:

• Intel Pentium II 350 Mhz-compatible or Mac G3 processor & greater
• Microsoft Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS 8.6 & greater
• USB equipped system
• For USB 2.0 speeds, the system must support USB 2.0 specifications

Front View- nice LEDs

Back View- Connections, power switch, and riveted serial number plaque

The claims are impressive- 3 feet of fresh or salt water for 10 days, a half an hour at 1,550 degrees F? Solid construction with a bolt hole to allow you to bolt or padlock the unit in place? That’s a lot of security for a $150 500Gb hard drive!

My dreams of baking this thing in an oven were squashed when I read the manual, though. It rightly points out that the IoSafe protects your data, but does not promise that you will instantly be able to recover it. We will talk about this aspect more later.

As a hard drive, the IoSafe works perfectly well. It does not come with back-up software, but back-up and sync software is available all over the place to fit your needs. The drive mounted flawlessly for me with XP quickly finding the needed drivers- a great example of ‘plug and play’. Backing up data goes quickly on the USB 2.0 cable, if your computer supports 2.0. For the purposes of this demo, I just copied the contents of the My Documents folder from my HP Mini 1000, but with 500Gb to play with, I could copy most of my computers to this thing! The Solo is also available in 1 and 1.5Tb versions.

Disaster protection and recovery- these are the big selling points. IoSafe products are designed to protect your data from physical theft, fire, floods, and similar disasters. While companies are a targeted customer, it makes sense for individuals to protect their data as well.

The plan here is that the IoSafe will protect the drive from many kinds of damage- but the user needs to understand that the data may not be immediately accessible. Cables and connectors can melt, some of the circuitry, like the fan, is outside of the ‘vault’ and can be damaged, etc.

If you can mount your drive after a disaster, great! If you cannot, IoSafe offers several Disaster Recovery Plans that give you the support you need with a toll-free number. The packages range from 1 year for free to 5 years for $100. They even offer $1,000 of insurance if they canot recover your data.

When you call, you will be assigned a point person to coordinate your recovery, and they will try to do everything possible over the phone first. If needed, you will be directed to ship your drive to the company so they can do their magic.

Is it better to store your data in a system like this, backed up on site, or to back it up elsewhere? Is this a good option for me or my business? How the heck would I know? But- their site has several good articles to help you design a plan for your company based on many variables, including things like how long you can be without key data.

Now for the fun! I backed up several megs of data to the IoSafe Solo. Let’s mess it up! Here at the Gadgeteer Test Labs and Lemonade Stand, we have lots of high-tech devices that we can bring to bear on this issue, like a deep sink.

After taping over the connectors to help make it easier to reconnect, I put the drive in 7″ of lukewarm water. I added a little hand soap so it will better infiltrate the drive’s guts and to simulate the sort of gunk that would be in flood water. It bubbled a lot! I let it soak for about 30 minutes and drain for a few hours.

Under water, still bubbling several minutes later!

I plugged it in with a little trepidation. The power cable provides 12v at 2A so I was not worried about shocks or anything, but I was a bit concerned that the more exposed circuits might be damaged. When I plugged in the USB cable, the lights on the drive came on and the little chime when you connect things rang, and an hourglass popped up- but nothing loaded for a few minutes.

I left it alone for about fifteen minutes and everything was fine when I returned- drive icon, proper files, everything opened- perfect! While this is not a great test, it does suggest that it will survive worse.

Now for the heat. I’m gonna try to fry an egg on the case! My recipe is to preheat the case with my shop heat gun for as long as I can tolerate the tedium. It goes slowly since the drive has a large mass to help it absorb and dissipate the heat. When the top is warming nicely, I spritzed it a bit with oil, added a couple home-made rings, and fried me some eggs!

Heat test- you can see them setting on the edges a bit already

Heat test- about as done as I am willing to wait!

In hindsight, I should have used a torch because the case kept sucking the heat in instead of letting it heat the eggs, but the basic premise worked- I got the case hot enough to fry up a couple sunny-side up eggs! Dang that was fun! And clean up was a breeze- the metal is polished enough that whatever dribbled onto non-lubed areas just wiped right up. (I’m beginning to sound like a pitchman, aren’t I?)

I let it cool enough to carry, then plugged it in and was not surprised to see that it just loaded right up.

This is not nearly the same thing as surviving a house fire or flood, but I got the sense that the drive was just laughing at my efforts to test it. Between the tests I ran, the promises on the website, and the specifications it is built to, I would have to say that the ioSafe Solo works exactly as advertised.

If you’re interested in buying this product, ioSafe has a rebate page for possible savings.

Filed in categories: Desktop Computer Gear

Tagged: Backup, disaster, Hard Drive, protection, recovery

IoSafe Solo USB Hard Drive with Disaster Protection Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 1, 2009 at 7:29 am.