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This portable home battery can be charged up using solar, wind, and gas, and you can back it on Kickstarter now
This article is sponsored by EcoFlow
Grind, cook, weigh, and more: With 21 functions, the Omni Cook really is the Swiss Army knife of kitchen appliances
This article is sponsored by TOKIT
Although the world has begun to open up following the pandemic, many of us have grown accustomed to spending more time at home. And the more time we spend at home, the more likely we are to eat at home. Now you can easily make all kinds of tasty meals with the Omni Cook, now backable on Kickstarter for 9 (3 off).
Wireless earbuds are disgusting, but this adorable washing machine can fix that
Seriously, wash your ears tho
The human ear is a nasty place, and its unfortunate that we have to directly interact with it in order for headphones to work. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the design of true wireless earbuds, tiny, pristine bundles of incredible technology and engineering, which we must cram into our horrible head holes in order to properly use. Enter the Cardlax, the first washing machine designed exclusively for earbuds.
In the last several years, SwitchBot has become known for its quirky ability to retrofit "dumb" home accessories with some smart – occasionally bizarre – gadgets built for the modern age. If you're tired of flipping light switches in your home, SwitchBot has a solution for that. If you've always wanted to control your TV with your smartphone, they make an IR hub that can help. Now SwitchBot has a new project on Kickstarter that'll shove your curtains open (or closed) so you don't have to get up and do it yourself.
Anker has become popular by building reliable, yet affordable products. It's recently focused on making more upmarket products, which are naturally priced higher than usual for the brand. The Nebula division is famous for its projectors, including the Capsule, Mars, and Prizm series. It's now working on a new high-end lineup, including a 4K UHD projector.
Whether you're preparing for a trip across the world or just getting together a few essentials for a hike, it can be difficult to find space for everything that will come with you. If something is too big, it's staying at home. That's where most smartphone gimbals tend to fail the test: long handles and awkward shapes make them terrible to pack and annoying to carry. Zhiyun, a company highly regarded for its DSLR and smartphone gimbals, is preparing to release a new model called the Smooth-Q2 that's more compact than any smartphone gimbal on the market. Aside from a few basic sacrifices, it's a great little tool to really improve the quality of your videos.
True wireless Bluetooth earbuds were introduced in 2014 by the likes of the Bragi Dash and later popularized by the Apple Airpods. Since then, we've seen incremental developments like fitness tracking on the Jabra Elite Active 65T and wireless charging on the Samsung Galaxy Buds, but the form factor has essentially remained the same — a pair of earbuds stored inside a charging case that goes in your pocket. Aipower, a sub-brand of Aukey, is looking to shake things up with the Aipower Wearbuds (that recently went live on Kickstarter) by combining true wireless earbuds with a wrist-based fitness tracker.
Some of you may remember as far back as 2016, when a little project called the Superbook hit Kickstarter, aiming to turn our smartphones into laptops for a mere $100. It was a tremendously ambitious dream that didn't really work out in practice, and sadly Sentio, the company behind the Superbook, has recently announced that it ran out of money after shipping only 75% of pre-orders.
I know, typically we avoid covering Kickstarter products, but once in a while a product catches our eye as kinda cool, or kinda luggage lookin'. This time it's the SuperTank, a slightly ridiculous name for a slightly ridiculous battery/portable charger/power bank/whatever. The monstrosity you see above spits a ridiculous 138W in total, with up to 100W of that over a single USB Type-C port. All that power comes pretty cheaply, too, with an $89 "Early Bird" price.
Smartphone cases, in all their various forms, are meant to do one thing: guard our increasingly expensive pocket-sized supercomputers in case we lose our grip as we absentmindedly jab at them with one finger while also walking and drinking coffee. There are many that do a pretty good job of this, but a German engineering student was evidently dissatisfied with the level of protection afforded by what's currently on the market. So, naturally, he created ADcase, a silly and wonderful contraption that detects when your phone is falling and ejects springy spider legs to dampen its impact.
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Most home security cameras need to be plugged into power, but there are a few that made do with batteries. Even the best wireless cameras currently on the market need a recharge every couple months, but Eufy (an Anker company) has an alternative. The EverCam has a humongous battery that offers a full year of operation on a charge. You can't get one yet, but you can join the Kickstarter.
Usually, we aren't too into Kickstarter stuff here at AP. No small number of crowdfunded endeavors have failed to materialize in the past, and too many of them are merely rebadged OEM goods. But in this brave new dongle-filled world, the HyperDrive has caught our eye. It's a combo USB-C hub, Qi charger, and phone stand all in one. And, unlike many Kickstarter promises, this one has already hit its funding goal.
Remember when dreaming about modular electronics was all the rage? Even Google got caught up in the fantasy for a little while. Project Ara's notion of a modular smartphone might be dead for now, but there's still a smartwatch with interchangeable components to capture our attention in 2018. Blocks raised $1.6M in a Kickstarter campaign that ended way back in 2015, and there must have been concerns that the product would never make it into production. Some of its backers are thankfully starting to receive their watches now, as the company announces the official launch at CES.
For those of you who haven't heard about it, PowerUp makes smartphone-controlled paper airplanes. They're relatively inexpensive, with a basic PowerUp 3.0 costing $24.99, and they work pretty well which has led to them becoming incredibly popular. The last time PowerUp used Kickstarter to launch a product, it closed on .2m after asking for only $50,000. This time around, the goal is just $25,000. It's not hard to see where this is going.
Robots on Kickstarter or Indiegogo usually are slow-moving and expensive products, with little or no real utility. I don't think 'Aire' is anything different, but it's certainly... special. For $699 (or $749, once the base tier runs out), you can have the privilege of owning a hovering upside-down lampshade with the Alexa voice assistant built-in.
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The Android enthusiast community has always been hungry for phones that offer a flagship experience at a low cost. That's why people still mourn Google's Nexus program a year later, despite numerous hardware problems over the years (I should know, my 5 and 5X both died unexpectedly after about a year). And despite OnePlus' many misfires over the years, the company's phones are still praised.
There have been plenty of attempts to make Android a desktop operating system, with most of them not being very good. Jide Technology burst onto the scene with a Surface Pro clone running the company's own 'Remix OS' ROM in 2015, and later released a small desktop PC as well as a version of Remix OS for standard x86-based PCs.
The main reason headphone jacks remain a staple of most phones is because they work. There's no pairing and re-paring, or worrying about how much longer the batteries in your earbuds will last. Anker's new "apprentice brand," Zolo, is trying to make Bluetooth earbuds without any compromises. The Kickstarter for Zolo's Liberty+ earbuds was revealed yesterday, and it has already passed its funding goal ten times over.
ZTE had an interesting idea a while back. What if consumers got to design a phone? I mean, there's no chance it would end up like The Homer, right? People made some unusual suggestions like eye-tracking technology and a case that sticks to things. ZTE's attempt to bring this phone to life as the Hawkeye have hit a snag. It's cancelling the Kickstarter campaign and going back to the drawing board.
The Banner Saga... saga is immensely popular, and for good reason. The incredibly pretty graphics, mythical world, and engaging gameplay are what makes the series so beloved amongst fans. Those who played and liked the other two games will be pleased to hear, then, that the third game in the franchise, The Banner Saga 3, has reached its $200,000 goal with 35 days to go.