Pillar of sound

I'm doing fewer gadget reviews on this blog for what I think is the good reason that an awful lot of people are making an awful lot of gadgets very well indeed. It's probably indicative of my age that when I started writing about this stuff, there was some poorly-made tat out there and some weedy little speakers that were quite overpriced.

Which is why it's a pleasure to write about the Stelle Pillar, £249 from an Apple store near you (they will also be available elsewhere I'm sure). You can see from the picture that they come in different colours so you're likely to find one that will look good in your living room. The better news is that they're chargeable with the enclosed adapter so proximity to a wall socket isn't an issue when it's full of juice; it will also charge an external device through its USB socket.

Mine is black and it was very easy to pair with my iPhone although it seemed to struggle when I tried to add my iMac it wasn't so keen; it recognised my Nexus tablet OK but switching between this and the phone wasn't great. If you don't mind pairing again every time you want to use a different product with it, you'll be fine in my experience.

So, what about the sound quality? The answer is that it's very good. It has speakerphone capacity which is great, it has 15 hours of playback and although I'm not one for quoting decibels at people - they always seem a bit meaningless to me in the context of a review - it had a decent bit of bass oomph so that you can enjoy listening to music quietly as well as loudly.

Gripes are few; it came with a plastic disc whose purpose I've yet to ascertain (I suppose it can stand on it but...why?) and for a geek like me switching between devices could have been smoother. The speakers being built into a small unit means there is inevitable next to no stereo "spread". My wife had to fiddle with her iPhone audio settings before she was convinced it could play classics reasonably (my Beatles, Stranglers, Madness and other middle-aged-rocker fare were fine). And when you switch it on, the voice that says 'hello' is Australian - that's not a gripe, just a bit of trivia, before I get complaints!

For the vast majority of listeners I suspect it'll be a very good buy.

Taking the tablets (and phones)

Apple has been making new toys as you've probably read. Of course I've been looking at them and some are very shiny indeed.

First the one I don't 'get'; the iPhone 5c. Slightly cheaper than most of the others on offer but not sufficiently to make it a cheap option, this comes with up to 32 gigs of memory and has a better camera and faster processor than its predecessors. It's a nice phone and if you want a marginally lower-spec phone then OK - but releasing it at the same time as the 5s? Really? I suppose something's going to compete with it and Apple might as well aim for the number two slot as well. I did wonder whether the youth market would go for the colours; my 13-year-old's view was 'it's a bit yellow, isn't it?'

iPhone 5s

The 5s is a prince among phones. It has fingerprint recognition and it's no use mugging me and gruesomely cutting my finger off so you can use it - it detects that it's an actual finger with a pulse that's touching it. This seriously excellent function is hidden in the start button so there's nothing obtrusive in the design, which basically echoes the iPhone 5. It's a faster phone than we're used to in terms of apps and it has a number of new whizzy features; if you leave your phone switched on in a locker in a basement (it can happen) then normally it will continue to waste battery trying to find a signal. The 5s won't - it realises it's not moving and switches the aerials off.

Best of all is the camera. You get decent pictures from your mobile, which has never gone without saying. Here are some fireworks from mine - remember this is just a phone camera with the flash turned off in poor light - someone who knew what they were doing with a camera could take some seriously good pics (this'll probably look OK on the page, click it for a larger image and see how out of focus it actually is - my fault, not the camera's). I certainly don't have any reason to carry a 'snaps' camera around with me any more...oh, you'd got to that stage some time ago? OK.

Look also at Apple's third video down on this page, which about two minutes in demonstrates the slow-mo video camera. I've had hours of fun making the dog wet and filming her shaking using this - just nothing worth sharing yet because I don't know what I'm doing with the lighting. Here's the Apple link: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/

As you can gather, if you're thinking of upgrading or generously buying someone hundreds' worth of phone for Christmas, I'd go for the 5s.

iPads

I haven't seen the new iPad Mini yet but the iPad Air is much lighter than its predecessors. It has the same processor as the new phones so is faster to react than the older versions and a lenticular display like the last one; the result is a very easy full-sized tablet which is fine for high-definition movies, whether you're filming them or just watching. The speakers always impress me; you get a reasonable amount of bass for something so thin.

I find my own previous-generation iPad Mini more practical because you can carry it around in a smaller case; on the other hand I've stopped using it for typing in spite of buying a keyboard case because the keyboard is physically too small to be comfortable, and I find the larger screen better when I'm travelling as I like to carry movies with me for the plane and long hotel evenings whilst on business.

Accessories

As always there are accessories available, including the usual gamut of cases and chargers. My favourite is the Griffin PowerDock 5. Looks like a toast rack (except the dividers are plastic) and it supports up to five devices. The blurb says it's designed for Apple gadhets, which I imagine is a bit of marketing - it has USB ports, you plug your own adapter in so it'll work with anything. I've recently bought a Google Nexus 7 for testing Android apps and it's charging perfectly happily as I type.

(Incidentally I don't write as much about Android because I use mostly Apple, but for a good all-round tablet with a smaller form I've been very impressed with the Nexus 7 so far - it even managed to transfer a YouTube film to my TV yesterday without my having to set up a manual connection. I suspect it was talking to the Virgin Media box, but I didn't have to fiddle with passwords or anything like that as it was already on the same WiFi network. Didn't work for stored video, unfortunately, so Apple kit plus Apple TV is still ahead on points if not price).

Photographers should also look at the Olloclip, a deceptively simple add-on for the iPhone's camera. You just clip it on and focus a bit and you suddenly find your camera on your phone has gone wide-angle or panoramic, there's a lense for each. Make sure you buy the right one for your phone; grown-up photographers will want to know that it takes fish-eye, wide angle, macro 10x and macro 15x. None of that means very much to me; I do know that I've started to take pictures that look as though they come from a much better camera...unfortunately with the same incompetent operating it as before.

Just in Case

The thing about getting an iPad or other tablet - or indeed a smartphone - is that not only do they need protecting but a good percentage of the cases on the market are purely decorative - or worse, the designers think they're decorative but anyone with functioning eyeballs is likely to have a different opinion.

This is why the black picture you can see illustrating this entry was such a blessed relief. It's from Tech21. Look, it's black and more chic than you can see from the picture - but it's also reinforced and feels very solid indeed.

The same is true of the Impact Shield screen protectors the company produces - obviously they're flexible and stick-on-able but ultimately very tough. This is achieved by putting some of the same stuff BASF and the military use to protect their equipment.

It seems to do the job which is excellent; in my view, though, the best thing about it is the simplicity and elegance. Just don't put it down on a black surface.

Docusign Challenge 4: The conclusion

As per previous posts, I've now tried to go three months without signing my name with a pen. Fortunately nobody has asked for my autograph - no, look, that has happened to me when someone has a book I've written at an event (my guess is that the PRs put them up to it, but no matter).

The latest is that I signed another contract electronically today and a further one last month but - wait for it - the other party signed it in biro and sent my copy back to me. I'm not sure if that counts.

Signing for prescriptions and anything like that is at the moment a dead loss without a pen. Ironically it's years since I've had a prescription for anything, but a blood pressure issue (discovered only months ago) and a minor scalp operation followed by antibiotics mean I've become very familiar with the health systems. When it's your health involved, you sign in whatever way they want you to.

But I think the e-signers are onto something. I'll certainly continue with electronic contracts as they file themselves and you don't lose them. That's a good reason to use them in its own right.

I'll look forward to some of the statutory services catching up.

Great weather for...er...

I've been playing with gadgets again. This time it's the Netatmo Weather Station, a handy little gizmo - or pair of gizmos - which turn your iPad and/or iPhone into a weather station. They use an app, they talk to your phone and tell you when it's raining.

OK, the last bit was an oversimplification.

As I write in the formerly sunny Norwood it has started pelting down. Obviously I don't need a piece of technology to tell me this. Last week, however, a family member was suffering a little with breathing issues due to pollen - we live opposite a microscopic park (already my home sounds posher than it is) and if you have hay fever this can become very difficult, particularly combined with an unkempt (read 'completely neglected for years) garden next door.

Air quality

So an indoor and outdoor gadget that tells you what the air quality is like is something of a help. You can monitor temperatures and air quality through the apps, which are of course free, and set alerts when they reach a certain level.

For £139 it could be an expensive way of seeing whether it's raining or not if you're not all that worried by the temperature. In the current heatwave, however, if you're prone to breathing issues it could be a very good investment - and you can buy extra modules to monitor different rooms if, say, you have kids.

Orbitsound: unobtrusively making TV better

I had an issue with the sound on my TV. I admit the issue was mostly 'Guy is a fussy little sod' and it was perfectly comprehensible, but I do like a bit of bass when I'm listening to music or watching a movie. On the other hand my wife has this incomprehensible aversion to wires and speakers all over the room. I assume this is because she's a bit weird or something, looks perfectly OK to me, you should see my office.

Nonetheless we started investigating sound bars. I've been loaned a few in the past and they've been difficult to set up, needed the right connections, all that confusing stuff. The Orbitsound M12 (pictured) had none of this trouble. Inputs through optical (which we use) port, or a standard 3.5mm port like you'd use on an earphone (avoid if possible, you have to turn the TV volume up really high so don't get so much control), speaker cable options (again quite good but not quite what you'd get from optical) or Bluetooth.

Bluetooth is a great option because the predecessor, the T12, had a little iPhone stand on it. I now don't have to have my iPhone in the dock whilst listening to music, just pair it up and go. The sound is good - no, not quite the spread you'd get from separate speakers but a decent beefy sound nonetheless. It's particularly effective on music programmes and movies but improves most things.

Best of all is that this time around the subwoofer is smaller than on previous models so you can hide it away more easily; this is simplified and helped by the fact that, Hallelujah, it's connected wirelessly so just put it near a power socket and you eliminate the trailing wires.

By all means I'd prefer a full-fledged, five-speakers-around-the-room system but if I want my marriage to last that's not going to happen. This is a neat solution for just under £400 (so no, not cheap) with enough oomph to keep me happy.

P. S. Although we don't have a convenient shelf on which to try it out, the soundbar is apparently non-directional. So although you get sounds clearly coming from the left or the right, you can in theory put the soundbar on a shelf nowhere near the telly and it should still sound OK. That said, you're then back to having wires trailing around the room everywhere.

Docusign Challenge: Day one

So I've entered this thing called the DocuSign Blogger Challenge. The premise is simple enough and as a tech addict I couldn't resist: just go through three months without signing a wet signature if you can avoid it.

Instead you use the DocuSign app on your phone or tablet. I have duly installed it and have to say it's aaving me a little time already. It wasn't much use when my sports club wanted me to sign to take receipt of something, but in business terms it's been great.

My standard process for dealing with signing stuff has so far been: someone sends over, say, a contract. I print it out, I sign it, I scan it back in. This gets fiddly because my scanner isn't that fond of my printer, so I generally end up transporting the scanned document back to my computer for sending out on a memory stick.

So far I have opened up two contracts on my iPad Mini, supplied by way of thanks by DocuSign (hence the declaration at the end of this post), dragged and dropped my signature, done the same with the date, and sent them straight back. Returning them goes through DocuSign's secure system so I can be certain it's all safe.

I have to say I can't see a downside on day one. Let's see how it shapes up later on.

This post is a sponsored post as part of the DocuSign Blogger Challenge.

Grooming gadgets

One of the least appealing things about reaching middle age is the things your barber suddenly starts attacking. I was in the chair a few weeks ago and he solicitously started snipping not only the hair I intended but also a quick clip of nasal hair and inside the ears.

I have rewritten that first sentence three times to try and make myself sound better. It doesn't work.

So I was pleased when among all the stuff Sassoon for Men is releasing lately, including a number of beard trimmer products (as people who read this blog regularly will realise I quite enjoy being clean shaven), included the Titan Series 'hygiene trimmer'. It's nicelty designed, not too expensive, does the job, is easily washable and unlike my last one from Boots' own-brand range, it has a flat base so it stands up in the bathroom cabinet. I'm amazed more people don't think of this when designing these things.

The other gadget I've been playing with is a clever nail clipper from StylFile, the company owned by Tom Pellereau and Lord Sugar sparked by Pellereau's win on The Apprentice. Pellereau, you might remember, was a bit of a boffin and a very good thinker. Yes, he came up with the "emergency biscuit" when they were asked to design a biscuit but actually being prepared to throw any idea out and see if people react is a good thing.

This time he's attacked the concept of nail clippers. They generally have parallel blades so they more or less snap the nail off, which then flies around the room. If they had a scissor motion, he's presumably reasoned, then the nail would simply fall into the bin. And that's what he's done - very simple indeed and like all good inventions, obvious with hindsight.

Would I have put his face on the front of a beauty brand? I'll pass on that, but then I wouldn't put mine there either.

Christmas presents 9: Tweed iPad case

The thing about leather iPad and iPhone cases is that they all tend to end up looking the same. Go to a meeting and put your iPad down and you'd be hard pressed not to pick the wrong one up at the end.

So it's useful that iChicGear has issued iPad and iPhone covers in a very distinctive Harris Tweed design (pictured). They're reasonably priced, the one in the picture is €49 plus delivery. There's a little leather catch at the back so you can tilt your iPad on a flat surface for easier typing. Mine's brown herringbone tweed with orange micro-lining.They have magnetic closure so they'll switch the thing off, and although they don't feel like it they have hard shells built in for protection.

Actually I wouldn't have minded paying a little more if they'd put a bit more into them. I do like to have a couple of card pouches in an iPad holder, and preferably somewhere to put a pen. This is a lot more basic than that - but then I'd be back to my case looking like everyone else's.

These are a nice alternative to the norm, they're genuine tweed and aimed at the luxury market. They're distinctive - you can make your own mind up about whether you want any extras.

Christmas presents 3: iO PLAY 2

Some time ago the people at Armour Automotive put one of their iO PLAY products in my car. It's a Bluetooth kit that enables you to play music from your phone and receive calls whilst driving (please, please tell people you're driving and cut the call short, focusing on the road). You'd think when they offered to upgrade me to the iO PLAY 2 I'd have been delighted, but initially I wasn't. I didn't see how they'd improve on something this simple - pair a phone or two and it just works. Easy.

Nonetheless I agreed - for the blog they'd offered to do it for nothing, saving £159.99 plus installation, so other than curiosity about what they'd change there was nothing to lose.

I have to tell you it's marvellous. Many new cars now link their stereos with phones anyway, so there isn't much point in buying this, but if you have a relative whose motor doesn't do this it's worth considering getting one as a gift for them. First there's the built-in iPhone charger (for the iPhone 5 you'll need an adapter as the charger has changed). It doesn't stop there, though.

There's a little display. This tells you which phone you're linked to. It has called ID. It has a voice - through the speakers it tells you who's texting and will read texts. It will, if you're linked through the charger rather than Bluetooth and using Siri on an iPhone, accept spoken commands. It lets you switch between tracks, albums (displaying the title), car audio, look up numbers in your phone book and initiate calls without taking your eyes off the road (although I'd still recommend pulling over if you're going to be thinking about a call rather than the road hazards).

The original iO PLAY set my phone free - I'm not a massive headphone fan so driving with my music is where having a music phone comes into its own. This upgrade has allowed me to do more with it than just play music, and spares me the bother of fiddling with the handset finding music before starting the car, it remembers five devices so I can have my iPad as well as my phone ready to work without booting my wife's phone out of the memory.

It is, quite honestly, pretty damned good and well worth the money. Unless your car already does this stuff I can't find a single down point.

Christmas present ideas no. 1: the phone

I've been playing with a new phone. It's the new RAZRi from Motorola (sponsored link through my Amazon affiliate link) - you may have seen it advertised as the phone with the screen that goes all the way across the front.

I'll be honest, I'm an Apple man myself (sounds like a rubbish superhero but never mind). I skipped the iPhone 4S and moved to the 5, and if I'm horribly honest it's been a bit, well, whelming. Yes it's a bit longer but apart from allowing me to put even more icons on than I had before, that doesn't really add a lot to the experience. I like Siri but that was in the 4S as well - new to me but not much of an upgrade.

So when I was sent the Motorola to review I set about it with some enthusiasm. It is, I would confirm, the best looking phone from that company for quite some time. The screen really is pretty generous and if there's a disadvantage to not having an Apple retina display then it's not something my middle-aged eyes are going to worry about. In fact the larger screen makes it slightly easier to use than the Apple, although if I were going to be reading loads of emails then something like the Kindle Fire would be a better option (if I were in the market for an upgrade again I might have gone for a Samsung SIII - in fact after the iPhone I kind of wish I'd done so).

It's a seriously nice looking phone and it works. It uses a micro sim, so if you have a phone with a standard sim you'll need to get another (you could risk one of those cutter things, but I'd be inclined to resist that). If your phone is one of those that uses nano sims (like the iPhone 5) then you can get adapters; be careful with these. I thought the easiest way to ensure mine didn't get lost was to stick it in the phone even when it was empty; without the sim in it the structure was weak, so when I pressed it to get it out, it broke. This, I hasten to add, was a third party adapter and not, repeat not, part of the package from Motorola.

What is part of the package is the battery. I've never had a phone that lasts the best part of two days on a single charge - well, I have, but it was just a phone rather than an emailer/music player/Internet searcher/video machine...you get the idea. The battery life is one of the most striking things about this gadget.

In terms of synchronising with a Google account it does everything you'd expect, very quickly, and a load of it worked right out of the box without the need to install extra apps. Some of the social apps, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, are free and it might have been nice if they'd been preinstalled.

But this is the most promising phone I've seen from Motorola certainly this decade, possibly for a lot longer. Clearly if I want to use it longer term then I'll lose all my iPhone apps - there's no reason anyone should hand me an Android version for nothing - so that's a consideration. Also not all of the movies and TV shows I've downloaded from the Apple App store are compatible (see how they lock you in?). They'll work with the iPad so that's not a huge problem for me; others may differ.

But if you were thinking of buying your first smartphone and hadn't already been thoroughly tied to one particular software environment, this would be an excellent, clear, powerful phone to own.

iPhone wallets: Cases in point

I've been looking at iPhone cases. Not for the shiny new iPhone 5, you understand; many companies are still looking into just what they do to be compatible with those (if you think the case people have a problem then bear in mind the power connector has changed, too). There are still plenty of 4s and 4Ss around.

There's a nice leather one from Knomo available for £50, the iPhone wallet. As you'll gather it's a combination phone and wallet so you need only to carry one of the things around with you, which is a step forward for blokes trying not to rumple their suits with too much in their pockets (you know this is a problem when, as happened to me relatively recently, a tailor takes your jacket and complains it's too heavy...or was that my mother, or wife, or all three...).

As you can see from the picture on the left it's nicely made and tastefully understated. The other end of the spectrum is the Bookbook by Twelve South, which you can buy on Amazon by clicking here (this leads to my Amazon affiliates site, I will get a small amount for every one ordered through this link).

When the review sample arrived (see picture) my initial response was that it was over the top, tacky and definitely not for me. My daughter, on the other hand, thought it was brilliant. "I love cheesy stuff", was her response, and it's certainly not for the understated.

Both are nicely made and would stand up to being pulled out of your pocket a few times. For me there's still a bit of a concern about pulling all of your money out every time your phone goes off, you never know who's watching; I hope I'm being overly cynical about that but in spite of the convenience I'll probably stick with a separate phone and wallet case for the moment.

What do other people use?

Running socks and skipping ropes

OK, been busy so it's been quiet in here for a little while. But following the piece a few weeks ago on my attempted lifestyle change I can confirm that around half a stone has vanished in three weeks with a belt notch being tightened on my suit yesterday. No, it didn't hurt and yes, I know leather stretches so this probably wasn't a whole "notch" in real terms.

The exercising I mentioned - using a skipping rope - hasn't gone quite so well. I've been testing some socks from Runbreeze and can confirm that if you find ankle socks/trainer liners comfortable they certainly do the job of cushioning your foot and keeping you cool just as you'd hope.

I've been using a digital skipping rope (pictured) from Kettler. I can confirm that this does the job - counts the time you've been working out, tells you about the calories you've been burning, or at least it did until I let my daughter loose on it. It came back with the display dead, I have no idea why, she couldn't have run out the battery that quickly.

Nonetheless it's still fine as a skipping rope, albeit one with a lighter cord than many people will be used to so you have to work harder to get it over your head. This is where the other component comes into play; you know, the unco-ordinated, immovable heavy lump attempting to skip for the first time in forty years when he wasn't particularly good at it anyway. I tend to last about two minutes before getting tangled up, so if I'm honest the 'cardio fix' running alongside the calorie reduction hasn't gone quite to plan. I will persist.

Still, three weeks, half a stone. I'm not at all distressed at that so far.

Related posts: Attempting a lifestyle change

Philips Citiscape headphones: more comfort, less noise

I've been testing the new Philips Citi Scape headphones and I have to say they're pretty good. My thanks to the PR company for sending them along.

They are a lot like many headphones I've tested in that they have a decent bit of foam on them to cushion against the ear. This has two effects. First it seals a bit of the sound in and a lot of the extraneous noise out. Second, because it's memory foam, the experience actually improves as you wear them more often (or as in my case, the more they're used the more daughter's-head-shaped they actually become).

The foam is breathable so you shouldn't break out into a sweat too quickly whilst using them. You can take calls as there's a built in microphone.

Yes, I'd like a bit more oomph in the bass and a bit more on the treble, but then if you shop around you can get these for forty quid or so. If I want something that sounds as if it costs hundreds there's clearly an easy answer. For something within a much more comfortable budget, and which can be worn for a fair while, these are pretty good.

Declaration: Sample headphones supplied by the PR company, link above goes through to Amazon and is an affiliate link - costs the buyer no extra but this blog gets a commission.

Hey fatty, how's the sport? Fitbit research

There's a great piece of research bound to do the rounds over the next couple of days. The makers of Fitbit, a sort of extended pedometer which monitors how many steps you've taken, how many stairs you've walked up and down, how far you've gone, have looked into how much lard we're all going to put on around our waists by watching sport rather than doing it this summer.

Men have admitted to watching four hours a day of sport (which if you're watching a tennis match isn't much), with 5% saying they'll happily watch 42 hours a week when the Olympics are on. A fifth of us confess that we can't fit exercise into our lifestyles.

I'm overweight and this is where the Fitbit has started to help. It acts as an ordinary pedometer but then it starts doing clever things (and before you ask I bought it after having it recommended, no freebies, no discounts). The website is the clever bit because it starts telling you how you're doing compared to the average.

Take my own example. I walk the dog twice a day, I go up and down stairs a lot, I walk to the station when I have to - I was a little perplexed at just why I'm this shape. The Fitbit site told me in about 24 hours that a lot of the calories I take in are unnecessary - not just through the obvious stuff like "cut down on the drink" but also I hadn't taken in how many calories were in a glass of orange juice, nor had I measured how large my bowl of cereal in the morning was. Cutting this down a bit was no trouble.

More importantly in spite of walking the dog I find my average daily steps are about 60% of those of the average male of my age. It all slots into place really easily after this.

If I could change one thing about the website, it would be that it's so American. This isn't a criticism as such, but when all of the calorie measures for fast and pre-packaged food refer to foreign products it's much less easy to guesstimate how much you're taking in. Nonetheless in identifying a few areas I could be changing quite painlessly, this little widget is very useful.

It also tells you about your sleep patterns by tracking your movements. I thought I was sleeping badly and blaming a lot of tiredness on that, taking ages to get off... It turns out that I'm not, my imagined 'ages' is about ten minutes long and I sleep like a baby. Inactivity is the answer.

At £79.99 it's not dirt cheap but for a report like that on my lifestyle I would have paid a lot more. You can get one from Amazon through this link.

Power to your i's

First a bit of crowing. Last week I mentioned that I'd scooped the Times men's fashion pages in its Saturday Magazine two weeks in a row. OK, so last Friday I wrote about "A Suit That Fits" in John Lewis retail stores and then a day later - you've guessed it, they wrote about it too. Of course they come out on Saturdays and I can blog when I like so I'm working with an advantage here. And deadlines mean there's literally no chance I wrote my piece before they did. Nonetheless, you saw it here first.

So, we haven't looked at gadgets here for a while and it's time to set that right. One of the biggest drawbacks of a smartphone or tablet is that they're even thirstier than a people-carrier (other CR-V drivers will know exactly what I mean by that). They don't so much use power as inhale it. One possible answer is the smart cover; I've been using a Mophie Juice Pack Air Case for my iPhone 4, it fits snugly around it and I now find I get two or three days' charge out of the phone with normal use. Obviously if I'm driving and using it as a satnav while it's Bluetoothing music to the car stereo it uses a bit more, but it tends not to run out of juice by the end of the day which has to be a good thing.

The other gadget I've been playing with is the Mophie PowerStand for iPad + iPad 2 (pictured) from the same company. It charges, it allows you to tilt your iPad for comfort and adjust it for landscape as well as portrait viewing. This is actually more useful than I'd assumed it would be at first. Being able to look at a second screen whilst working is old news to many; I could see this replacing paper notes-holders for many typists. Better yet it makes the iPad more usable in the kitchen - as long as you have WiFi you just connect, set it up and suddenly you don't have to get the iPad greasy (or oniony or sugary or whatever else you were going to do to damage it) by constantly picking it up and putting it down when you need to use it. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and many people will be able to use the stand and the keyboard as their main computer as long as they're happy storing all of their media in the cloud (at 64 gigs even the largest of the Apple tablets isn't a particularly grand computer).

It's costly for what it is but for the transformation in the way I can now work it's worth it. Others may disagree and I freely admit I wouldn't have gone for it if I didn't write about gadgets and have the need to try the latest and best - but I'd be reluctant to let mine go now I've got it.

Declaration: the links in this story go to the products listed on Amazon, through the writer's affiliate agreement - I will get a small cut from any purchases made as a result. This has not prejudiced the writing in any way.

Egg-sacting times for Tefal

Occasionally on this blog I write about a gadget. Occasionally they're even affordable. This one is: the Toast'n'egg from Tefal. My thanks to the PR company for sending me a sample. I can confirm that it works - and for under £40 is a reasonable enough buy if you want to cut down a bit on washing up.

Of course I'm not completely satisfied. It's great if you're making breakfast for yourself. Two slices in the toaster, egg in the poacher and you're away. So far, so excellent. But there's another option. It will take up to four eggs for boiling.

This is another good thing but - and here's the rub - if I'm cooking four eggs then I'm probably cooking them for more than just me. And if it's all the same to everyone, I'd quite like the option of a four-slice toaster.

No doubt someone in product development thought of this, looked at the size, told someone in marketing about it and someone decided the thing would just be too big. If I'm right, that's probably not a bad call - but then why make it cook so many eggs if the whole lot won't be ready and hot all at once?

This is probably a quibble. For the price it's a perfectly good kitchen gadget. I'd bet, though, that loads of people will stick with a saucepan and separate toaster.

Clean under your car

My thanks to the people at Karcher who sent a review unit of their Chassis Cleaner. They pitched it as a lifestyle accessory for men; that's fine, I'm a stereotype, although if you haven't got a driveway (I haven't, we park on the street) it's not going to be easy to use.

The principle is simple. Your car gets damaged not only when it gets dirty on the surface but when it gets dirty undereath. This is where salt gets into the wheel arches and elsewhere and you might as well start saving up for its replacement immediately.

So if you haven't got a garage with a platform onto which you can drive the car and clean it from underneath - which I'm guessing covers the vast majority of LifeOver35 readers - you need something that will turn the average jetwash into an underneath-the-car jobbie.

This is easy to assemble and does the job well. Typically from Karcher the water pressure is impressive. Yes, you'll need a good bit of space and an outside tap is a help - the distance between the kitchen in our terraced house and the pavement outside would make this impractical as a regular thing. Nonetheless if you have the set-up then the just-north-of-£80 including VAT I found on a website could be a very good investment that will extend the useful life of your motor.

Christmas gifts 9: Gadgets - and a discount for readers

Blokes like gadgets. That's probably sexist and stereotypical too, but look, we just like gadgets. The way to a man's heart is with an iPad 2, and soforth. If you have the budget then a new phone - HTC Sensation XL is one of the cream of the current Android crop - great, he'll love it unless he's an Apple user (if he has an iPhone 4 or 4S then his sim won't fit the new phone anyway). If he has a BlackBerry have a think about a Playbook - it syncs with your BlackBerry and then works like any other tablet computer. I've been playing with one, it's a good machine and the lacklustre sales so far have me stumped.

There are also new land line phones from Magicbox like the Torque, which looks like a phone on a plate which answers itself when you pick it up. Very chic. A new iPad holder from Vogel's called the Ring-O is very useful, turns into a desk stand, wall bracket or attaches to the headrest on a car seat so the kids can have a movie going on the journey to the in-laws. Add a decent pair of headphones - my new ones from BlueAnt are pretty good, a little bulky but who cares in the car - and they'll even be able to hear the film.

Maybe you're a little more eco-conscious than all that, and the good news here - no, really - is that readers of LifeOver35 can have a discount on a JetStorm from Ecocamel. This is a shower head that adds air into the mix so you get just as good a shower as you would with any other head, but you should find your water bill goes down 40% a year. Families of four should, the company says, save up to 56,000 litres of water a year and annual savings average out at £240 per annum. This means you'll save enough to have paid yourself back for the purchase price after three months, according to the blurb.

Or two and a bit months if you help yourself to a 25% discount for readers of LifeOver35 - just go to the website above and order the shower, entering the code EC13 at the checkout and twenty five pee in the pound will vanish from your purchase price.

Other gadgets pitched to LifeOver35 this season include a whole load of coffee machines. These are a bit of a dark art to me; I'm honestly happy with our DeLonghi matching kettle and toaster, and we bought these because they look nice rather than because we think the water is going to be boiled any better by using them.

Note: in case anyone's wondering, I have no affiliation with any of the companies mentioned in this piece; you can order nothing or a million shower heads, I won't get a penny, this is an independent blog. That said, if you *did* by a million of them, please tell me and I'll try and flog the company an ad...

Christmas list 1: Kobo in Kolour for Christmas

E-book reader specialist Kobo has released a new model in time for Christmas. The Kobo Vox is not just an e-book reader, although it's being marketed that way. It is actually a full-blown tablet computer, competing in America with the Amazon Kindle Flame (which we haven't seen in the UK yet) but maybe not up to the spec of Apple's iPad or iPad 2.

First the reading. This is what the gadget is mostly about and it's a bit of an improvement on the black and white model when the light is dim. Like the Amazon Kindle, it uses e-ink and there's no backlighting on the mono version so this brighter-lit sample is a joy. I can imagine my eyes getting tired after a while but for short bursts it's excellent. I suspect the processing power required for a full-blown tablet computer will explain why it's a lot heavier than the basic Kobo, though, and if I'm honest then for me the extra light didn't quite compensate for the additional poundage. That said, I do wonder how many people will actually end up weighing them up side by side as I did.

There's a lot that's positive, then. It's just a shame that the company wanted to put a full tablet computer onto the market. One of the things you may want to do with a tablet computer, I should explain, is to go onto the Internet. That's fine, it attached to my wireless network without a problem. You might also want to check your emails.

And it's here, with regret, I have to say "whoops". There's a bookmark on the screen where you can get to a gmail account, but no matter how hard I tried I have to say I couldn't get anything other than a blank screen out of that. Other web pages including this one worked fine. So I'd gone from really quite enthusiastic (albeit not enough to go and buy one instead of my current mono readers) to thinking, what a shame.

It's possible that this was due to a defect in my review unit, but it does seem a shame - browser working and then a dead link from one of its own bookmarks. So if you wanted to get a loved one an e-reader for Christmas then for me it's still the Kindle or the monochrome Kobo which remains a pleasure to use.

I will be exploring further blokey Christmas gift ideas in the coming weeks - public relations types wanting to pitch items into the mix are more than welcome.