By David Ponce

I’m almost certain I’ve seen car stereos that cradle your iPhone before, so maybe one of our readers can set me straight. Still, the design of the Devium Dash stereo is intriguing because it’s simple and elegant. The detachable faceplate features one button: a knob for volume. The rest is a space for your smartphone, which when inserted becomes the brains of the unit. While cradled it charges, and you’re free to use any application to listen to the radio or your own tunes. There are several good radio applications on the market, such as TuneIn, so the fact the device itself has no radio features shouldn’t be a problem. The faceplate holds on to the rest of the unit (a full 2-DIN affair) with rare earth magnets, reducing the number of moving components and lowering the risk of mechanical failure. While the first production faceplate is for the iPhone 4 and 4S, there will be versions made for other phones.

One problem with this setup is that the iPhone doesn’t display your applications in landscape mode. There is a companion app however, the Devium Dashboard, that does give you access to some of your apps in this way and makes it possible to use your iPhone exactly how you’d expect it to work in this application.

Normally $300, you can get yours for $250 on pre-order right now. It’s on Kickstarter, and the company needs $45k to make this happen. They’re at $2,7k right now but have 56 days to go. If they reach their goal, you’ll get your delivery in July of this year.

[ Devium Dash Car Stereo ]

By David Ponce

So Halloween is over. You know what that means. Santa music’s gonna be blarin’ in malls across America and the pressure is on to spend money and buy gifts. For what it’s worth, the American economy could use a little consumerism at the moment. So here’s a nice and inexpensive present to buy someone. It’s a small RC replica of a Boeing AH-61A Apache helicopter. The remote control however is not your typical radio joystick box but your Android or iOS device. Simply attach the IR dongle (seen in the pic) into your 3.5mm jack, run the app and you’re good to go. The helicopter is gyro assisted so it should level itself out. Better yet, pitch, roll and possibly yaw are all controlled via your device’s own gyro sensor. You’ll just have to use the onscreen controls for elevation. Range and battery life are not discussed, but this is clearly more of a cool toy than a serious RC application so don’t expect to be able to use this from very far for very long.

At $40, like we said, it makes for a cool gift.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Red Ferret ]

By David Ponce

Let’s not kid ourselves. Our generation is in the process of developing a terrible skill: one-handed telephone use through extensive texting-while-driving. Kids, shame on you. Trevor Prideaux, a man of a previous generation, did not have this sort of skill and found it difficult to use newer smartphones with only one arm, having been born with only one. He’d either have to balance them on the prosthetic arm or put it on a flat surface. So he had a special prosthetic made:

Technicians at the Exeter Mobility Centre got working on a ground-breaking limb. Prosthethist Steve Gallichan, technician Les Street and undergraduate worker Sarah Bennett then produced a prototype in just five weeks. They made a laminated fibre cast of the phone and built it into the limb, so Mr Prideaux’s mobile could fit inside.

So now his Nokia C7 sits snugly in the artificial limb and Steve is happy as can be.

Why a Nokia C7? Because he asked apple for a blank case of the iPhone for fitting and testing and they turned him down.

[ The Telegraph ] VIA [ Geekosystem ]

By David Ponce

Notice that the headline mentions a smartphone, rather than “your” smartphone. That’s because Mobisante’s recently released, smartphone-based MobiUS SP1 ultrasound device doesn’t work with just any phone, but the now very dated (already two year-old) Windows Mobile 6.5-based Toshiba TG01 smartphone. Of course that doesn’t make this device any less awesome, since it means that accurate and inexpensive point-of-care diagnostics are now much more mobile. Whereas an injured person would traditionally have to reach a hospital in order to receive potentially life-saving scans, ultrasound scans can now be performed on the field. Images taken with the MobiUS SP1 can then be sent to another physician for a second opinion. Emergency internal surgery could be attempted en-route, preventing a possible bleed out for example.

This device is not cheap at $7,495, but then again it’s aimed at medical professionals.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Medgadget ]