You could have a lamp on your desk. Or you could have a lamp that would be at home in a sideshow, fooling viewers into thinking it’s something it’s not. The Bulbing 2D/3D lamps from Studio Cheha on Kickstarter are a fun visual mind trick.
When you look at the lamps from the front, they appear to have 3D shades, like a regular lamp. Look at them from the side and you’ll see they’re actually very flat. Each lamp glows with LED lights that can be dimmed for use as ambient or night lighting.
The Bulbing lamps are constructed with plywood birch and acrylic glass etched with lines that provide the optical illusion when seen from the right angles.
Light up your 3D life.
Studio Cheha
The lamps come in different designs, called the Deski, Ziggi and Classi. They max out at over 15 inches (around 40 centimeters) in height. The lamps start at about $73 (£47, AU$101) for the Classi model, which approximates a small table lamp with a downward-facing shade.
Keep in mind that not every crowdfunding project successfully delivers on time and as promised. Studio Cheha does have a Kickstarter track record you can peruse before pledging.
Studio Cheha has built a small crowdfunded empire out of optical illusions for the home. Its first venture was the Flatlight, a flat candle holder that was funded in 2013. A bulb-shaped mood light came to life in 2014. The new lamps are bright enough to read by and represent a nice leap forward in the evolution of Studio Cheha’s designs. They’re are an entertaining take on home lighting and should appeal to tricksters, design fans and people who are tired of dusting lamp shades.
I wish life could be simple. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. When it comes to Apple’s iPad lineup, which used to have just one model called the “iPad” back in the day, picking which one to buy has become a strangely entangled process. Somewhere between every single model Apple offers is the perfect iPad, …
Using the Force to move an X-Wing out of the swamp was easy. But I need more work on my robot raptor fetch game.
At this year’s New York Toy Fair, I got a taste of how tech is transforming playtime. But you’ll need a tablet or smartphone
to get the most out of these new toys:
Now playing: Watch this:
Mind-reading toy trains ‘Star Wars’ Jedi Masters — with…
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Here are some more details on the toys featured in the roundup:
Crayola Color Alive books cost $6 and are available now. Using Crayola’s app, point a smartphone or tablet camera to the colored page and watch the character come to life and dance off the page. Later this year, Crayola will let you order a 3D printed figurine of your creation, made by 3D Systems. The price of the figurines have not been determined, but expect it to be somewhere between $25 and $50.
Taking your art to the next level, Color Alive Easy Animation Studio turns coloring book pages into a two-minute cartoon videos with sound. The app captures poses recorded by a mannequin doll, and the coloring book character will mimic the postures to create a smooth animation on the screen. The set comes out in the summer for $25.
You’ll want your own pet dino after seeing WowWee’s MiPosaur. The company took the MiP self-balancing robot and turned it into man’s best prehistoric pet. The $120 rolling robot follows commands and changes moods with a smartphone app and a remote-control ball it chases around.
Race cars
have a mind of their own. WowWee’s REV app-controlled cars come in packs of two for $100. Race around and battle with a friend. But if you don’t have a friend around, these self-driving cars are smart enough to chase you on their own.
The popular Anki racing cars
have a few upgrades in Anki Overdrive, coming this fall in a $150 starter pack. These app-controlled racing cars require a special track, and now that track can be built and expanded into various shapes. Along with some new app features, the Overdrive version can race against both iOS and Android players at the same time.
Perhaps one of the most creative tech toys is the Star Wars Force Trainer Hologram Experience by Uncle Milton. A headpiece senses beta brainwaves to measure your concentration levels. The trainer hologram projection is created when a tablet is placed on this reflective pyramid-shaped display. If you concentrate just right, you can lift an X-Wing out of the swamp, or push back your hologram enemies.
You’ll feel like a Jedi when you ride the IO Hawk. This personal transport device requires concentration and slight shifting to send you zipping around. This skateboard-Segway mashup costs $1,800.
Everyday can be Girl Scout cookie season with the Girl Scouts Cookie Oven by Wicked Cool Toys. The oven itself is $60 and will come out later this year with cookie mix packs to whip up a batch of Thin Mints and other famous flavors.
CNET Update delivers the tech news you need in under three minutes. Watch Bridget Carey every afternoon for a breakdown of the big stories, hot devices, new apps, and what’s ahead. Subscribe to the podcast via the links below.
If you’re tried of calculating exactly which US carrier gives you the lowest absolute price on any given smartphone, you can start by “blaming” T-Mobile.
Today, T-Mobile gives you two ways to pay for a phone (everything up front, or down payment and monthly), Verizon offers three (two-year contract, Edge, and month-to-month), and AT&T provides you with a whopping four (two-year contract, one-year contract, Next, and month-to-month). Some second-tier carriers have also introduced more payment methods as well.
Let’s say you’d like to buy the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I’m choosing because it’s a new phone on all carriers that has not been subject to discount. You now have nine pricing options to compare on T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T alone.
The price of the hardware is just the beginning of working out the phone’s total cost to you. There are additional fees to consider, like activation, data plan choices, and how many devices you’ll want to connect to a shared data plan, if any. All those factors contribute to the total cost of ownership over the course of two years.
Instead of simplifying anything, the country’s three largest carries have now made seeking the best deal into a time-consuming, mind-numbing project.
Does a contract really matter?
These days, I think it matters less if you’re technically on a contract or not. As I see it, the main reasons to switch carriers are to get a new phone that a current carrier doesn’t have, to get a better deal, or to get better service, either in terms of network performance or customer care. And some of these thorns are going away.
For instance, more flagship devices appear across the carrier spectrum, which eliminates the need to switch providers if customers are happy with their service.
The same can now be said for early upgrades. Thanks to T-Mobile’s industry agitations, carriers are understanding that customers want affordable options for switching handsets more often, which takes some of the sting out of getting a new device before two years are up. You’ll still have to pay more for the privilege of upgrading (after all, smartphones cost hundreds of dollars each), but you won’t have to shoulder the entire cost yourself if you want to switch phones on a whim.
That brings us to the two-year nature of the contract itself. T-Mobile is indeed a no-contract carrier in that it won’t penalize you for switching once you pay off your device, but you’ll notice that its upfront-plus-monthly pricing plan follows the two-year contract model with 24 neat and totally digestible little payments.
An underlying psychology at play here is that paying off smaller chunks of change in installments makes the product seem more affordable, even if the cost remains identical over time. This, and a carrier’s subsidy of a phone with a contract agreement, makes purchasing the most expensive phones seem much more attainable than paying a lump sum. It is a problem of perception that T-Mobile has “exposed” in its anti-contract potshots and tirades.
T-Mobile may not penalize you for leaving, but by hewing to the contract spirit with its two-year payment cycle, it’s hanging onto a deeper goal that’s the prerogative of all carriers everywhere: keeping you on the network — and paying those data bills — for as long as possible, probably two years and quite possibly much longer.
Does cost perception keep you from your best phone?
My main concern, as someone who make phone recommends for a living, is if a higher up-front cost winds up steering price-conscious customers into making concessions they ordinarily wouldn’t in order to save money.
If you avoid the pricier handset with an off-contract carrier in an effort to keep costs low, you might still wind up replacing the phone sooner than you would have had you bought the higher-end device in the first place. On the flip side, if buying a more expensive phone on contract feels “cheaper” than buying the same phone off-contract, you could still wind up paying more for the phone and data, depending on your whole kaboodle of needs.
Price is important, of that there is no doubt, but it’s still only one piece of the entire smartphone usage puzzle, alongside factors like the carrier’s breadth and quality of coverage. Still, in pricing choices that are the most complex I’ve ever seen them, the industry as a whole is making it harder for buyers to calculate their overall costs, not easier.
CNET
Smartphones Unlockedis a monthly column that dives deep into the inner workings of your trusty smartphone.
