Awesome Stuff: Stand And Deliver

from the will-the-best-tablet-stand-please-stand-up dept

There's a huge industry out there for smartphone and tablet accessories, and that industry contains a lot of hastily-made junk. But it also provides an opportunity for real innovation and smart, functional design work, so like many industries that fits those criteria, it's booming on Kickstarter. This week's Awesome Stuff post focuses on a slice of the tech-accessory world that is saturated yet still not perfected: smartphone and tablet stands.

The fame*dock: Deceptively Simple


Lots of people have offered natural-wood stands, and this isn't even the first to do custom laser engraving, but as far as I know it is the first to hide a handy technological secret: a Bluetooth-based beacon that communicates with your device to trigger functions like SMS, home automation and various online services when it's in or near the dock.



The Léaf Mount: Will It Stick?


One of the holy grails of device stands (and a lot of other applications) is the ultimate sticky surface — one that instantly and firmly connects to anything, but also easily releases when you want it to, and retains these qualities for a long time. The Léaf Mount is one such entrant, with micro-suction pads that they claim will endure multiple devices over many years.


The Right Arm: Highly Flexible


This bigger, heavier-duty stand focuses on flexibility over portability or compactness. Not just for tablets and smartphones, it can hold up full-sized laptops as well, and is designed to provide lots of standing-desk configurations for people who prefer work on their feet, or just more ergonomic postures when sitting down. It also uses a different mounting system — adhesive polyurethane gel, rather than a microsuction surface (the ultimate victor of the sticky-stuff wars is still undecided).

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Filed Under: awesome stuff


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  • identicon
    Jake, 2 Mar 2014 @ 6:31am

    Or you could, you know, buy a laptop. Just sayin'.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    AjStechd (profile), 2 Mar 2014 @ 7:59am

    Really like the "Right Arm". Looked for something like this months ago and ended up building my own. If the price is reasonable, I'm all over this one. Nice find.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Leigh Beadon (profile), 2 Mar 2014 @ 11:35am

      Re:

      It's just over $100, which doesn't seem that bad -- at least, I'd be a little nervous entrusting a laptop to something that cost much less. And when you compare it to the insane price of a lot of monitor arm-mounting systems and such it looks pretty good... Still often nervous about buying these kinds of things without seeing them in person though, or at least being able to look at some hands-on reviews -- I hate ordering something like this and it turning out to be palpably cheap & junky the moment you look at it up close.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    DNY (profile), 2 Mar 2014 @ 8:46am

    Highwaymen?

    From the title I expected something about highwaymen.

    Of course, maybe collecting kickstarter funds to produce fairly pointless devices like tablet stands is a species of highway robbery.

    (Okay, I get the joke, it's about stands...)

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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