If you’re an Apple user, you’re probably familiar with Mobee’s technology already. Mobee makes inductive chargers for all sorts of gear, but really blew up when they made an inductive charger for Apple’s Mighty Mouse, which always was kind of a pain to recharge. Mobee solved that problem, and now they’re about to make life even easier for Apple users.

They’ve got a charger coming for Apple’s wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad. If you’ve used the things, you’re already cheering, because they eat batteries like some sort of Battery Monster. But even better is the design.

Mobee has constructed a bar-like device that connects to both the keyboard and the trackpad to charge them both while keeping them usable during their powering up, unlike other chargers we’ve seen. This alone makes it worth it, but it gets better.

The setup is incredibly simple and takes less than a minute: you just slide it onto the keyboard, plug the Magic Bar into a USB port, and you’re done.

What we really like about this is how green it is. You save batteries, you save money, you save time, you don’t even need an AC adapter, and you can even recycle it if you need to. Pretty much perfect for techies and greenies alike.

There’s an arms race going on in displays right now. Samsung and LG are competing with each other to create the biggest, brightest transparent screen possible, complete with touch capability. They look awesome, they perform exactly how you’d want them to, they are full HD, and you will never be allowed to own one.

Why?

Because they’re being developed for advertisers, not for home use. Which is a bit like a weapons manufacturer admitting “Yeah, we’re designing this to be used for pretty much pure, unmitigated evil. It even has a “kill parents and make new orphans cry over their corpses” button. So what?”

We all know what these displays will be used for. If we’re lucky, they will have annoying dancing cartoon characters to entertain children while pointing you towards your hotel. If we’re unlucky, Fruity Oaty Bars and Blade Runner will be prescient.

What’s frustrating is how awesome these displays are. Oh, sure, they’re ungodly expensive. They’re enormous touchscreens, which only became cheap enough for large corporations to consider using huge ones thanks to the iPad driving down costs. Still, that they’re being shown at all, and then to be told they’ll be used to sell beer, is just aggravating. At least think about a consumer model, guys.

Keyport was founded on the idea that keychains are among the last refuges of clutter. This is because the founder of Keyport has never seen my apartment. Anyway, the idea is actually pretty brilliant: just the blade of the key is stored in a small box, which you pop out when needed and keep stored when you don’t.

And now, there are more colors! Because what a gadget needs is more colors!

Before I rant, let me just point you towards Keyport’s official site. It really is an incredibly neat idea that deserves way more press than it gets, which is why I’m taking the excuse of new colors being introduced to plug it.

That said, I kind of hate the fact that gadgets only seem to really catch on once the case comes in a series of pretty colors. Keyport is doing well, and it wouldn’t be introducing colors if the market didn’t want them, but this is something you keep in your pocket. Color really shouldn’t matter. But it does.

Basement dwellers like to blame that mythical (to them) creature “the girl” for candy-colored gadgets, but it’s really due to nerds. It’s the nerds who are OCD about everything being the same shade of green in their pockets, who complain about their iPod not matching their headphones, and so on. Women don’t care nearly as much as guys about this, I’ve found.

So, come on, guys, just buy the damn gadget if you want it. Just like a girl, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

I drive my girlfriend crazy in the kitchen, because I’m a perfectionist. She tolerates it to a point, because I have good knife skills, but she hates it when I try and cut things to precisely the measurements required by the recipe. I can’t help it: I’m very picky and I take instructions literally.

It’s like Fred, the greatest products store ever, knows me or something.

Yes, that really is a cutting board with precise measurements and angles, and yes, it really is available for purchase. The measurements go right down to the millimeter, in addition to offering up a small way to calculate angles. What’s terrifying is that I can easily imagine several people I know, who are all nerds, not getting the joke and seriously buying this thing and using the measurements.

Although it’s not really catering to the OCD. After all, it’s made of beechwood, which, while undeniably visually attractive and evocative of old-school style rulers, soaks up germs like you wouldn’t believe. And you can’t soak it in hot water to kill any diseases from meat. It totally should have been made from plastic. Especially that germ-killing plastic that just instantly kills germs. Excuse me, I need to go wash my hands.

It’s a problem with even the greenest products: packaging. How do you package the product so that it’s protected, but without destroying the environment or creating unnecessary waste? Paloma Agliati, a designer in Chile, is tackling the problem with the revolutionary Plamp! lamp design: the lamp isn’t encased in the packaging. The lamp IS the packaging.

How does it work? Well, like this: the box holding the Plamp! is also the shade, which unfolds a bit like a flower into a four-panelled design which can be plain or have Arabesque patterns laser-carved into it: your choice.

You pop off the endcap, which also happens to be a ceiling rose you can use when hanging your Plamp, and pull out the wiring and the low energy bulb which are included. You thread the wiring through the shade, screw in the bulb, plug it into a power source, and there you go; a fully assembled hanging lamp with no cardboard to throw away.

Even the folded shape of the Plamp is well planned out; the hexagonal form factor means it saves space during shipping, which in turn means more stuff can be shipped and more fuel efficency.

You can currently buy the Plamp from Aglati’s website,

Look, we’re not going to mince words; it’s easy to make your gadgets look ugly. Tacky faceplates, hideous phone protecting cases, godawful engraving…bad things happen to good gear all the time. But, equally awful is when somebody spends an enormous amount of money to look classy on a case that either misses the point or announces to the world that you just have way too much money. In other words, just as one extreme is gauche, so is the other.

Meet the ne plus ultra of that concept, from De Bethune.

Before you ask, yes. Yes, that is a functioning pocket watch, in an iPhone case, on a device that has a clock that is far more accurate than even the best mechanical watchmakers could dare dream.

And, just because it didn’t quite scream “I am rich because my father made a lot of money and then died promptly” enough, that would also be alligator leather.

How much does this monstrosity cost? Oh, easily $8000; in fact, probably more. So for the cost of only 40 iPhones, you too can have a case that tells the world “mug me! Mug me! For the love of Pete, beat me up and take my personal possessions!”

Say what you will about Android, the phone operating system, and the multiple issues it’s faced as it has entered the market and Google learned the hard way that “open source” to phone manufacturers means “Ooooh, we can break it in new and interesting ways like monkeys throwing stemware!”, but man, that is an incredibly cuddly mascot.

And, if the plushies, t-shirts, and other memorabilia aren’t enough for you, you can now get an Android headset jack. Well, sorta.

The design is limited to 10,000 pieces and comes from Internet start-up Makible. Makible is essentially trying to be Etsy if Etsy users had access to Chinese labor and materials construction, but it needs to both prove its concept and raise some seed money, so they’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone.

OK, granted, if you’ve gone anywhere near Regretsy, that idea is actually kind of repellent and terrifying, and we’re pretty sure Makible is going to inflict some truly horrible cheap plastic crap on the world, most likely with a watch movement glued to it to claim that it’s “steampunk”. But when the headset design is this cute, we just don’t care. Even better, you can string the headphone cords through the Android’s adorable antennae or arms.

Countdown to 4Chan trying to get Makible to produce a Pedobear plushie starts…now.

Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, Polaroid was an enormous company bringing people what other photography companies couldn’t: simple, instant photographs. Pictures were shaken, memories preserved, proto-MySpace photos were taken, and the cameras sold by the millions. Technology marched on, but these cameras didn’t, and they looked doomed to become landfill fodder…until Dan Riordan came along.

Riordan, a designer working out of Chicago, realized that the accordion-style light hood could easily be swapped out with something translucent. So he did that, and then put in an LED bulb that lasts 50,000 hours without needing any sort of change, and is even dimmable.

Then he began selling them out of his Etsy store and discovered just how many nerds like the GearCrave staff desperately want a lamp that looks like an old camera we’d otherwise treat with disgust.

As Riordan has to handcraft each lamp, he’s currently sold out, but you can keep an eye on the store. He’s asking approximately $150 per lamp, but really, that’s a small price to pay to have friends look around for the light source and then realize it’s coming from the old camera on the table.

OK, so we think about this stuff too much. Cut us some slack, it’s our job.

Hey, remember the theremin? That creepy instrument that was a staple of bad ’50s sci-fi films and occasionally featured on a good rock album? That theremin? Wouldn’t it be great to combine that high-pitched sound with the risk of electrocution? Well, it exists thanks to, who else, the Japanese!

The EaTheremin creates alleged music (if you consider a dentist’s drill “music”) by completing a circuit whenever you eat. Yes, with your mouth. The “music” produced varies with how wet the food is, how much resistance the food has, and whether or not you’ve slammed the annoying utensil in question in a drawer repeatedly for emitting a high-pitched whine.

Sure, the Japanese have a long tradition of chindogu, or “unuseless” inventions, but this is pretty bizarre even for them. All we’re left with, on observing this, is questions. Questions like “a university produced this? Not a community college? Or 4Chan?” “Don’t they know how irritating those sounds are?” “Where do these people get their drugs?”

If you really want to hear the EaTheremin in action, and if you do, God help you, you can experience the pain with this video. Or you could listen to a dentist’s drill right here. Same difference, really.

Energy efficient bulbs are always a good idea, but they’re also very bland and almost painfully eighties. Also, that straight, narrow design doesn’t really fit in areas where we need a lightbulb shaped like…well…a bulb. Fortunately, Solovoyov Design has our back with this brain-shaped bulb.

The bulb is shaped like a brain for two reasons: one, it’s really neat, and actually a fairly interesting design challenge. Nobody’s tackled the idea of making these increasingly popular but kinda fugly bulbs into something worthy of actual design, or even showing off. But the potential was there, and kudos to Solovoyov for realizing it.

But the bends and curves aren’t there to be witty and for Glenn Beck to rail about smug liberals and their smug elites with their stupid brain-bulbs: the way the bulb is designed actually creates new light patterns within old fixtures, creating a new light design in your house simply by switching in a few bulbs. It’ll fit even in fixtures designed only for a bulb shape, a real problem in older homes and apartments. And, of course, you can even leave the bulb itself bare in a few applications, such as on a dimmer switch, and display it as the work of art it is.

Personally, we plan to have it on a lamp and place it behind people’s heads when they get an idea, but that’s just us.

So, you’ve got a favorite scotch; a robot bartender, or at least an automatic liquor dispenser, for your favorite tipple; a fine set of glasses to pour it into; and you’ve got a tiny little robot forklift to pick up your drink and carry it to you, all you need are the coasters to go with it. Finally, somebody has seen this crucial market and is actually catering to it.

These pallet coasters come courtesy of Labyrinth, a Spanish design house. Obviously inspired by our ever more globalized world, you can finally ship your guests some quality alcohol without having to resort to those coasters your mom knitted for that coffee table you got off of Craigslist those few short years ago when you got your own apartment in college with five other guys. And, let’s face it, nobody cares about Ikea furniture anyway.

Of course, wit and class costs: these coasters go for between $21 for a three pack and $36 for a full five-pack. Nor do they come with the forklift robot, but we’re sure that iRobot will come up with something along those lines. Come on, guys, give us something useful instead of another robot cleaning product; the Roomba makes a terrible ottoman anyway.

Southern Americans will tell you that the word “Barbecue” should never be used as a verb. What will they say about dropping the final “e” for a bit of European flare? Italian designer Piero Lissoni’s “Barbecu” does just that, with both a gas igniter and the ability to make any Southerner proud with charcoal. Best of all, a set of work tops accomodates all sorts of outdoor occassions, from the straightforward pit to the tabletop grill to the tall, rolling cart. There’s no assembly required, either. Look for the Barbecu at Panik-Design, via Alessi, in a matter of days. [Panik-Design]