Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf my name is David Pearson this week we're doing something a little different our whole team is in town which means people from all over the world are here in New York who we never get to see and a lot of them have really weird gadgets a lot of that is just our people being weird and there's also different stuff going on internationally than in the US so we're gonna take a look at some of it starting with you Thomas Ricker the Flying Dutchman I just decided that that's your name that's not you can't tell me that that's not true you're from Amsterdam right so tell me what you brought you brought okay I think your assignment was bring weird things right I don't know how weird these are as much as just absolutely beautiful and stunning craftsmanship from from a small Dutch company called Mineo they're located about an hour north of Amsterdam and it's company just ten people just ten people ten people and they're not like outsourcing their manufacturing to somebody else they tell you people who make they do it all themselves they do all their design all the all the all the craftsmanship they do a complete line for iPhones or Apple iOS devices right now so they have the full-size iPad case they have for the iPhone 5 and you can see a number of the cases here and they have an iPad Mini case like this one which has just just been announced and I don't think you can buy it yet okay and these I'm assuming are astoundingly expensive yes so this one here this is called the the iPhone the the the mini oh book is gorgeous this is a yeah this is absolutely phenomenal the craftsmanship on this is just beautiful I don't know if you can see it I think that the top is a I'm gonna probably only get the wood on it it might be a teak I think and this is a maple doesn't I have nothing to prove you wrong and it's all just going so all the wood comes from managed forests so it's as as sustainable as you can expect as you can hope but they replant and Sunday dad but these are I mean there's a magnetic close can unit yeah just that's phenomenal it's gonna work but this craftsmanship is absolutely beautiful yeah this one I love that it like it rolls up here it's you and it's all of these feel like I see these and they seem really precious but none of them feel particularly breakable or no and the super premium and it you know it acts like the the Apple cover as you would expect it to they are expensive though this one here is $190 which is pretty yeah expensive for a case serious yeah this one over here is about 90 I think after the European after the Euro transit translation and then the iPad Mini one comes in and around 80 I think so not too bad but this is I mean it's all handcrafted it is phenomenal is absolutely fun on the way they put our logo on right will they do that for anybody oh yeah here this is it's the I would five there's a feeling there's a lot of things called the I would five yeah but this is the mini Oh Cobra which is nice because it's like the Shelby Cobra design it's really beautiful I think and you can get all these two macaws and you can actually customize these cases so this one here you can you can have as many strips of different colors as you want so you can actually do the Cobra in this design and really unbelievable wars so does this company just happen to be Dutch sure is there's something sort of about where you are from that makes people pay lots of money for I don't sound like a thing oh just spoke excellent yeah expert craftsmen I mean think about the wooden shoes and this is Jo this is the this is the next iteration 2013 wooden shoes okay okay so you're something else to wait yeah a new gap so this is that this was a Kickstarter project this is a company called waka waka which means let me see if I could if I can remember this it some shine bright really in Swahili okay isn't that also what Fozzie Bear says Henry on okay but this is amazing cuz um if you if you camp this is a phenomenal little device it's a it's a light it's a battery so you can charge all your USB devices so cool and it's solar powered so you can charge it off of off of the sunlight or you could there's a micro USB and you can just charge it off the main so you just leave it on the table all day and yeah hopefully and how much how much power to get out of this so this is a 22 milliamp Hertz battery inside it charges the company claims that if it's pointed directly at the Sun at that was a latitude longitude of New York City it'll charge at about 8 and a half hours okay that in my own experience I've just said it in a room that gets direct sunlight about three or four hours out of the day and I just said it there I didn't like I didn't I didn't adjust it so it turned white Sun or anything directly right I just left it in the room and I came back after a day and it was about half charged okay now when this thing's fully charged it'll recharge an iPhone to 100% and you'll still have two out of four dots remaining which is pretty good yeah that's a lot you can get it's a light too right yeah okay so you touch it once and you get the you get the four indicators to see how much batteries left you touch it again and then you the flashlight and the flashlight is adjustable to multiple levels and then if you press and hold on the see if this works then you get the universal distress yeah that's what else that's kind of genius yeah so it's great for camping no / - battery's dead yeah SOS yes that's the worst thing that happens you recognize right you recognize that just automatically I know I should but I don't know now here's here's the thing so the company behind this has a foundation set up so if you pee if you buy this for $69 they put $10 towards a foundation that helps young entrepreneurs develop solar technologies they've also as part of the Kickstarter wouldn't they raise five hundred thousand I think and that allowed them to send 10,000 of these things to Haiti because three years after the earthquake they still have like 300,000 people who are without light so they sent these down but they've also they've had buy-one-get-one offers and all these things and so what they do is they ship these things to developing nations now this has two things right it has a battery and it has the lights in like 1.5 billion households around the world still or not actually 1.5 billion people around the world do not have electricity at all and then there's millions more that live in brownout situations so something like this is amazing because you know people light their homes with kerosene lamps which are there's a health hazard there's an environmental hazard too and in developing nations are used mobile phones for everything I mean we use them for social media and for doing fun things playing game right but these people they do their banking they do like farmers will check crop prices and find the best price for their fields and then use that to sell it so the mobile phones are incredibly important to them so to give them a device so that they can charge a mobile and like their homes is amazing for not a lot of money yeah and one of the other things about this is these solar panels they're they're super efficient they're like twenty two percent efficiency and part of that is through a deal with innovation it's another Dutch company that makes these power management chips um so they claim to be the most efficient device of this kind available so yeah this is just a it's it's so it's def technology it's Dutch design and they're very proud of it and it's not even shoes Thomas Ricker thank you very much thank you up next he's from Japan but he's also from Canada he's canapa knees that's actually what he told me Jeff Blagdon Jeff hello hello and what in God's name is that it's funny you should ask that this is a TV hand actually could have guessed that so you know how difficult it can be to control the TV this is like the beginning of your keep going so like there's a lot of buttons there's a lot of complexity there and what the TV hand tries to do is basically solve that problem with some simple gesture based interface so you just is like a universal remote control only crazy yes only better um so what does he do so you pointed out to TV and just waggle it back and forth but you can change the volume you can change the channel if you turn the switch you can turn the TV on and off just by it just by the way down okay just pure waggle I just really like the idea that you're pointing you're like no no TV no no and it turns off you show the TV who's boss yeah exactly but yeah it works with any TV or any Japanese TV I should say setup is really easy you just press and hold the button and it I think it just it just pairs yeah I want everyone to be like that that's awesome it's pretty simple but also powerful and so does it do anything else then it'll change the volume or the channel or turn your TV on and off it does it does it's also it also so it lights up which is really handy if you're like reading at night and you need that actual bit of right enough I guess it is yeah yeah if it's dark I mean it's pretty bright in here but you can turn it to throb mode as well you can turn it off and then also please don't call it's wrong so when you're reading it can be a pain to actually like reach down and flip the page so what you can do is use the the rubberized finger here and actually grab ahold of a page that you can turn page mean there's a that's clearly a lot easier than using your fingers it's pretty there's no question it's pretty efficient yeah but you were saying you're talking before and you're saying this is like front and center at a big electronics store that's right yeah they're they're pushing it this is awesome so how much does this cost it's like eleven dollars okay so it's dirt cheap yeah well Jeff thank you so much get this thing actually this is mine thank you very much all right we see it later ok so we've seen beautiful and we've seen sort of odd and now I think we're about to get really weird with this man Sam Byford and I I can see these things I have no idea what they are so none of them look like gadgets me you'd be surprised I know apparently so this is actually a line of merchandise for an app in Japan which is super popular it's a messaging app called line and it's along the lines of whatsapp viber this yeah they're trying to make waves in the US but it is that big in its its colossal in Japan it's like the noodle mode of communication for a lot of people Wow ok and yeah it's not really taken up in the US but one thing that has taken off in a way is a the business model of stickers where you yeah they're like kind of glorified emoji so a lot of people like pay money online for new stickers and like Facebook and Perth have sort of done the same thing right recently so in Japan because the apps so popular these stickers the characters have become like Hello Kitty style characters in there right all starting just from the app also neater from the app yeah so my favorite is this bear called brown his hair is called that's his name he's broke ground the bear yeah sure and his the thing about him is his face never changes and he's always putting crazy situations ok looking unemotional ok it's a yeah he's very he's very nonplussed yeah so whatever is going on because because he's popular you can buy the usual range of merchandise you expect you know like cuddly toys and so on but of course because it's an app a lot of them are kind of gadget related so for example you can get this little capsule thing for about a dollar where you are it's got a sucker in it and you can stick it onto your phone and then if I put it down it's like a nicest phone stand and you can see he's unfazed by the right crushing so that's like I just I need that it's life I don't even use the app and I need constantly just something to prop can you just put heavier things and see if he ever gets angry about it I don't think it's faced with everything but there gets a little more complex with something like this which is it's kind of like a Roomba like a robot vacuum cleaner but for your phone so what yeah so let's see I've got a pretty fingerprint the iPod touch yeah if I put this all the way I like that you just keep just whipping gadgets out of your pockets here this is what let's see if he pulls up the edge and this does this work I guess it kind of does so that's like carving beautiful patterns into your fingerprints yeah he's just trucking alone like it's totally another big deal he's I'm pretty impressed by his you know he's not falling off the edge that's true as to whether this phone is clean I mean you can sort of see trails yes he's getting there if you gave him a couple weeks you'd get that which in fairness is kind of what a Roomba does as well I think if you give it a point day and a half it'll Krabs perhaps we're expecting too much of the ground that's fair so this is these are part of just a huge line I mean if there's these things there must be all kinds of oh yeah and so I got all these at a toy store in Harajuku it's maybe the most famous toy store in Japan okay and like the entire sort of front entrance area has been taken over by line stuff really like that sort of painted the characters on the glass doors and yeah it's like you can't go to that show up and like miss this range of stuff is now there are like TV shows that's like this yeah that's like an online like anime okay kind of Japanese style animation and there's like manga and things that go in magazines it's a yes it's it's pretty strange to see this kind of crazy mainstream thing just come base before that or other apps like this or is it just mine that became so popular than people there are others like this one called Kakao Talk which is from Korea and light is actually done by a Korean company but it was produced in Japan and Kakao Talk is kind of popular among certain people in Japan but uh lines definitely the biggest so we what's this this looks like something you would like that I would give a kid who really wanted a cell phone but that you get to have a self that's pretty much what it is and I feel like because of line that because the characters are so cute and you can buy the toys everywhere that's gonna result in a lot more kids wedding cell phones specifically smartphones just to be able to use yes characters but also but also in the media as with them a lot of sort of a you know new social technologies right so and often those kind of concern in the media about you know like letting kids communicate with strangers around their children is probably is very different so you can get this which is the line tell and my touch it is basically a fake phone oh wow and it has apps the control system is out of control so this is this like touch panel thing where you like it's just an Android phone from two years ago yeah I mean the screen might be a little better but uh yeah it's not Pentel but um yeah so you can do things like you can play games you can play rock-paper-scissors with the characters and if you win you get more stickers to send and you can send stickers and messages to like friends who also have one of these by like touching their phone together so it's kind of a it's sort of an evil scheme to get kids into fair falling in love with the characters or toys in general this high tech I mean like you you just this is a very technologically advanced toy it kind of is you can touch phones together and yeah it's like that so this costs about seventy bucks and it's a which is pretty cheap I guess but I mean you know products like this the price is falling all the time not only outside toys it's a I'd say this is definitely at the upper end of like what you have casually give it but uh but then again in in Japan I mean it's hard to see a kid that doesn't have like a Nintendo DSO right and I think so it's not really not really out of out of that rate I guess I would say the functionality is a little a little limited beyond I guess that's why that's why they give you the smartphone yeah once you turn well you graduate yeah but it's um it's pretty interesting nothing else so do you use line is that I did yeah absolutely I used to not everybody but like I mean my girlfriend for example just we we write in light mm-hmm just to be able to communicate using distance of air yeah absolutely awesome Sam thank you very much and brown the bear I guess thank you as well thank you alright and that's our show thanks so much to sam Byford and Thomas Ricker and Jeff Blagdon for being here and our whole international crew for liking and buying very strange gadgets we'll be back next week and we'll see you that