All The Gadgets You Need To Survive 2022 With
The Forever Hot Coffee
You’ve just made a steaming hot cup of coffee. Just before you take a sip, one of your kids sprints headfirst through the ranchslider. A few hours later, after a quick trip to the emergency room, your abandoned, untouched coffee is stone cold and has developed a skin. Gross, can nothing go your way? Well the Ember Smart Mug can’t reverse all your life choices, but it can keep your drink warm indefinitely on its charging coaster or up to three hours on its own charge. Temperatures can be tweaked to your liking, from between 50°C – 62.5 °C by pairing it with your phone.
Now you don’t need to be in a rush to glug your coffee down before it goes tepid. Comes in a range of sizes, colours, and textures.
This Keyboard Fits Like a Glove
The time of flat, single keyboards are over. The age of split, contoured, wireless keyboards is upon us, all hail. Glove80 is a new project by MoErgo which seeks to create the ultimate ergonomic keyboard. It’s optionally wired, highly programmable and reconfigurable to adapt to your needs. It follows the natural curl of your hands to minimise movement on your part, and the full split and positioning of the keyboard allows you to have good posture while using it. Adjustable legs on the base also means you can get your ideal tilt.
One bit of weirdness is that a bunch of the control buttons such as backspace, alt, and control have been shifted to a thumb reachable position, so relearning how to type on one of these things is definitely going to be a barrier to entry.
Also, of course, it has RGB lighting and comes with Open-source ZMK firmware, allowing you to make your own tweaks to both the lighting and the shortcuts and macros. It connects via either USB-C for zero lag gaming inputs and charging. Otherwise you can go wireless with Bluetooth LE 5.2.
Prices start at $299
kickstarter.com/projects/moergo/glove80-the-incredibly-comfortable-ergonomic-keyboard
Elasto Mouse
At first glance, the Elasto looks like just another oddly-shaped mouse to help it stand out from all the other mice out there. But upon closer inspection it actually makes a pretty compelling case for itself as an ergonomic mouse. If you find that days of clicking are starting to put a strain on your index and wrist, it could be due to the hard stop of clicking a mouse. The actuator on a regular mouse is a simple button underneath the plastic, which you click down on, the force applied being abruptly stopped by the body of the mouse. The Elasto negates this by allowing a springy soft click, by placing the actuator near the base of your palm, making your index finger feel likes it’s on a spring diving board, meaning no hard stops after clicking. It’s a sweet design.
kickstarter.com/projects/elasto/elasto-click-lighter
Foldable Laptops are here
Yet another trend that’s jumped from phones to laptops is the foldable design. The catchily named Zenbook 17 Fold OLED UX9702 comes in two configurations quickly folding between the compact 1920×1080 12.5” screen and the expansive 2560×1920 17.3” display. In the smallest configuration, the extra screen real estate slips behind the keyboard. In all the larger configurations, the keyboard snaps clear allowing you to position the monitor in any format that works for you. It’s packed with a 5 MP camera, Dolby Atmos, USB-C Easy charging, Thunderbolt 4, a 75 WH battery and an Iris Xe graphics card. All of this is powered by a 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 U Series.
It’s lighter than a Macbook Pro, comes with 16Gb of Ram and 1TB of storage.
Biometric Security Everywhere
Want to give criminals a reason to chop your fingers off? Why not buy this USB stick that gives you the most secure login method on the planet. Called the YubiKey Bio – FIDO Edition, this USB adds biometric thumbscanning on the USB’s face and 2FA to all the most popular services online. Whether you’re paranoid about losing the keys to your Gmail kingdom, or need to deck your office out with beefed up security, this USB offers you a new passwordless environment on any service that supports FIDO2/WebAuthn, or FIDO U2F. Compatible with services like Facebook, Dropbox and password managers like Dashlane, its injection molded to be crush resistant and is compatible with pretty much anything that has a USB-A slot.
Get Hyped
The hypebody razor takes the sheer quality of what a vintage safety razor can deliver and redesigned it for the 21st century. The redesigned packs are in the convenience of cartridge razors but offers a shave you could only achieve before with the help of a vintage razor. It’s made of premium aerospace-grade aluminum and leaves your skin feeling silky smooth and irritation free.
An accompanying magazine loader automatically injects fresh blades into the hypebody, meaning you never need to handle the blades. It’s also super easy to clean, making it easy to avoid bacterial buildups standard razors are prone to getting. It comes with three different heads for different shaves, Sensitive for first timers, Comfort for daily shaves, and Ultra-close for when you need to look as sharp as possible.
It comes in a simple brutalist tech style design. Each piece comes with a hundred year guarantee and 20 blades to get you through your first year of shaving.
kickstarter.com/projects/hypebody/the-hypebody-razor-experience-the-perfect-shave
SYMFONISK to the ears
Somewhere between art and usefulness lies the SYMFONISK Picture Frame with WiFi speaker made in collaboration between IKEA and SONOS. It’s a speaker that’s designed to blend into your living space, without becoming the feature of it. Personally I’ve just ditched my entertainment system that was cluttering the corner of the room with amps and wires, and a device like this is definitely preying on this recent need to declutter our homes. Sure, it isn’t 5.1 surround but you’re never going to be tripping over it. It weighs 3.8kg making it a little heavy for wall mounting, but not impossible. The picture is difficult to change so your home’s aesthetic better be cool with dark digital looking spiderwebs. I want to see a version 2 of this with a proper LCD. Heck, do I just want a TV?
Built for Mars
Everything about Vollebak’s Mars Jacket is form following function. It’s made out of five layers of aluminised Mylar, with a surface layer of Teflon, Kevlar and Nomex. The outer shell has ballistic nylon used in flak jackets, making it incredibly durable and tear-resistant. The interior is lined with Cordura making it snug and soft, as well as windproof.
The circluar cap on the chest isn’t a knock off Mercedes-Benz logo. It’s a 3D printed cap allowing quick access to a vomit bag. You probably won’t be experiencing space adaptation syndrome any time soon, so consider it an emergency piece for a particularly rowdy night out.
Five other non-puke related pockets litter the jacket. For earthbound users, there are also two large zipped side vents alongside elasticated panels of ballistic nylon along the back of the shoulders.
The Mars Jacket and accompanying pants come in two colours, Light and Dark edition. Pricing starts at $995.