Gadgets

VueScan Mobile is an iOS app which will let you scan from your wireless scanner direct to your iPhone or iPad, no computer required. The list of supported scanners is huge, and the software works with pretty much every wireless Epson, Canon and HP scanner out there.

Hamrick software’s Vuescan desktop app has been around for years.

Your new iPhone 4S camera might be the best phone camera you ever owned, but there are still a few things it can’t do. One of those is that, thanks to its tiny sensor, it can’t throw a background out of focus whilst keeping the subject sharp.

These days, it’s the fashion to take shots with a super-shallow depth-of-field, and Big Lens is an app that will let you do that with your phone. Kinda.

We 21st century humans are busy creatures. Bombarded by a constant stream of data flowing into our smartphones, we struggle to respond to text messages, tweets and e-mails in a timely fashion. But LG’s latest smartphone, exclusive to T-Mobile, may provide a solution.

Dubbed the DoublePlay, the handset boasts a 3.5-inch touchscreen display for viewing content, and a slide-out qwerty keyboard that should appeal to the dwindling numbers of BlackBerry faithfuls among us. And, in a strange twist of industrial design, the DoublePlay also comes with another 2-inch touchscreen that splits the keyboard in twain, and serves as a second app dock for fast task-switching.

SAN DIEGO — There’s no way around it: Banking sucks. And if you’re broke like me, opening up your browser to your online banking site only to continually find a zero balance sucks even more. Aside from getting a higher-paying job, there’s not much out there to boost your balance. But an interface makeover from a small software company could make the experience a little less painful.

Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, could end up making a pretty good camera sensor. Researchers at MIT have discovered that graphene can turn light into electricity, but not the way you’d think.

Unlike camera sensors and solar panels which rely on the photovoltaic effect, graphene creates a current because of a temperature difference. When light shines on its surface, it heats the electrons within, but “the lattice of carbon nuclei that forms graphene’s backbone remains cool.” This temperature difference produces the electricity.

It’s hard to believe that you don’t already have a device in your home (or your pocket) that’s capable of connecting to Spotify, but should your kids be getting sick of you stealing their iPod Touches to stream your Dad Rock, then you might want to spring for Western Digital’s new WDTV Live Streaming player.

The tiny box comes without storage, and is meant just for streaming (hence the name).

If something is good, then more is surely better, right? That seems to be the thinking behind Charlie Nghiem’s Rotor Digital Camera.

Taking the popular (and excellent) resurgence of manual dials as his cue, Nghiem’s concept stacks eight (8!) dials on top of each other, nestled into a cylinder of control underneath the regular mode dial up top.

When you turn a dial, a strip appears on-screen right next to it, showing the results if your efforts.

And the “Biggest Apple Fanboy of the Week” award goes to (drum roll please) the guys who made this insane real-life, glass and aluminum mockup of an iPhone 5.

A team of Apple fans at Benm.at in Germany used CAD designs, leaked hints, case designs and realistic mockups to develop a 3-D computer model that was then used to build a true-to-life, true-to-scale iPhone 5 mockup.

The team says they used the same process to create their prototype that is used to create the iPad.

If you were to idly doodle a picture bike whilst chatting on the telephone, you might slip from realism into fanciful embellishment. And if your were placed on hold during that call, or if you’d smoked a little something before it, you might come up with something like Ron Arad’s WOW Bike.

Arad’s design is like a fixed-gear 29er rendered coming via your grandmother’s wallpaper. Everything about it is familiar except for those wheels, each fashioned from 18 strips of steel.

Waiting for the iPhone 5? Then you might want to put Tuesday, October 4th in your diary. According to All Things D, this is the date Apple has scheduled for the new iPhone’s launch. The event, revealed to All Things D by “sources close to the situation,” will be presided over by Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook.

It makes sense. The rumors have long pegged a late September or early October date for the announcement of the iPhone 4’s successor, and iOS 5 — which will doubtless come pre-installed on the new phone — is due in the fall, which starts right about now.

The news that Tim Cook will be headlining is slightly more surprising. Cook was always more of a behind-the-scenes executive, and some expected that he’d remain so as CEO, letting Steve Jobs’ long-time stage companion Phil Schiller or iOS chief Scott Forstall become the public faces of Apple.