Joby have been making knobbly-but-nice mini camera tripods for a few years now. Their patent-pending leg design means you’re not restricted to standing your camera on a level surface. You can wrap one or more legs around a branch or railing, or bend the legs sideways to make a stable platform. The Gorillapod tripods are available in a bunch of different sizes to support everything from your tiny compact camera (or Flip Mino), right up to a chunky model that supports 5kg DSLRs.

Now Joby have turned their hand to the mobile market. The Gorillamobile kit comes in two flavours: one with a suction cup for generic mobile devices, and one with a custom-fitting case for iPhone 3G and 3GS. Local New Zealand importers Lacklands have kindly hooked me up with an iPhone model for review.

Having just picked up a brand new iPhone 3GS, I was looking for a protective case. The case that comes with the Gorillamobile does a fine job even if it didn’t double as a stand. It has a nice soft-touch finish, and is designed so that when not clipped to the tripod, there are no protrusions to get hooked on your pocket or bag. The case clips around the back or your iPhone, so you’ll need a screen protector if you want 100% protection.

The Joby tripod clips into the iPhone case with a simple sliding action, and is released with a button. There’s a secondary locking ring to avoid any accidental releases. It’s incredibly easy to set the iPhone up in a stable position, and you can rotate it to any angle you want. The Gorillamobile would be a great iPhone stand if that’s all it did.

But wait, there’s more! Both Gorillamobile kits come with a standard 1/4″ tripod screw clip and two additional adhesive clips. This means you can use the same tripod for 3 additional devices. Basically you’re getting the original Gorillapod with added extras. The clips are fairly unobtrusive, so you can leave them screwed into your pocket camera or stuck on your other mobile devices. The Gorillamobile tripod has no problem propping up my fairly chunky Panasonic TZ5, using the standard tripod mount. It takes seconds to unclip the tripod from the camera, and clip it back on to the iPhone.

Overall, for something I originally thought would be a bit dinky, the Gorillamobile impressed me. iPhone case, iPhone stand, Camera tripod, and mobile device stand, all in one well-built kit.

Local New Zealand pricing hasn’t been confirmed yet but I’m guessing something like $80-$100. I’ll update this post as soon as I find out. The Gorilla mobile will be stocked in all the regular appliance and electronic stores.

Popularity: 24% [?]

The chaps at Blackbox have been kind enough to let me give away the C18 earphones I just reviewed. You know the drill by now: stick the bits in the form below, and you’re in to win.

P.S. The spec page over here might be useful.

Conditions:

• One entry per person.
• Entries only valid using the entry form above.
• Entries limited to New Zealand residents only (sorry guys, the postage will kill me).
• The items are brand new, but may have been opened and reviewed for this website and TVNZ.
• Entries close Monday 30 November 2009 at 8:00pm (NZ time).
• Winners will be contacted by email.
• Winner will be re-drawn if there is no reply by one week after competition closing time.

Popularity: 17% [?]

V Australia have recently joined the list of airlines (Singapore, Thales, Finnair) using Kiwi company Phitek’s noise cancellation technology for their fleet. If you’re going to chose a noise cancellation product, wouldn’t it be a good plan to choose the one that includes this same technology that so many airlines have chosen?

Blackbox are a line of consumer audio products that incorporate Phitek’s noise cancellation system. And blimey is it good. I tested the M14 headphones a while back, and still use them for my day-to-day open-plan-office cone of silence. At the time, the C14 earphones were Blackbox’s only in-ear noise cancellation phones. They worked well, but were quite frankly really, really ugly.

Enter the new C18 earphones. Slimmed down, but with the same noise cancellation tech that you’ll find throughout the Blackbox range. The combination of snug-fitting silicone ear buds – the kit comes with 3 sizes – and the noise cancellation system really gives you that “head in a pillow” experience. With my regular in-ear phones (Ultimate Ears 5vi), I can still hear the background churn of air conditioners and other office mechanisms. With the C18’s I can only hear muffled irregular sounds (e.g. people speaking).

Sound quality is damn good for a pair of NZ$179 earphones. They are a little bass-heavy for my personal preference, but I imagine this would actually be a good thing in a noisy environment like an aircraft. They don’t have the separation of my Ultimate Ears, but then you’re saving $200 over the UEs and getting active noise cancellation.

The box that does the noise cancellation hangs, lanyard style, from the earphones. If you rest it on a desk or on your chest when lying down, this is no problem, but you wouldn’t want to be walking around with the box dangling. It runs for many, many hours on a single AAA battery, and has a volume control and on/off switch. Unlike some active headphones, the Blackbox C18’s will still work in passive mode if your battery runs flat. Whoops – it looks like there’s no passive option for the C18’s sorry. The existing M10 and M14 models do still have passive mode.

Given the price and the compact size (the included carry case is about a quarter the size of the M14’s case), I think the C18s are a great buy for a regular traveller, or someone who really wants active noise cancellation in the office.

You can purchase Blackbox products online from their New Zealand store website.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Just as New Zealand jumps on the TiVo bandwagon, Gizmodo is reporting on the inexorable decline of TiVo subscriptions in the USA. The drop is big enough to take TiVo right back to 2004:

Even without this news, TiVo has a very hard road to success in New Zealand. ISP exclusivity, expensive hardware, and a complete lack of exclusive content. Why would you bother?

Popularity: 15% [?]

‘Twas the month before Christmas, and all through the web, not a packet was stirring, except for free TiVo on Telecom and free YouTube on Orcon.

A while back, I wrote an impassioned post about net neutrality, why it matters, and why you should care. The truth is, net neutrality is already dead in New Zealand. Traffic is charged differently depending on where it is coming from and going to. We have zero-rated TiVo on-demand data, but only if you are on Telecom. If you’re on Orcon, you get free traffic to the O-zone, and more recently, free YouTube until February. The favouritism extends to mobile data: for $2.50 per month you get all-you-can-eat music download data on Vodafone’s MusicStation.

Orcon’s Duncan Blair commented on their YouTube offering:

YouTube is the single biggest site used by our customers (by data). As we all know Kiwi’s [sic] hate data caps. While we can’t remove them altogether we thought that giving customers free access to the biggest single site was a pretty good step in the right direction.

It’s not all milk and honey and free data. Telecom makes no secret about heavy traffic shaping in their Big Time plan, making special mention of “file sharing”. Telecom (“there is no prioritisation of any traffic, its all treated the same”) and Vodafone (“nope, none of that. It’s all easy bits on the network”) deny that they shape any other traffic, but I’m wondering if it’s just that I’m asking the wrong question. Take a look at Orcon’s “service control” functionality, documented last year in a rather technical and in-depth post. It’s hard to imagine that the big guys don’t do something similar.

Like I stated earlier, the purest form of net neutrality – all packets and all destinations treated equally – is already long dead in New Zealand. ISPs are openly choosing favourites, either in the hope that it will land them extra customers (Orcon), or for revenue sharing opportunities (Telecom and Vodafone).

Is this a bad thing? It depends on how you look at it. In all cases – so far – what consumers are getting is improved or cheaper services, but only if you are in the right place at the right time. It’s hard to complain when you get free YouTube traffic, but it’s a little easier to complain if you have to switch ISPs to use TiVo. It does feel like ISPs are playing fast and loose with traffic for their own purposes.

Duncan Blair clarifies this approach, effectively saying that it’s not anti-neutrality until it’s bad for the customer:

I think the net neutrality debate in general is pretty vague, but where we see it becoming a problem would be if service providers essentially create a tiered internet. Some examples:

• a provider was to deliberately degrading VoIP traffic in order to protect their traditional voice revenues.
• a provider entirely blocking some protocol, and charge extra to get access to it.
• a provider completely blocking access to a competitors site or product.

This is all totally icebox as long as it remains to the benefit of the consumer. But it’s also a barely discernible line between ‘it’s good for you’ and ‘it’s for your own good’. I can easily imagine the statement becoming “YouTube is the single biggest site used by our customers” … and it’s affecting our other traffic, so we need to charge extra for full-speed access.

At this stage I’m keeping my scepticism in check, and am hopeful that we’ll see more cost benefits from partnerships between ISPs and content providers. But mark my words: the moment this becomes a “for your own good” scenario, I’ll be the first one to the barricades.

How about you? Are you happy to have a non-neutral internet in New Zealand as long as it means cheaper data? Or should we be making noise about this before it turns nasty?

Popularity: 21% [?]