Gadgets

This is the BagPed, from Workiture, and the most surprising thing about it is that it actually exists. What is it? A stand for your bag.

That’s right. You get into work, you stow your fixed-gear bike at the in-office bike rack and you head to your desk. Once there, you no longer have to put your bag on the perfectly clean and smooth floor, or even a spare corner of your desk. No, with the BagPed, your messenger satchel finally has a place to call home.

Thanks to a new plan developed by the FCC and CTIA, an organization that represents the wireless communications industry, cell phone customers should soon see an end to “bill shock” — that sinking feeling of dread we experience when reading through a monstrous, completely unexpected wireless bill. The plan is slated to roll out during the next 12 months, and should help prevent consumers from getting hoodwinked by unanticipated service fees and roaming charges.

iOS 5 is here, and with it iCloud. ICloud is the biggest step yet towards cutting the cord with desktop computers, and it arguably does away with the old-fashioned idea of files and folders. One of the best parts of iCloud is Photo Stream which, in combination with the new Photos app, lets you forget about the computer completely. Almost.

Camera

First, and most noticeable, are the new Camera and Photos apps. Any iOS 5 device can now snap a photo using the volume-up hardware switch (which is right next to the lens in the iPad 2 and almost laughably hard to use without photographing your finger).

As if any Gadget Lab readers needed to be told, the mobile Internet is taking off. What might be surprising is that almost all tablet Internet traffic comes from the iPad. “In August 2011, iPads delivered 97.2 percent of all tablet traffic in the U.S.” says a new Comscore report. What’s more, the iPad is even beating its older brother the iPhone, managing 46.8 percent of iOS Internet use vs. the iPhone’s 42.6 percent.

According to the report, U.S mobile Internet use is still small compared to computer-based Internet use at just 6.8 percent, but it’s growing fast.

Supermechanical brings craftsmanship into the computer age. Instead of churning out endlessly dull and ever-lower quality MDF rubbish, Supermechanical instead uses computer-controlled tools to do the same work as a human craftsman. This means high-quality, long-lasting furniture at reasonable prices.

And as you’d expect from an MIT startup, it comes with a geeky twist.

The men behind Supermechanical are John Kestner, previously seen on Gadget Lab with his Proverbial Wallets, connected billfolds which modified their behavior depending on your bank balance, and David Carr.

Forget washing your clothes. In the future, you may be able to clean your shirt just by taking a walk in the sun.

Students at UC Davis have worked out a way to mix cotton with a compound that reacts to light. When hit by photons, the compound — 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid — reacts and produces hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide.

Hydrogen peroxide, you will remember, is used to bleach hair and propel rockets.

We’ve been without an official iPad Facebook app for so long it has seemed as if it would never arrive. But rumor has it we won’t be waiting for it much longer.

There’s a chance Facebook’s iPad app and an HTML 5-based mobile platform (rumored to be codenamed “Project Spartan”) are ready to hit the prime time, according to multiple reports. Both could be introduced at Apple’s iPhone event this Tuesday.

We first got a sneak peak at what looked to be Facebook’s iPad app in July. It was tucked away inside Facebook’s iPhone app and could be accessed by tweaking a setting when running it on your iPad (until the hack was removed). News of the mysterious “Project Spartan” also showed up this summer. The project was rumored to “use Apple’s own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution,” according to technology blog TechCrunch, but it could instead be used to demonstrate iOS 5’s HTML 5 capabilities at Apple’s upcoming media event.

You know all those concept bikes we see which look like they’d break in two as soon as you jump on them? And how it doesn’t matter anyway, as they’ll never make it outside of a CAD rendering? Well, Gabriel Wartofsky’s e-bike is not one of those concepts. Not only did he come up with a plausible-looking design, but he managed to get it funded already on Kickstarter.

Strength-wise, the bike looks good, sharing the fat tubes and chunky joints of the super-tough (although slightly wobbly) Brompton.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the best thing about Soma’s new cargo bike was its name: the Pick Up Artist. But even with such an awesome moniker, the bike itself is even better.

Like other cargo bikes, the Pick Up Artist has a long wheelbase for stability. Unlike other cargo bikes, it achieves this length by shifting the front wheel instead of the back wheel. The small wheel is moved forward, underneath the load-bed, and is steered using a linkage system similar to the bakfiets bikes used to deliver goods and children over in Northern Europe.

This might be one of the worst ideas, like, ever. It’s called the PowerWheel, and its purpose is to slow your bike down. The wheel is a straight swap-in for the perfectly good front wheel already on your bike and, once fitted, will make it much harder to ride.

The idea of the PowerWheel to slow you down.