The tripod itself is nice. I like the gorillapods and the way you can twist them around anything. But the interchangeable clips are a total failure. There are four clips in the packet, two “high bond adhesive clips”, one universal camera adapter and one “high-end suction cup”. High-end?? It’s tempting to say that it sucks, but that’s actually what it not does. It doesn’t suck.

I put the suction cup on the back of my iPhone 3Gs and I couldn’t even position the iPhone without it falling off. I have several gadgets that use suction to fix to things, like the front shield of my car. And the gorillamobile has the worst suction cup I ever have tested. Totally useless. And I would never use the suction cup to fix it to my bike or anything moving.

I probably should have checked better before buying, but I would have preferred some kind of cradle like the tomtom iPhone car kit. The whole point about the gorillapods are that you can stick your camera to anyhting. If you can’t trust the suction cup to actually hold your camera, the whole point is gone.

One final word: The camera adapter is nice anough so I may be using it for my waterproof camera.

PS. Yes, I tried using the suction cup on the iPhone screen, as the camera is on the back. It was slightly better but the iPhone still fell off everytime I tried adjusting the tripod.

(RSS subscribers may need to click through to the video)

One thing missing though – have a look at the end of the video – no multitouch.

Full instructions at NRKbeta.

Lego iPhone,
originally uploaded by gilest.

Why wait until June? Make your own iPhone today.

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.