The tinyPod is a case in your Apple Watch, which most likely doesn’t sound too thrilling by itself. Nonetheless, its distinctive angle — a click on wheel that controls the watch’s Digital Crown — makes Apple’s wearable appear and feel (at the very least in its advertising and marketing) like the corporate’s first breakthrough product of the twenty first century: the iPod. Though you need to use it as a music participant, it additionally works with every part else in watchOS, reworking Apple’s smartwatch right into a minimalist, distraction-free “telephone.”
The $80 tinyPod works with Apple Watch fashions in Sequence 4 by means of 9, together with the Apple Watch SE. (The 41/40mm and 45/44mm Apple Watches have separate tinyPods.) In the meantime, one other 49mm model for the Apple Watch Extremely — as a result of who wouldn’t wish to flip their $800 wearable right into a minimalist telephone? — prices $90. There’s additionally tinyPod lite, a $30 case sans click on wheel.
That click on wheel is its core gimmick, and its creator apparently believes it is going to be protected from Apple’s attorneys. (The truth that it depends on an Apple product most likely doesn’t damage.) The case’s wheel syncs its motion with the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown through “fastidiously mechanized parts inside” that make “direct rotation contact along with your Apple Watch crown.” In different phrases, wherever on watchOS that allows you to scroll with the crown shall be scrollable with the tinyPod click on wheel. In principle, anyway.
The tinyPod web site says it may well assist multi-day battery life by turning off the watch’s wrist detection (which you don’t want right here). However dwelling as much as that could be a tall order, given how quick the battery lifetime of mobile Apple Watches tends to be when used with no telephone in Bluetooth vary. In fact, you possibly can use a GPS-only mannequin (or flip off mobile) and keep on with domestically saved music, however that might additionally restrict what it may well do.
tinyPod is the product of Newar, a former Snap designer and one-time jailbreak guru. In Might, the creator posted that it started as a facet challenge earlier than being reworked into “an actual, transport product for one motive: Each time I left the home with it, I beloved how I felt.”
Whether or not the tinyPod lives as much as its billing as a minimalist, distraction-free and nostalgia-laden “telephone” or not, its creator seems to have put important thought into aesthetics, readability of objective and consistency in advertising and marketing. Its web site demonstrates an eye fixed for element that relishes in its iPod inspiration, together with era-appropriate Apple fonts and a teaser video in a traditional 4:3 facet ratio. (Cue silhouettes dancing to Gorillaz.)
The tinyPod is obtainable for pre-order forward of shipments “this summer time.” You possibly can reserve one as we speak on the product web site.