Perhaps you are going over to grandma’s house for Christmas dinner this holiday season and you’re going to once again be fascinated by her old rotary telephone. With the move to digital and touchscreens, we’ve lost that retro appeal in our homes, but that doesn’t have to be the case. The Pyle Retro Home Telephone Collection is a unique smartphone dock that reminds us of days gone by.

There are four models in the range and they are all handcrafted from real wood, featuring real brushed copper parts. They work with your regular landline, but the kicker is that they are also compatible with your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, iPad, and other mobile devices, including tablets and even MacBooks. All you need is a standard 3.5mm connection.

Some of these retro home telephones, like the $89.99 PRT15I, look just like a classic rotary phone, whereas the $109.99 PRT35I comes with a built-in iPhone charging dock, in addition to the rotary dial and classic handset. Standard features include last number redial, ringer high/low selectoin, and one-button pick-up.

Check out the full press release below or head over to PyleAudio.com for more information. Prices range from $89.99 to $109.99 MSRP.

The post The Retro iPhone Rotary Smartphone Dock Grandma Will Love appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The motion-tracking Swivl smartphone dock is cool, except for the marker device that you have to carry with you always and also the hefty $179 price tag. But the folks at Satarii have just introduced a more basic version of the accessory called Swivl-it which is currently available for $129, although that marker is still needed.

In case you are new to the product, the Swivl comes equipped with sensors that track a marker you will be holding. You just have to dock your smartphone in it, grab the marker, and then start recording yourself or video chatting. When you move around in your room, the dock will automatically follow the marker horizontally or vertically. And iPhone users are able to use a marker which has a built-in microphone.

As you might have guessed by now, the new Swivl-it comes with fewer features. With this version, vertical tilting has to be done manually. And also the marker device won’t have a microphone, so you will have to make sure that you are in range of your smartphone’s mic. But you will be able to purchase a $49 microphone-packing marker later on, but then you should have just got the original Swivl.

And a price cut is important for the makers as there are other products out there like the Galileo which is coming with a lower price tag yet having cool features.

Head here if you are interested in the Swivl-it and here if you want to try your luck.

The post Swivl-it: The Cheaper Swivl Smartphone Dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Do you remember the Motorola Atrix 4G and how it had that laptop dock? You know about the PadFone from Asus that has a slot in the back to take your smartphone? Well, the Exotablet is fundamentally the same idea, except for Apple iDevices.

What you get with the ExoTablet is a device that “instantly converts a smartphone into a full-size, full-power, all-singing, all-dancing very connected tablet.” You simply slide your smartphone into the ExoTablet and you get the big screen experience, all without having to resync your content or use a secondary wireless connection. It’s all powered by your smartphone, not unlike the Asus PadFone. The difference is that it is more flexible, allowing for “any smartphone to be used with any of their planned range of ExoTablets.” Apparently.

To accommodate different shapes, layouts, pin connectors, and so on, they will also introduce the ExoAdapter. Each smartphone model will have its own adapter (costing a dollar or two), making it compatible with the ExoTablet. They’re even planning a range of ExoTablets in different sizes and configurations, including the possibility of built-in SSD storage. The kicker? They say that the new version could be “very possibly for iPhones and iPads” too, working “in the same ExoTablet because they both use the same operating system.”

They’re telling us that a typical ExoTablet will cost in the $150 range and the launch is being planned for October or November of this year.  We’ll wait and see if this is just vaporware or really the next best thing since..

The post Exotablet Planning to Create iPhone 4 Smartphone Tablet Dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Should you choose to go for the full Voltron-esque experience, all of these devices can be completely combined into one unified Fujitsu Lifebook. Based on this initial design by Prashant Chandra, the tablet part becomes a touchscreen keyboard, for instance, while the slim digital camera can mount to the lid of the notebook to work like an outward-facing webcam. They all integrate and work together combining their powers.

It could mean that the main Lifebook would have its own processor, which could then be supplemented by the processing power of the tablet and smartphone for even faster performance. All the data gets shared between all the devices, helping reduce the instance of repeated data and components. “For example if I have my songs on my music player, why do I have to block the same amount of storage on my laptop?” Chandra continues, “Similarly, if I have a processor sitting in my tablet, why can it not also run/assist my laptop?”

It is of course a concept, but is this what the future of computing will bring us? Would you want a modular computer like this? I would.

The post Perhaps This Modular Fujitsu Lifebook Concept Isn’t Too Far From Becoming Reality appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

If you’re one of the growing number of people who are passing up landlines and relying solely on your cell phone for communication, the iClooly might be pretty appealing.

The dock turns any model iPhone or Android phone into a stylish desktop phone, complete with handset receiver. This means you don’t have to struggle to pull your phone from your pocket when it rings, but also frees up your screen during calls to check notes or websites while you’re talking. Didn’t bother to read an email the email your boss is calling to discuss? No problem. Skim through it and ad lib while you’re talking. Call from a client you don’t really want to talk to? Check your calendar for a better time or your contact book for someone to divert his attention to without having to rudely hang up or ignore him/her by pulling the phone away from your head.

Plus, I imagine it would be good for FaceTiming in noisy or less-than-private environments.

The dock doesn’t have it’s own charger connection, meaning you’ll have to run your own cord up underneath to keep it charged. But this is actually a decent idea, as an attached 30-pin or USB charge plug would limit the number of compatible phones. The way it stands now, you could buy one for every desk and worker in the office regardless of what cell they’ve got.

That, in conjunction with either a Skype number or a Line2 account giving you work, home and cell numbers on the same phone, you could have soulless docks rather than stand-alone phones at work and at home.

Convenient.

I know the iPhone 4′s death grip is something of an old story, but this could be a boon in that respect, too.

The anodized aluminium stand sits on four non-slip silicone pads, holding your phone in either vertical or horizontal positions. The handset plugs into the 3.5mm jack and clips into the base to prevent your phone from sliding off whenever you answer the phone.

The iClooly is available now for about $40 on Amazon and various other sites if you’re looking to pick one up.

[GizMag via iClooly]

The post iClooly Desktop Phone Dock for iPhone and Android a Good Call appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Motorola today at CES unveiled the AT&T bound Atrix 4G Android smartphone. This device packs in a 1GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor with 1GB of RAM. The massive 4-inch display will be a QHD 24-bit capacitive touchscreen, giving Apple’s Retina Display a run for its money. It’ll host Android 2.2 with MOTOBLUR and Flash Player 10.1. I know what you’re thinking, AT&T doesn’t have 4G, and that’s correct they don’t; so it will use the HSPA+ network until around 2013 when true 4G is unleashed. You can expect the Atrix 4G to surface in the first half of 2011, with another 20 or so 4G LTE smartphones coming out of the AT&T stables this year.

Not just another Android phone. What makes the Motorola Atrix 4G a little different than all the rest is their customized docks. Motorola designed three docks for the Atrix, but most notably is the laptop dock with 11.6-inch LCD display. You’re not going to be running photoshop or anything like that, but the “Webtop” dock will give you a big display to view your Android handset on as well as adding a fully tabbed FireFox browsing experience (Flash included). The other docks are a Multimedia dock for 720p HD playback and a Vehicle dock for seamless Google map navigation and multimedia playback.

No price is set on the Atrix 4G, nor are any release dates for the docks. It’s going to be interesting to see how the laptop dock performs with Android, we’ll do our best to get some hands-on time with the Atrix at CES.

[InfoSync, Gizmodo]

The post Game Changer: Motorola Atrix 4G Android smartphone with laptop dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.