Warpia’s new Easy Dock could do with a new name and a prettier box, but the promise of the product is an enticing one: rid yourself of (almost) all cable-clutter. The wireless-USB kit consists of a USB stick that plugs into your notebook and a base station that plugs into everything else: your monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse. Apart from hooking your laptop up to the mains once in a while, you never need to snake cables across your clean desk again.

The Easy Dock will be $150 when it ships in a few weeks (we will be testing one out). I’m pretty excited as I have been looking for something like this for a while. Once the drivers are installed (for OS X and Windows), the OS should just see the peripherals as USB devices. But how well does the display work? The specs say that it supports monitors of up to 1400×1050 and will display HD video up to 720p, at a color depth of 32-bits.

We wonder if hard drives can be hooked up, (we’ll test that one out) and just how the display copes with movies and fast-moving games. If it all works as promised, the dock could be great for keeping your desk clear, or it could let you stream movies direct from your laptop to the big screen and speakers. One day, we hope, this tech will just come standard inside every USB device.

Easy Dock [Warpia. thanks, Natalia!]

See Also:

• Imation Ships First Wireless USB Hard Drive
• WiGig Tempts With High-Speed Wireless Data Transfer
• Iogear Announces Wireless Kit for Monitors and Projectors
• WUSB
• Cheap, Home Made Wi-Fi Tether
• Review: Kensington Docking Station Makes Mobile Computing Almost …

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Quirky’s new crowd-sourced widget, the Cloak, is a rather clever and good-looking iPad case. The rubber and plastic construction goes with the already established book-cover metaphor, and adds a few twists.

We predict a huge market for iPad cases. That may seem obvious, given the amount of protective sheathes out there for iPods and iPhones, but the iPad seem to need a little more coddling than these smaller machines. I’m a strictly commando kind of guy: I slip my gadgets bareback into my pocket, but even I will be buying or making an iPad case. First, it’s bigger, and you can’t reserve a key-free jeans pocket for it. Second, this device begs to be propped up, either for watching movies, typing or just listening to podcasts in the kitchen.

The Cloak’s front cover flips around to the back to prop the iPad up in landscape mode, and when upright, the inside of the same front-cover has a u-shaped plastic kick stand that flips out. The main hinge actually has click-stops, controlled by a button on the spine, which lets you set an angle without the iPad slipping and falling flat.

That’s quite a lot to pack into one case, and the price isn’t bad, either, at $36. As always, you commit to order, the productions lines spin-up when the minimum order is reached and you are charged when the product ships. Hopefully you’ll have yours in time for the April 3rd iPad release.

Cloak [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany!]

See Also:

• First iPad Stand Steps into View
• Kickster Adds Stand, Handle and Case to iPod Nano
• Powercurl Cord-Winder Makes Magsafe Heatsafe

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