POWER UP WITH MOPHIE AND APPLE
APPLE couldn’t pull off building a single charging mat for all its devices, but we are now able to get our hands on what you might call the next best thing.
The iPhone-maker revealed plans for, and subsequently cancelled, a product called AirPower – a simple mat that you could lay your phone, watch, and AirPod headphones on to charge wirelessly.
It couldn’t get it to work safely, though, so canned the project last year.
But now Mophie, which already makes several charging accessories, has come out with the catchily titled 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Pad.
This has a charging stand for Apple Watch (which holds it at a good angle for nightstand mode), a special “charging cavity” for the AirPods case, and a space to lay your iPhone down to charge wirelessly, if it supports that feature.
There’s a second charger available, too – the dual wireless charging pad, which lacks the Apple Watch stand of the 3-in-1, but has a USB-A port to charge a third device.
The dual pad costs £99.95 and the 3-in-1 £129.95 – both are available now, either from the Apple Store or direct from Mophie.
WORDPRESS BUYS TUMBLR
AS CORPORATE acquisitions go, the purchase of the Tumblr microblogging service by Yahoo! some six years ago now seems like it could have been one of the worst.
Yahoo! paid $1.1bn for the service in 2013. Fast-forward to this week, and
Tumblr has changed hands again – this time reportedly for less than $3m.
Yahoo! itself was bought a couple of years ago by the US mobile network Verizon.
Since then, Verizon has changed Tumblr considerably, not least by banning any kind of adult content from the platform – users were not happy about that. And so, after selling off another of Yahoo!’s prized assets, photo-sharing service Flickr, last year, Verizon has now offloaded Tumblr, too – to the owners of one of Tumblr’s longstanding rivals, WordPress.
New owner Automattic says it won’t change Tumblr but there must be plans to integrate at least some of the features of these two great online publishing tools.