Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

iPod Classic emulator for the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 finally gets the size and aspect ratio right

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Apple has the opportunity to do something really cool here! An emulator going by the name of Classipod has been doing the rounds on the Google Play Store, letting you run an iPod Classic style interface on any Android phone of your choosing. The only problem is that Apple never really made a 9:20 iPod Classic. Every iPod Classic had a short, stout design and as it stands, there are only two Android phones that currently fit this bill, and both fold.

A video on Instagram showed the Classipod interface on a Galaxy Z Fold8 and I can’t help but feel like this almost exactly looks like the classic iPod. The proportions are damn near perfect, the interface still makes me nostalgic, and those color options absolutely slap! The only real problem is that, like all good things, Classipod came to Android before it did to the iPhone Duo… but if someone from Apple’s software team is reading this (hey Craig!), just go ahead and give us an Apple Music skin that brings back the iPod Classic! Pretty please??

Designer: Adeeteya

Here’s what I find so funny about running Classipod on a Z Fold8 – sure, it almost matches the iPod Classic’s form factor, but even when folded shut, it’s still thinner than the iPod! I’m talking hinge, two sets of screens, two batteries, an entire processor, cameras galore, all that packed into something that measures 9.7mm thick while the iPod Classic, which is just a tiny screen, battery, SoC, and a massive flash drive, measures 10.5mm in thickness. Then again, the iPod Classic packs an aux input too, which you’ll never see on a foldable phone.

But hold the Z Fold8 in your hand and the Classipod definitely scratches the itch of owning vintage Apple gear. The weight and heft, the analog interface, and that gorgeous jogwheel that is sure to get your muscle memory kicking in instantly. You sideload music so it plays locally (no streaming), and you can do everything, from searching for artists to making playlists. And yes, if you’re asking, the jogwheel has haptic feedback so it actually does feel like the iPod of yesteryears.

There are a few iPod emulators on the App Store, but none as good as the Classipod. I guess someone could vibecode one overnight and run it on an iPhone Duo soon, but until then, turns out the most faithful recreation of an iPod Classic exists… just on an Android device!

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Gorgeous LEGO Book Nook Has a Steam Train Blasting Straight Through Its Snowy Pages

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Every kid who grew up with Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express remembers that moment where the story stops behaving like a story. A train just shows up, chugging straight out of the snow and into a kid’s actual bedroom, and suddenly bedtime reading feels a little bit dangerous in the best way. That’s the exact energy LEGO builder CrazyInventor is chasing with Winter Express, and yes, I see what you did there with that title, very smart way to dodge a certain mouse-shaped legal team while still getting the reference across loud and clear. Except here the train doesn’t stop at bursting out of the pages. It runs straight through the whole book, cover to cover, like the story just wasn’t big enough to hold it.

The result looks like someone left a hardback open on a shelf and a Victorian steam engine decided to use it as a shortcut. Gold trim, a red ribbon bookmark, snow dusted across the back cover like a sky full of stars, this thing reads more like a diorama that happens to be shaped like a book than a book that happens to have a train in it. And once you spot the tiny second train hiding inside the pages, you’ll understand why this project cracked 1,000 supporters in about three days flat.

Designer: CrazyInventor

The book itself steals the show before the train even enters the conversation. It’s a navy blue hardback with rounded gold corner guards and matching gold bands running down a curved spine, the kind of cover treatment you’d expect on a leather-bound classic rather than a pile of ABS plastic. A gold plaque on the front reads “Winter Express” in a wood-grain frame, and a red ribbon bookmark hangs off the top edge like someone set the book down mid-chapter and wandered off to make tea. Flip to the back cover and it’s scattered with pale blue round studs, doing double duty as either falling snow or a starry winter sky, depending on how you’re feeling that day.

A black and gold Victorian locomotive takes over from there, complete with a glowing headlamp, a cowcatcher up front, and Technic side rod detailing, coming straight out of a snow-capped rock tunnel carved into the front cover. A matching passenger coach trails out the other side through the spine, decked out in scrollwork trim with its own lit lanterns and a roof stacked with skis and sleds. Snowy pine trees, cobblestone tiles, and two working lampposts fill out the base, along with a frozen little pond built from trans-blue tiles.

My favorite detail is buried in the pages themselves. Look closely at the tan interior spread and there are cutout windows revealing a second, micro-scale train crossing a tiny stone viaduct, a whole miniature railway hiding inside the book that the big train is currently smashing its way through. It’s a small touch, but it’s the kind of layered thinking that separates a fun MOC from a genuinely great one.

Winter Express landed on LEGO Ideas on September 15 and has already pulled in 1,291 supporters, cruising well past the first 1,000-vote milestone toward the 5,000 mark it needs next. If cozy winter dioramas with a little bit of chaos baked in are your thing, go to the LEGO Ideas page and add your support and watch this one keep climbing.

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Battery-free Portable Water Sprayer Solves a Problem Beaches, Campsites, and Public Restrooms All Share

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Sand is genuinely one of the most stubborn substances on earth. Anyone who’s ever come home from a beach day still gritty between their toes, despite standing under an outdoor shower for five minutes, knows the feeling. Camping does the same thing in a different register, swapping sand for mud, trail dust, and whatever else the outdoors has to offer. The core problem is always the same: you need a controlled stream of water pointed precisely where you need it, and you either have access to a tap or you very much do not. There is no middle ground in nature.

PORTALO is Karim Ali’s answer to that, and the 24-year-old French product design engineer started on it in 2022 while still in school. It’s a compact manual pressurized water sprayer, 410ml of BPA-free water in a pneumatically pressurized vessel that hits up to 3 bar through a 60cm retractable hose and a brass nozzle you can dial from a focused jet to a wide mist. It runs on pure air pressure with no battery, no motor, and no charging, meaning the space competitors devote to electronics goes straight to water capacity. The origami-inspired form docks magnetically, slings across your body, and leaves both hands free.

Designer: Karim Ali

Click Here to Buy Now: $57 $69 (17% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $53,000.

Twenty-six billion wet wipes enter the environment every year, a figure that makes sense when you realize a wet wipe is the default portable hygiene solution for much of the western world. They contain preservatives and fragrances that dermatologists flag regularly, account for 94% of UK sewer blockages, and cost families roughly £58 a year in infant care alone. Karim spent four years and eleven prototypes working on one question: how do you bring that same comfort anywhere? PORTALO is a compact manual high-pressure water system for hygiene and quick cleanups anywhere, designed to deliver a pressurized jet anywhere, from a small water reserve, without electricity or disposable consumables. Karim calls it hygiene autonomy, which sounds a lot more elaborate than a ‘portable spray,’ but when you get into the details, you realize the PORTALO is, in fact, much more than just a spray.

Building pressure by hand before use, rather than routing it through a motor, is the decision that makes everything else in PORTALO possible. PORTALO is pressurized first, then delivers a continuous controlled stream through a lightweight shower head and retractable hose, with no continuous pumping, motor, or battery. Electric competitors in the same size class devote part of their interior to a lithium motor and battery, require regular charging, and still top out at 0.5 to 1.5 bar of pressure. Removing the motor and battery leaves more room for water at the same size, requires no charging, and keeps the system mechanically simple and maintainable. At 120 seconds of continuous runtime from 410ml and a body weight of just 205 grams, the numbers make a compelling case for leaving the electronics out entirely.

Most portable bidets have a public restroom problem: you’re holding and aiming the whole bottle while trying to use it, and the coordination that requires is more athletic than hygienic. PORTALO’s 60cm retractable hose separates those two tasks, letting the bottle stay beside you while only the small shower head goes where you need it, with no need to hold or turn the whole bottle upside down. That nozzle is brass, not the injection-molded plastic standard across competing products, giving it a tactile density and durability that reads as deliberate. The spray width dials between a direct jet for powerful cleaning and a mist for refreshing and gentle rinsing, with the head rotating freely in any direction. It’s the kind of setup that makes you realize how low the bar in this category has been set.

A Japanese Asanoha origami geometry shapes the PORTALO body into an angular, faceted form, paying homage to Japanese culture and its strong relationship with cleanliness – both in life and in visual design. The spray head clips magnetically to the bottle and rotates in any direction, so you can place it down, point it where you need it, and keep your hands free. Most things in this category look like they were designed to be forgotten in a toiletry bag, and PORTALO clearly was not. Sling it across your body, the nozzle docks magnetically, the strap holds it upright and ready, and both hands stay free with running water on demand. The reservoir is heavily tinted but transparent enough to read the water level at a glance without opening anything, a detail that matters most when you’re refilling in low light. PORTALO is made to be repairable and uses standard joints with a minimal amount of glue, with 90% of the product disassembling by hand.

PORTALO started in 2022 inside a student dorm, with a first prototype that was a modified garden sprayer assembled to test whether manual pressure alone could generate enough power for portable hygiene, and despite being bulky and far from the final vision, one thing became immediately clear: the pressure worked. PORTALO evolved through 11 different prototypes of simplifying before reaching the current final version, which is now patent pending internationally under the PCT. PORTALO won the Alibaba CoCreate Pitch 2025 from a field of 30,000 applicants and appeared at Concours Lépine 2026 at the Paris Fair, where the first production units were sold directly to the public. Concours Lépine, established in 1901, has over a century of rewarding practical inventions over aesthetic concepts, which is exactly the company PORTALO belongs in.

PORTALO is available in four colorways, Coal Black, Sky Blue, Olive Green, and Canyon Orange, with a microfiber carrying case and carry strap included. The retail price is €59, roughly $68 USD, with worldwide shipping and an estimated delivery of December 2026. The product is no longer a concept-stage project, having already been designed, industrialized, manufactured in a first batch, presented to the public, and sold during Concours Lépine, making this a finished design scaling for broader distribution rather than a concept hunting for its first factory run. For anyone who camps, travels, has young kids, plays outdoor sports, or has quietly accepted the portable hygiene problem as an unsolvable given, PORTALO makes a well-reasoned case otherwise. Four years, 11 prototypes, a brass nozzle, and a clever pump. Karim did the work.

Click Here to Buy Now: $57 $69 (17% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $53,000.

The post Battery-free Portable Water Sprayer Solves a Problem Beaches, Campsites, and Public Restrooms All Share first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Hydrogen Motorcycle Concept Revives a 90-Year-Old BMW Idea That Never Reached Production

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In 1934, a BMW designer named Alfred Böning built a motorcycle so far ahead of its time that BMW itself did not know what to do with it. The R7 wrapped its entire mechanical guts in smooth, pressed steel bodywork shaped by Art Deco geometry, and it was so expensive and so strange next to the “bicycle with a motor” norms of the era that BMW shelved the one and only unit, crated it up, and basically forgot it existed. It sat lost in a warehouse until someone rediscovered it in 2005. It took until 2012, and a full restoration by Hans Keckeisen, for the world to actually see what Böning had been sitting on for seven decades, and it walked away with best in class at Pebble Beach the moment it did.

I bring this up because REV-1 feels like the same idea getting a second shot, minus the eight decades of waiting around in a crate. Designer Lennart Baramsky has wrapped a hydrogen powertrain in one continuous, hand-formed aluminum shell with barely a shut line in sight, badged simply REV-1 on the flank. There is no traditional fork, no fairing bolted over a chassis, just one sculpted metal body with cutouts carved through it like a machine that grew its own windows. Böning would probably recognize the impulse immediately, even if the engineering underneath has changed a lot in ninety years.

Designer: Lennart Baramsky

The front end is the part that stops you. Instead of a telescopic fork, there is a linkage setup, rod ends, a rocker arm, and a coilover mounted almost flat against the body, the same basic family of idea behind hub-center designs like the Bimota Tesi or the BMW Duolever we have covered on this site before, except here it disappears into the bodywork so completely you have to squint to find where the suspension actually lives. That single design decision does more to sell the “grown, not built” read of this bike than anything else on it.

The badge on the tank claims a 450kW hydrogen core, and I want to be honest about what that number means in context. The most advanced real hydrogen motorcycle running today, Kawasaki’s Ninja H2 HySE, went public at Suzuka in 2024 making nowhere near that figure, and hydrogen fuel cell scooters like Suzuki’s Burgman have spent over a decade proving out the tech at a fraction of REV-1’s claimed output. That is not a knock on the design. It is a reminder that this is a concept badge doing concept badge things, the same way we flagged when covering Bandit9’s aluminum and carbon fiber Ducati builds that a beautiful shell does not always mean a buildable one.

What REV-1 actually nails is the argument that a motorcycle can be one object instead of a pile of bolted-together ones. Böning tried to make that case in 1934 and got a crate for his trouble. Baramsky is making it again in an era with hydrogen fuel cells and render engines good enough to sell the illusion completely, and whether or not this thing ever turns a wheel in real life, the shape has already done its job.

The post This Hydrogen Motorcycle Concept Revives a 90-Year-Old BMW Idea That Never Reached Production first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hublot Turned Jeff Koons’ $58 Million Balloon Dog Sculpture Into a 42mm Watch

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Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the red colorway

Koons has spent three decades turning party balloons into stainless steel, freezing something floppy and disposable into ten feet of mirror-polished permanence. Hublot has now run that trick backwards. The new Classic Fusion Balloon Dog takes a rigid lump of machined metal and bullies it into looking like it is full of air. Every surface bulges outward. The crystal domes up, the dial swells, and even the titanium screw heads look like somebody left them parked next to a helium tank. I have seen plenty of watches wear art on the dial like a bumper sticker, and this one goes out of its way to avoid that.

Hublot dropped it on September 16 in New York, alongside a $488,000 sapphire tourbillon called the MP-14 Origin. The Balloon Dog comes in three flavors. Silver is mirror-polished stainless steel, while red and blue use polished anodized aluminum, chosen because anodizing builds saturated color into the metal instead of sitting on top of it like paint. The case runs 42mm wide and 11mm thick, with the HUB1710 automatic inside and roughly 50 hours of power reserve. The crown is shaped like a balloon’s inflation valve, and a floppy rubber dog tail sticks out at 10:30. Each color is capped at 200 pieces and costs $25,100.

Designer: Jeff Koons, in collaboration with Hublot

Rather than printing an image of the sculpture onto a dial and calling it a day, Hublot rebuilt the Classic Fusion’s entire architecture around the idea of internal pressure. The normally flat, angular case profile has been reshaped into convex lines and soft domed surfaces throughout. The sapphire crystal sits raised and rounded. The bezel puffs outward. Even the H-shaped screws that anchor the case get inflated, domed heads, which is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort for a component nobody examines closely. It is the same instinct we saw when a design team built an entire chair around Koons’ inflated visual language, chasing the illusion of softness in a material that has no business looking soft at all.

Koons’ actual sculptures get their color from transparent coatings baked onto mirror-polished stainless steel, and Hublot chased that same saturation by anodizing the red and blue cases instead of painting them. Anodizing builds color into the metal’s oxide layer rather than resting on top of it, which is why these two colorways read closer to candy than lacquer. Silver skips the tint and goes straight for mirror polish, putting it in the most literal conversation with the source sculpture. Even the tungsten rotor swinging behind the caseback picks up the same rounded, voluminous shape as the rest of the watch, a detail almost nobody will ever see in person. It is the kind of commitment Hublot has shown before, whether that meant wrapping Daniel Arsham’s MP-17 in fluid, water-formed titanium or handing Samuel Ross a canvas of micro-blasted titanium for the Big Bang Tourbillon SR_A.

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the silver colorway

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the blue colorway

The dog riding the seconds hand does not actually move, a detail Hublot’s own product page has to clarify because the launch film animates it, so temper your expectations of kinetic sculpture on your wrist. Koons has licensed this exact balloon vocabulary everywhere from a BMW 8 Series hood to a pair of Lexon lamps and speakers built with The Broad museum, and a wristwatch is arguably the hardest surface in that lineup to pull off, since the whole point of a watch is daily contact rather than gallery distance. Hublot cleared that bar by treating this as an engineering brief instead of a printing job.

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the red colorway

At $25,100 for 200 pieces per colorway, you are paying gallery-adjacent money for a watch running an entry-tier automatic movement, and that math will sit fine with some collectors and badly with others. What nobody can argue is that Hublot made the sculpture’s whole DNA visible in every component instead of stopping at the dial.

Rear View of the Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch’s Exhibition Window

The post Hublot Turned Jeff Koons’ $58 Million Balloon Dog Sculpture Into a 42mm Watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

UGREEN’s iPhone 18 Pro Case Packs An Extra Screen For That ‘iPhone Duo Effect’

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Don’t worry, you don’t need to spend $1999 to gift yourself an iPhone with an extra screen. UGREEN debuted what they call the “Magic E-ink Screen Case” for the iPhone 18 Pro series – a protective case that gives your 18 Pro an extra display… kind of like the Duo, but without the bleeding price tag. The case, shown in a complementary burgundy colorway, packs a 6-color E-ink display on the back, making it perfect for photos, wallpapers, notes, QR codes, or any sort of personalization you’d want. No, sadly it won’t pull off that cool frosted glass animation that made the Duo so drool-worthy!

Fresh off a successful run at IFA (with the company debuting their world’s first liquid-cooled MagSafe power bank), UGREEN decided resting was for the week. Just days after Apple’s iPhone announcement, the company took to Weibo, sharing a look at three products to complement Apple’s latest Pro-series device. The first, a 45W charging brick, second, a screen protector, and thirdly, a protective case that makes the back of your phone about as interesting as the front.

Designer: UGREEN

The case’s primary role is to serve as protection for your $1199 phone. It covers the sides with a thick bumper, packed with air-cushion corners for extra drop protection. The camera plateau gets a raised lip to shield your lenses (especially that variable aperture shooter), but the screen on the back steals the cake. UGREEN hasn’t specified its dimensions, but we do know that it’s a 6-color E-ink display that can be controlled via an app on the phone, letting you send images, wallpapers, and notes to the display with a simple button push. Once there, the e-ink screen renders the image out, keeping it there forever without any power consumption.

We don’t know whether this still lets you use wireless charging on your iPhone, my guess is that you’ll have to make that compromise, along with never being able to ever put any MagSafe accessory on the back. The benefit, however, is having a hyper-personalized smartphone case so you don’t ever confuse your device with someone else’s ever again. For the right audience, that’s a very doable trade-off.

While details remain scarce, there are two worth noting. Notebookcheck mentions that the e-ink screen won’t function as a viewfinder for the rear camera – a feature that would almost instantly turn this case into a very acceptable iPhone Duo replacement for a large group of people. It’s just photos for now, which makes sense because adding extra features would mean adding a bigger battery and more powerful processor. At that rate you might as well just pack an OLED in there along with a thick battery panel.

The second caveat is that UGREEN’s marketing the Magic E-ink Screen Case exclusively in China, with no word on a global launch. That’s probably why we didn’t see this at IFA 2026 either. I’m sure it would’ve been all the rage on the show floor!

The post UGREEN’s iPhone 18 Pro Case Packs An Extra Screen For That ‘iPhone Duo Effect’ first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hisense E7SF packs MiniLED, 144Hz, and Fire TV into a seriously affordable big-screen TV

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There used to be two ways to buy a TV. Go cheap and squint through a mediocre picture, or spend enough that your banking app sends a concerned notification. Hisense’s E7SF exists to blow up that choice entirely. It runs a native 144Hz MiniLED panel, Hi-QLED color, and as many as 260 local dimming zones, paired with Fire TV and Alexa+, across six sizes from 50 inches up to a genuinely massive 100. The 50 inch model has already been spotted selling for under $400.

That price point used to buy a TV that struggled in daylight and looked worse the second a game turned on. MiniLED is the technology that fixed most of that, and until recently it was reserved for sets that cost real money. Hisense’s approach over the past few years has been to move formerly premium display technology down the price stack faster than the rest of the industry, and the E7SF is that philosophy in its most direct form. The brand’s role as the Official Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2026 and its standing as the number one brand globally in 100-inch and larger TVs gave it a huge stage this year, but the bigger takeaway is simpler: everyone now wants a bigger, brighter screen at home, and far more people can actually afford one.

Designer: Hisense

Click Here to Buy Now: $697.96 $799.99 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

MiniLED backlighting replaces the standard LED array behind an LCD panel with a system that improves how light is managed across the screen and brings out more detail in every scene. More zones means tighter control over which parts of the image are bright and which go dark, producing better contrast, deeper blacks, and more vivid highlights across the panel. On the E7SF, that backlight scales to up to 260 dimming zones depending on the screen size selected. Hi-QLED color technology layers on top of that foundation, designed to keep every shade, scene, and skin tone looking true to life, rendering every scene convincingly real, just as the creator intended. The result is a picture that competes meaningfully with displays that cost significantly more just two or three years ago.

AI Picture runs continuously in the background, reading what’s on screen and instantly fine-tuning the picture so colors pop, details shine, and everything looks natural and clear, without any manual settings required. The E7SF supports Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, HDR10, and HLG, covering every major HDR format, which brings brighter highlights, deeper contrast, and richer color in every scene no matter what’s on screen. Dolby Vision IQ adjusts the picture based on ambient lighting in the room, keeping the image calibrated whether the curtains are open or the lights are off. Filmmaker Mode preserves the original aspect ratio, color, frame rate, and sound so viewers watch movies exactly as directors intended. The full HDR stack future-proofs the set against whatever content the studios push out over the next few years, which matters more than any single format badge on the box.

Sports content gets dedicated handling, with the TV automatically recognizing sports content and adjusting picture and sound settings for the action, delivering smoother motion, clearer details, and boosted crowd audio that recreates the excitement of being in the stadium. Dolby Atmos handles the immersive audio experience more broadly, pulling picture and sound together so viewers see, hear, and feel like they’re right in the middle of the action. The E7SF carries a 20W 2.0 multi-channel system on the 50 to 85 inch models and steps up to a 50W 2.1 system with a dedicated woofer channel on the 100 inch. Bluetooth Audio rounds it out for wireless headphone setups, and the whole audio package scales sensibly with the screen size it’s attached to.

Native 144Hz on a TV at this price tier does real work, particularly in gaming, where many competing sets still pad the marketed refresh number through motion interpolation rather than delivering it natively from the panel. Two HDMI 2.1 ports run at full 4K at 144Hz, keeping the signal chain from a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X completely uncompromised. AMD FreeSync Premium matches the TV’s refresh rate to the connected graphics card, delivering reduced lag, minimized tearing, and fluid motion for a more immersive gaming experience. Dolby Vision Gaming and HDR10+ Gaming keep HDR active during play without requiring a manual mode switch. Game Booster 240 and ALLM, which switches the set into game mode automatically when a gaming device is detected, round out a feature set that sits well above what most TVs at this price level bother to include.

Hisense spent the World Cup cycle positioning itself as the brand for communal, big-screen viewing, and the E7SF still feels like the clearest expression of that idea after the tournament dust has settled. Fire TV manages the smart platform, with Alexa+ built into the voice remote for cross-app content search, smart home management, and watchlist sync, all handled through natural speech. Six sizes span from 50 to 100 inches, and a 100-inch MiniLED television at a mainstream price point is genuinely new territory. A screen that size used to require a custom installation budget. Now it’s an off-the-shelf decision. That shift is arguably the bigger story the E7SF is telling, and at the price Hisense is asking, it’s a hard argument to walk away from.

Click Here to Buy Now: $697.96 $799.99 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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This $120 Lumibricks Manga Shop Glows Like Cyberpunk Shibuya at Midnight

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Anyone who has wandered Tokyo’s Nakano Broadway knows the joy of a cramped shop stacked floor to ceiling with secondhand manga. Those shops smell like old paper and feel like treasure hunts, and Lumibricks has imagined what one might look like in a neon cyberpunk future. The Manga Shop is a 1,699-piece building block set where a wooden Japanese bookstore gets retrofitted with neon signs, exposed cables, and a robot raccoon on the roof. The tiled roof and lattice windows stay proudly old school while the billboard out front glows like a Shibuya crossing at midnight. It’s a street corner caught somewhere between the Showa era and a sci-fi anime.

In the set’s backstory, paper manga is nearly extinct, and a collector named Eiji Fushimi scans rare volumes with a vintage eye implant to keep the stories alive. He shares the shop with Akira Tachibana, a genius hacker, and Yuzu Kurose, an office worker who spends every free minute buried in manga. Two interior sections slide out, revealing a browsing aisle stocked with printed manga covers and a VIP reading room upstairs. The set also connects to Lumibricks’ existing Izakaya set, letting the two buildings share one power supply and form a glowing little street. At $119.99, it’s a pretty convincing excuse to start building your own Neoncity block by block.

Designer: Lumibricks

A translucent red torii gate frames the entrance, and above it hangs a NEUVA billboard whose printed anime artwork glows blue and magenta. A tall orange MANGA sign climbs the corner, while a pink ドキドキ neon (the Japanese sound effect for a racing heartbeat) sits over the lower eave. Up top, red and blue cables run from a dish on the tiled roof into the billboard, basically the set’s whole theme summed up in two tubes. Then there’s the raccoon, a heart-eyed robot sprawled across the roof with a fan bolted to its arm and a manga page in its paw. Street level gets a gashapon machine, an arcade cabinet, a red lantern, and a black cat guarding its food bowl.

Cyberpunk has always borrowed from Japan, going back to Ridley Scott filling Blade Runner’s Los Angeles with Japanese billboards and Katsuhiro Otomo drawing Neo-Tokyo in Akira. The Manga Shop flips that around by starting with a traditional Japanese shopfront and letting the future creep in through the wiring. The tiled gable, lattice windows, and wooden eaves look like a neighborhood store your grandparents might have shopped at. The neon and tech feel bolted on rather than built in, which is exactly the point of the story. It’s a smart bit of worldbuilding for a toy, and it gives the design a logic beyond simply piling on glowing bits.

The lighting runs off a single USB-C cable or a battery box that takes three AA batteries, though you’ll need to supply your own batteries or power adapter. Getting there takes patience, since Brick Fanatics scored the build a rough 3 out of 10 in its review, citing unclear instructions and tiny wire connectors. The wires thread between studs with the included tweezers, and one step asks you to apply a minuscule contact strip with copper markings the right way round. That’s an odd exception in a set that otherwise skips stickers entirely, using 81 printed pieces and 35 metallic spray-painted parts instead. Budget around eight hours, and maybe a snack.

At $119.99, the Manga Shop undercuts Lumibricks’ 2,227-piece Neon Tech Tower, which sells for $150, and buying direct currently adds a free 388-piece micro version of the Izakaya and Manga Shop while supplies last. Up to four compatible sets can share one power supply, so your Neoncity street has a natural cap before you need another plug. Brick Fanatics still found the finished model worth the cursing once the neon came on, and the photos make that easy to believe. My only real gripe is the three included figures, whose hands can’t hold any of the manga the shop is built around. For a store dedicated to paper, nobody inside can actually read.

The post This $120 Lumibricks Manga Shop Glows Like Cyberpunk Shibuya at Midnight first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally someone made a ‘Rock Guitar’ out of actual rock… And it honestly sounds good!

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Almost every guitar ever made, acoustic or electric, comes from wood, which means the genre names have been lying to us the whole time. Rock guitar is not made from rock. Heavy metal is not made from iron ore. Somebody finally got tired of that gap between name and material, and a YouTuber going by BeBeau Builds decided the phrase “rock guitar” had the potential to be the greatest dad joke ever attempted with a table saw. So he sacrificed a perfectly good acoustic guitar, kept the fretboard, and built the rest of the instrument out of actual slate stone. It works. It plays. It is somehow real.

Repurposing the neck and fretboard from a donor acoustic, BeBeau built an internal armature to hold the stone in place, then pieced together individual slabs of slate into a guitar body that looks like the spiritual cousin of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Eighteen separate stone pieces went into the shape, cut and glued over a 3D printed skeleton, because free handing eighteen matching slabs by eye would have ended several friendships. The finished instrument weighs just under 49 pounds, which is closer to a car battery than a guitar. Somehow it still sounds like one.

Designer: BeBeau Builds

Slate was not exactly the obvious pick here, but it makes more sense for purely logistical reasons. The stone splits into clean, flat sheets naturally, which is exactly why it has been used for roofing tiles and pool tables for centuries, and that same property made it possible to cut consistent slabs for a guitar body instead of fighting a shapeless boulder. A tile saw got tried first and overheated almost immediately on material this thick, which tells you slate was never meant to be machined like plywood. The build leaned on 3D printed templates to keep eighteen individually cut pieces close enough in dimension to actually fit the internal skeleton. Even with that help, thickness varied enough across slabs that small angle errors piled up until the whole assembly stopped lining up, forcing a redo.

The first full glue attempt failed outright and had to be scraped clean by hand, a multi hour job that nobody signs up for twice. The fix was smarter the second time around, using hot glue as a temporary skeleton while construction adhesive filled the gaps and did the actual structural work over several days of curing. One piece of the soundboard cracked during shaping, which is the kind of moment that ends most builds, except a spare slab was on hand and it turned out to have even better tone than the original. Mineral oil went on at the end, both to protect the stone and to give it the same worn, wet look you would expect from a countertop rather than a guitar.

Here is the part that actually surprised me. Strummed unplugged, this thing sounds a lot closer to a normal wooden acoustic than a 49 pound rock guitar has any business sounding, trading off mostly in reduced volume and shorter sustain rather than some completely alien tone. Compare that to steel bodied resonators like the Dobro, which change an instrument’s voice dramatically even at a fraction of this weight, and slate starts looking less like a stunt and more like a real data point on how much a guitar’s material actually shapes its sound. The trade-off is obvious and unavoidable. Nobody is retiring their dreadnought for a slab of rock that weighs as much as a mini fridge shelf, and the neck angle on this build is slightly off, which stretches the strings sharp under fretting pressure.

Still, as a proof of concept, it lands. Burls Art has made a habit of testing whether guitars actually need to be guitar shaped materials at all, and we covered his cardboard guitar, built from laminated corrugated sheets and resin, which he engineered by studying the alternating grain structure of the Wiggle Side Chair to survive real string tension. Before that there was a fully functional bass built from 2000 LEGO bricks, and a guitar whose body was cast from 5,000 roasted coffee beans suspended in epoxy, so a rock guitar fits an established pattern of testing lutherie against materials that have no business holding a string. BeBeau’s slate build earns its place in that lineup by actually working as an instrument instead of just posing as one. A trained player still needs to put this through its paces before anyone calls the tonal verdict final. Until then, the dad joke holds up, and honestly, that might be the best review it needed.

The post Finally someone made a ‘Rock Guitar’ out of actual rock… And it honestly sounds good! first appeared on Yanko Design.

aulumu’s iPhone 18 Pro Cases Survive Drops, Glow In The Dark, And Auto Cool Your Phone

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Picking a phone case is one of the most low-stakes high-stakes decisions in consumer tech. The stakes are low because it’s a $40 purchase. The stakes are high because you’re going to look at it roughly 150 times a day for the next two years, and a wrong pick is the kind of thing that will quietly gnaw at you. The market that erupts around every new iPhone launch does not help, flooding storefronts with interchangeable shells that share dimensions and absolutely nothing else. aulumu’s A18 collection tackles that problem by running nine products across genuinely different design philosophies, from a 1500D aramid drop-protection case to a transparent polycarbonate case with a built-in glow-in-the-dark luminous array, all landing at once for the new iPhone Pro season.

aulumu has built its reputation by doing something the accessory market rarely bothers with: making sure everything in the catalog looks like it came from the same design brief. Their G03 magnetic wallet won the 2025 Red Dot Award, their A17 frosted case brought superconductive cooling tech to a category most brands treat as pure commodity, and their B01 sling bag pulled that vocabulary into carry gear entirely. The brand targets commuters, creators, and EDC enthusiasts who want things genuinely designed rather than manufactured to a price point. The A18 collection is that philosophy’s clearest expression yet, fielding four cases across four distinct material territories in one coordinated launch. The finish detail and surface craft running through the lineup is the kind of thing the September case flood never delivers.

A18 Armor Shockproof Case: Where 1500D Aramid Fiber and Drop Protection Finally Coexist

Aramid fiber is the same material in a bulletproof vest, which sounds impressive until you remember that a bulletproof vest will stop a bullet and do absolutely nothing for you if you fall off a ladder. The material is legitimately exceptional at being lightweight and stiff, and genuinely terrible at absorbing the kind of omnidirectional impact a phone takes when it bounces across pavement. aulumu’s AFT construction addresses that gap directly, combining 1500D aramid fiber with TPU in a single one-piece build, letting aramid carry the weight savings and refined texture while TPU handles the flex and cushioning. No separate layers to delaminate, no seams to work loose over eighteen months of daily carry. The result sits closer to a protective case than the ultra-slim aramid builds that look sharp and quietly terrify you every time the phone grazes a countertop.

A 2m drop rating headlines the protection claim, but the geometry tells the more interesting story. The screen sits behind a 1.36mm raised case edge, the camera system gets a 1.3mm raised frame, and full-wrap coverage extends across every edge with reinforced corners built to distribute directional impact. Corner drops are statistically the scenario that kills most phones, and the Armor treats that with structural reinforcement rather than optimism. For a case that still fits comfortably in the everyday carry conversation, the protection spec here reads like something that belongs in the rugged case category, which is a harder balance to land than it sounds.

Click Here to Buy Now: $79.98.

A18 Ultra-Slim Particle Aramid Fiber Case: Tactical Art That Weighs Next To Nothing

Particle structures and tactical technology aesthetics are not phrases that typically show up in a phone case brief, which is part of what makes the Particle Aramid Fiber Case such an interesting product to look at. The UV-treated gradient particle array across the aramid surface creates depth and movement that shifts with light and angle, producing a dimensional quality that a smooth polycarbonate case running the same finish could never replicate. The dense plain-weave aramid construction gives the particle array a textured foundation to sit on, and the two layers of visual information working together read closer to a topographic rendering than a fabric finish. aulumu calls it “Aramid Meets Digital Order,” which sounds like marketing copy until you actually look at the surface and realize the description is pretty accurate. Available in Black and Blue, both colorways lean hard into the tactical reference rather than softening it for a mainstream audience.

At 1.2mm thick from 27g, the carry weight is essentially a non-conversation. Full-coverage design extends across the edges and buttons with the same seamless enclosure that runs through the rest of the A18 family, so the visual drama does not come at any structural cost. The UV treatment is what separates the Particle Aramid Fiber Case from a conventional woven aramid surface, adding a gradient particle finish that feels genuinely considered rather than decorative. For a case sitting at this weight and profile, the amount of surface personality aulumu packed into it is a harder design problem than it looks.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69.98.

A18 Ghost Lumen Case: A Glowing Case That Steals The Spotlight, Even In The Dark

Premium transparent PC material that mimics the original metal and glass textures of the device, with a glow-in-the-dark cyberpunk aesthetic. That sentence describes a product that could very easily go wrong, and aulumu somehow stuck the landing. Optical-grade PC sheets with a light transmittance of 88-92% mean the phone’s hardware reads clearly through the case rather than disappearing behind a foggy plastic shell. The IML Laminating Luminous Array is what drives the glow effect, and the IML process keeps it long-lasting rather than fading out after a few weeks the way cheaper phosphorescent finishes tend to. It comes in transparent or lemon yellow, and lemon yellow is the correct choice, full stop.

The Ghost Lumen’s UV-resistant molecular formula protects against daily sun exposure, hand sweat, and heat-induced aging, which is the engineering answer to the single most common complaint about transparent cases. Nobody wants to spend money on a case that turns the color of old newspaper by spring. aulumu enhanced their molding process to create a fully enclosed PC case design without notches, keeping the one-piece aesthetic clean across every edge. As the most visually adventurous case in the A18 lineup, the Ghost Lumen sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Armor’s utilitarian brief, and the collection is considerably more interesting for having both ends covered.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39.98.

A18 Hyper Frosted Case: Yes, It Glows, and Yes, It’s Actually Cooling Your iPhone’s CPU

Phone cases do not typically come with a thermal engineering story, which is part of what makes aulumu’s CoolHyper Tech worth paying attention to. The A18 Hyper Frosted takes that signature technology and upgrades it with a bigger silicone thermal pad, repositioning the heat dissipation area closer to the phone’s CPU to achieve more efficient heat transfer. The result is a claimed 2 to 3 degree Celsius temperature reduction, which sounds modest until you consider that sustained heat is the primary reason flagship phones throttle performance during long gaming sessions or extended video work. A case that actively keeps the chip cooler is, in a subtle way, a case that keeps the phone faster. That is a genuinely different value proposition from anything else in the A18 lineup.

The frosted transparent TPU shell uses aulumu’s one-piece full-cover design, fully enclosed without notches, in Transparent Gray and Translucent White. At 43g it is the heaviest case in the collection, and that extra weight is essentially a direct accounting for the thermal hardware sitting inside. An IML Laminating Luminous Array adds the same glow-in-the-dark character as the Ghost Lumen, making the Hyper Frosted the only case that combines active cooling with a light-up finish. That combination is either exactly what you want or the detail that helps you rule it out, which is useful information either way. Ultra-strong MagSafe is built in for fast and stable attachment, and for people who push their phone hard through gaming, long video sessions, or navigation, this is the case designed with that use pattern in mind.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39.98.

The post aulumu’s iPhone 18 Pro Cases Survive Drops, Glow In The Dark, And Auto Cool Your Phone first appeared on Yanko Design.