Author Archives: JC Torres

This Fan Made the Sony-Nintendo Handheld the Companies Never Would

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The retro handheld market has a strange problem. The hardware keeps getting better, the screens get sharper, the processors get faster, and yet most of these devices land looking like prototypes someone forgot to finish. Generic shells, forgettable proportions, and LED lighting as a substitute for actual design thinking. For a category built entirely on nostalgia, very few of these devices actually look like they belong to any era at all.

That tension is what one Reddit user decided to address. Starting with a Retroid Pocket 5, a $199 Android handheld running a Snapdragon 865 and a 5.5-inch AMOLED display, the mod layers Sony and Nintendo branding onto the same shell. Vinyl decals, translucent polycarbonate, a 3D-printed volume rocker from Etsy, and a cable replaced in PS2 color. The result looks less like a sticker job and more like a concept render from an alternate 1999.

Designer: Mitchieyan

The translucent shell is doing most of the work. It pulls from the visual language of the N64’s Funtastic series, those clear and atomic-purple controllers Nintendo released in the late 1990s, where showing the circuitry was the design choice rather than concealing it. Over a piano-black grip body with PlayStation-colored face buttons, the frosted polycarbonate shifts from grey to near-white depending on the light. It shouldn’t feel considered. It does.

The branding placement is where intent becomes clear. The Sony wordmark sits centered on the upper face, exactly where it appeared on a PSOne. Below it, the PlayStation four-color logo. At the bottom bezel, the Nintendo badge mirrors its position on a Game Boy Advance SP. None of it is licensed, of course. These are adhesive vinyls placed by someone who grew up with both systems and wanted their coexistence on one device to feel inevitable rather than absurd.

Not everything here reaches backward. The analog sticks are translucent caps over hall-effect sensors, lit teal on the left and purple on the right, owing nothing to 1999. That generation didn’t have RGB anything. The lighting reads as a concession to the present; the one feature announcing this is still an Android device in 2025, not a prototype from some alternate Sony-Nintendo licensing meeting. Whether it sits comfortably alongside the retro shell is a fair question.

The rear view shifts the frame again. A large dual-grip body in smooth black rubber dominates the back, a clear plastic hinge connecting the screen to grip in full view, structural and unapologetic. The 3D-printed volume rocker at the top edge puts a physical control where fingers naturally land. The back half feels closer to a DualShock than a Game Boy, which is either the point or the problem, depending on what you wanted this thing to be.

Flip to the front screen, and the emulator grid makes the whole thing literal. DuckStation for PS1, Dolphin for GameCube, PPSSPP for PSP, melonDS for Nintendo DS, and a live PS2 wallpaper cycling behind all of it. This device runs both companies’ libraries simultaneously without asking permission from either. The branding on the shell, in that context, stops being a novelty and starts reading as a plain statement of what the hardware already does.

The retro handheld category is large enough now that sameness has become its default. The Retroid Pocket 6, the current flagship from the same manufacturer, drew community criticism for being indistinguishable from competitors: glass front, LED sticks, rounded edges, and no particular character. A fan mod building identity out of borrowed logos is one response to a problem the manufacturers haven’t solved. It’s also just someone enjoying a hobby and being honest about what they want.

The hardware to play PS1, PS2, GameCube, and Game Boy Advance all on one screen already exists and costs under $200. What the market hasn’t resolved is what that device should actually look like, or whose name should go on it. This mod doesn’t answer either question. It just makes the gap between what’s technically possible and what anyone has bothered to design feel a little harder to dismiss.

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This Origami Stool Has No Legs, No Bolts, and Opens With One Press

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Furniture storage is one of those problems that design has mostly surrendered to square footage. You either have room for a stool, or you don’t, and folding alternatives have historically resolved that with compromise: wobbly joints, hard edges, the kind of utilitarian resignation that makes it obvious the piece exists to disappear rather than be used. The Press Stool starts from a different premise, borrowing its structural logic not from joinery or hardware but from the physics of folded paper.

The concept begins with a simple observation: a flat sheet of paper has no load-bearing strength on its own, but folding it generates rigidity. Crease a sheet, and the forces redistribute across the form. Press the folds, and the geometry resists compression. This is the same principle behind accordion-style bellows folding in classic cameras, where pressing the structure generates mechanical force. Here, that same force is redirected toward something you can sit on.

Designer: Jaehyun Bae

In its flat state, the stool collapses into a wide, deflated oval roughly 610 mm wide and 520 mm deep, with gently curved sides and pinched, gathered ends where the material compresses to a narrow tip. The metallic silver material has a pronounced crinkled texture that lands somewhere between industrial foil and fabric. It ships flat. It weighs little.

Pressing the form open deploys it into a three-dimensional stool standing 530 mm tall, with two flanking vertical panels and a concave seat formed by the inward curve at the top. No latches, no assembly. The structural resistance comes entirely from the geometry of the fold itself, the way a creased sheet can bear more than expected when compressed along its axis. The fold-generated tension does the structural work that legs and frames usually handle.

That argument holds up as a concept, though the prototype leaves practical questions open. Material identity isn’t explicitly documented, load capacity is unspecified, and the crinkle finish that gives the piece its visual identity is also the surface most exposed to wear. A stool takes more daily abuse than most objects that look like they belong in a gallery, and the long-term resilience of the material composite is untested in any published form.

What’s clear is the conceptual economy. Form follows mechanism follows idea, without detour. Flat objects that become structural through pressing rather than assembly represent a genuinely interesting class of design problem, and the Press Stool makes that problem visible and tangible. How far the logic scales beyond a prototype is the question that follows it out of the studio.

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XPPen’s 4K Display Fixes the One Thing That Ruins Digital Art: Color

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Finishing a piece of digital artwork only to discover that the colors on your client’s monitor look nothing like what you spent hours calibrating is a particular kind of frustration. It’s not dramatic. It just quietly drains trust in your tools and your process. The XPPen Artist Pro 27 (Gen 2) is a drawing display built around the premise that color accuracy, at a professional level, should be the starting point rather than an expensive add-on you negotiate into a purchase.

At 26.9 inches with a 3840×2160 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, the display gives designers, artists, and digital content creators sufficient room to work at a scale that feels genuinely close to physical media. That kind of canvas matters when you’re sketching compositions or reviewing color grading frame-by-frame on an animation timeline, where pixel-level decisions compound quickly, and a cramped workspace turns into a liability.

Designer: XPPen

The color story is where XPPen is making the most aggressive claims. The 10-bit panel covers 99% of Adobe RGB and sRGB, and 97% of Display P3, all with a Delta E of less than 1, independently verified through Calman. For designers working across print, digital, and video deliverables simultaneously, that breadth matters more than any single gamut number. One device that holds accurate across three standards removes a class of color-management guesswork from the workflow entirely.

Getting there does require some setup. Activating the full 10-bit depth means going into display settings manually, and advanced color calibration through the bundled XPPen ColorMaster software requires a Calman colorimeter purchased separately. The hardware is capable; the software is ready. What XPPen doesn’t hand you automatically is the calibrated result itself, so buyers expecting out-of-the-box perfection should factor in that extra step and cost.

The display surface uses a new-gen luminous etched glass panel 0.7 mm thick, which XPPen claims offers 30% more light transmittance than its predecessor while keeping the anti-glare, paper-like texture. That texture is what keeps pen-on-glass from feeling clinical, and the thinner glass reduces the gap between pen tip and cursor, a physical detail that sounds minor until you’ve spent a session fighting it. Brightness is 350 nit, which positions this squarely as a studio tool.

Two styli ship with the unit: the X3 Pro Smart Chip Stylus with a standard silicone grip, and the narrower X3 Pro Slim Stylus, tapered at 26° to keep the tip in view during detailed line work. Both operate at 16,384 pressure levels with 3g activation force and 60-degree tilt sensitivity. A wireless shortcut remote with a 10 × 4 grid of programmable keys and a dial is also included, covering most of what keeps artists reaching for the keyboard mid-session.

The X-Touch multitouch system handles ten simultaneous touch points with native gesture support on Windows and macOS, customizable touch zones, and a floating shortcut menu accessible by gesture or button. Pen-priority mode suppresses accidental inputs while drawing. That last feature is the one that separates a touch-enabled display that genuinely fits a drawing workflow from one that just adds friction to it.

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$73 Lenovo Gamepad Turns the Legion Y700 Into a Switch Lite Rival

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Gaming tablets have always lived awkwardly between two worlds. Hold one flat, and it’s fine for casual sessions, but the moment a game demands precise analog input, touchscreen controls fall apart fast. Clip on a generic third-party gamepad, and the fit is never right, the latency is noticeable, and the whole thing looks assembled rather than designed. Lenovo’s Legion Gamepad G9 2026 takes a more deliberate approach, built as a dedicated accessory for one specific tablet.

The G9 2026 attaches to the newly announced Legion Y700 Gen 5 via its side-mounted USB-C port, converting the 8.8-inch Android tablet into something that handles more like a purpose-built gaming handheld. The wired connection keeps latency out of the equation entirely. The combination creates a form factor that puts it in the same general footprint as a Nintendo Switch Lite, just with a brighter screen behind it.

Designer: Lenovo

The input hardware sees meaningful changes over last year’s iteration. Most practically, the 4-direction D-pad is replaced with an 8-direction micro-switch alternative, an upgrade that fighting game and platformer players will immediately feel. All 12 switches across the face buttons, D-pad, and shoulder positions carry a 5 million-cycle rating. The ABXY layout follows Xbox conventions and supports Nintendo Switch/Xbox button remapping through the companion app.

Four touch-switch macro buttons on the rear can record sequences of up to 12 steps each. Eight of the main buttons support rapid-fire at up to 20 presses per second, with shortcut combinations for volume, lighting, and screenshots available without opening any menus. The “Extreme Control” companion app, Android only, handles deeper customization, including per-side RGB color, saturation, brightness, and animation speed. The Gamepad G9 2026 retails for ¥499 in China, about $73.

The quick-release protective shell built into the accessory has a large rear cutout that leaves the tablet’s heat vents and rear camera unobstructed. For a device running demanding content at sustained loads, any restriction to thermal airflow translates directly into performance throttling. That Lenovo addressed this at the accessory design level, rather than leaving the user to manage the consequence, suggests a more complete engineering process than most clip-on controllers go through.

The obvious limitation is also the one hardest to ignore. This controller only works with the Legion Y700 Gen 5, a beefed-up version of the Legion Tab Gen 5 that was just announced for the Chinese market. There’s no confirmed global availability for either the gamepad or the new tablet. The original G9 never left China, which makes the 2026 version most relevant to buyers already committed to that specific tablet and region. For everyone else, it’s a clear demonstration of what tablet gaming hardware can look like when the accessory and the device are actually built for each other.

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This Aluminum Pill Organizer Was Designed to Sit on a Restaurant Table

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Most pill organizers share the same silent agreement with their owners: get used and get out of sight. The plasticky snap-lid boxes that dominate pharmacy shelves were built around a kind of shame arithmetic, where function was traded for discretion, and discretion meant disappearing into a drawer or the bottom of a bag. bovii, a modular aluminum pill organizer, refuses that arrangement entirely.

The design premise is unusually direct for a healthcare accessory. Taking pills or supplements daily is a fact of life for a growing number of people, yet the objects designed for that routine communicate apology. bovii was built to sit on a restaurant table without anyone feeling the need to explain it, a standard that immediately separates it from the category it nominally belongs to.

Designer: Rudolph Schelling Webermann for curio studio

What makes that ambition credible rather than just a marketing position is the material choice. An aluminum casing with a circumferential ribbed texture runs across the surface of each box, giving it the tactile weight and finish vocabulary of an everyday carry item rather than a medical aid. The push-to-open mechanism at the front face adds a satisfying mechanical interaction, the kind of considered detail that signals the object has been thought through beyond its functional minimum.

Inside, soft silicone inserts hold the tablets quietly in place, a feature that addresses one of the more underrated problems with standard pill cases: the rattling. Anyone who has walked into a quiet meeting with a pill box in their jacket pocket knows the sound. The rattle-reduction system is patent-pending, which suggests the solution is more engineered than it first appears, though the specific mechanism is not publicly detailed.

The modularity is where the product’s logic really opens up. Each box measures 105mm x 55mm x 14mm and weighs 80g, with built-in magnets allowing multiple units to stack in precise alignment without accidentally popping open inside a bag. The Weekender set combines three boxes into a 48mm stack at 240g total; the OneWeek set stacks seven boxes to 94mm at a little over half a kilo. Compartment configurations run to either two or three adjustable inner sections per box, accommodating once-, twice-, or three-times-daily dosing schedules.

One honest limitation worth naming: bovii is optimized for tablets and hard capsules only. Gel capsules are explicitly excluded because they can block the internal mechanism. That narrows the product’s compatibility for anyone whose supplement routine leans toward softgels, which is a meaningful portion of the market. For that group, the design is genuinely attractive but practically unusable.

The question bovii leaves open is whether the stigma it’s designed to counter is widespread enough to justify a premium aluminum pill organizer in a category historically defined by low-cost convenience. The design makes a convincing case that it should be. That’s a different argument from proving that it already is, and how much the market agrees will likely determine how far this idea travels.

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Samsung and DOMINNICO made a leather bag that doubles as a Galaxy gadget case

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Fashion accessories and tech gadgets have always occupied separate drawers, figuratively and literally. The phone goes in a pocket, the earbuds get buried somewhere in the bag, and the bag itself has nothing to do with either of them. It is a small daily inconvenience that nobody really complains about, mostly because nobody has ever offered a better alternative. Samsung and Spanish fashion brand DOMINNICO have decided that the arrangement is worth rethinking.

The collaboration produced a handcrafted leather bag that treats the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Galaxy Buds4 Pro as design references rather than just contents. It follows a baguette silhouette in off-white leather, produced in limited quantities under a slow fashion approach. The construction stays deliberately restrained: a zip closure bearing the brand logo, an interior pocket, and silver accents distributed carefully across the piece without overcrowding it.

Designer: DOMINNICO x Samsung

The most direct hardware reference runs along the handles. Silver eyelets line them in a pattern that mirrors the camera module rings on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, pulling one of the phone’s most recognizable physical details into a fashion context. It is the kind of detail that reads as decorative until you recognize where it came from, at which point it becomes something more like a private joke between the bag and the phone sitting inside it.

The exterior front pocket is sized specifically for the Galaxy S26 Ultra, secured with three buckles that make it a visual centerpiece rather than a plain utility slot. The design concept ties back to the phone’s built-in Privacy Display feature: the pocket keeps the device accessible while screening it from view when not needed. Whether that connection feels meaningful or just convenient as a marketing angle is a fair question, though the pocket itself is a genuinely practical addition.

Galaxy Buds4 Pro owners get their own dedicated carry solution through three keyrings attached to the bag. Two are extendable, each fitted with a small mirror that doubles as a functional charm. The third holds a soft pouch sized for the Galaxy Buds4 or Galaxy Buds4 Pro case. A fixed keyring with the DOMINNICO logo in silver completes the set. All three hang visibly from the bag rather than disappearing inside it, which keeps the tech ecosystem part of the aesthetic rather than hidden from it.

The bag was unveiled at CUPRA City Garage in Madrid as part of the Madrid es Moda program, a setting that positioned it squarely within fashion week territory rather than a product launch event. That framing matters because it signals who Samsung is trying to reach here: not the Galaxy power user looking for a rugged carry solution, but the fashion-conscious Galaxy owner who wants their accessories to cohere visually.

Available for preorder through DOMINNICO’s website at €420, the bag sits closer to a fashion collectible than a mass-market accessory. The limited production run and handcrafted construction support that positioning. What remains genuinely open is whether a piece this specific, built around two particular Samsung devices, holds its appeal once the Galaxy S26 Ultra is no longer the current flagship and the collaboration’s novelty has worn off.

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Balmuda and Jony Ive’s Firm Built a $373 Clock With No Hands

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The phone on the nightstand is one of those design failures nobody talks about. It wakes you with a jolt, it glows through the night, and the first thing it offers each morning is not the time but a backlog of notifications demanding your attention before you’ve even sat up. The bedside clock was supposed to be the simple alternative, but most of them traded the problem of distraction for the problem of mediocrity.

Balmuda, the Tokyo-based maker responsible for a limited-edition sailing lantern and an aesthetic humidifier, built The Clock around a specific frustration. Founder Gen Terao had been playing rain sounds on a tablet at night to help him sleep, then tolerating the screen’s glow from the bedside. The Clock is the object-form answer to that exact problem, designed to handle waking, focusing, and resting without once asking you to reach for your phone.

Designer: BALMUDA x Love From, (Jony Ive Design Firm)

The dial has no physical hands. Balmuda’s “Light Hour” system expresses time through illumination alone, with a glow that reads more like something painted than something lit. The second-hand movement is slow and pendulum-like, and that quality was not accidental. The design team visited the Foucault pendulum at the National Museum of Nature and Science to study the movement before settling on the animation. That level of reference work is unusual for a clock.

The aluminum body is machined from a solid block, finished to a polish that achieves both structural weight and surface quality in a 75mm square form. Getting there required resources Balmuda did not have independently. The company’s collaboration with Jony Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom, opened access to aluminum processing vendors with capabilities that, according to Terao himself, would not have been available otherwise. The result is a body with a density and finish that the specs alone do not prepare you for.

Three operational modes govern the day from the same pocket-sized object. Relax Time plays original ambient tracks, including rainfall, crickets, and thunder, all produced by an in-house sound team working with outside musicians. The focus timer layers white noise over a countdown. The alarm begins building volume gradually 3 minutes before it fully sounds, a small but considered alternative to the binary silence-then-noise of a standard alarm. Control over all three modes runs through the BALMUDA Connect app via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, with options for multiple alarms, dial brightness, and a second time zone for travel.

At approximately 259g with a cloth carrying bag included and USB-C charging that restores a full 24-hour battery in about 2.5 hours, The Clock is portable without making portability the point. It is currently available in Japan at ¥59,400 (approximately $373), with no confirmed release date for other markets. At that price, it is asking to be taken seriously as an object rather than a category product, and the manufacturing pedigree behind it gives that ask some grounding.

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This Baby Walker Grows With Your Child for 6 Years in 4 Different Ways

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Most baby walkers have a shelf life measured in months. A 7-month-old wobbles through the living room gripping the handle, and by the time that same child turns two, the walker is already in a closet somewhere. The furniture cycle in a home with small children tends to follow that rhythm: buy, use briefly, replace with something else entirely.

The Safari Multifunctional Kids Furniture concept tries to interrupt that pattern by designing one piece that stays useful across the first six years of a child’s life. The name “Step-N-Play” gives away two of its functions without mentioning the third or fourth. It is, depending on the child’s age and the day’s agenda, a walker, a climbing unit, a play table and chair, and a toy storage solution.

Designer: Bharti Upadhyay

At its earliest stage, the walker is built for children between 6 and 18 months, with a frame measuring approximately 600 x 400 x 500 mm. The structure combines wood, ABS plastic, and soft silicone grips, with a 95-degree backrest angle designed for infants who are not yet seated with full stability. An anti-tip base and anti-pinch safety gaps cover the more obvious hazards of putting a barely mobile child in contact with a moving object.

As the child grows into the 1-to-3 age window, the same structure becomes a climbable stair unit. From ages 2 to 6, it transitions again into a play table and chair. A built-in storage compartment for toys and books operates across all configurations. The manufacturing approach pairs CNC-cut wood with injection-molded ABS plastic, a combination suited to years of contact with small hands and the occasional harder object.

The safari animal inspiration shows up in organic silhouettes and surface language rather than in literal animal sculptures attached to the frame. Smooth curves, generous fillets, and chamfered grooves define the form. The pastel color palette, wooden handles, and textured sensory balls read as a considered aesthetic choice rather than an afterthought, which matters in a living space where parents also have to look at the thing.

Safari is a student concept at this stage, so the harder questions remain open. How the ergonomics hold across such a wide age range, how the mechanical transitions between configurations actually work in practice, and whether a single object can genuinely serve a 7-month-old and a 6-year-old with equal competence rather than adequacy are things a physical prototype would need to answer.

The post This Baby Walker Grows With Your Child for 6 Years in 4 Different Ways first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Student Built a Pocket Planet Tracker That Works Without Your Phone

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Most of us have looked up at the night sky at some point and felt that brief, humbling recognition that there is an enormous universe out there, and we have no idea what is happening in it. Then a notification comes in, and the moment passes. Lumen Orbit, a student concept from CEPT University, is a small handheld accessory designed to keep that awareness alive without requiring a telescope, a star chart, or a dedicated app.

The device is disc-shaped and roughly palm-sized, with a two-part body split along its equator by a copper-toned accent band. The upper half is a polished silver-gray cap; the lower sits wider and shallower in a dark matte gunmetal finish. A woven braided lanyard with a hexagonal metal clasp attaches to the body, making it something you can loop around a wrist, hook to a bag, or hang using a built-in fold-out carabiner.

Designer: Kinshuk Agarwal

The primary face carries a circular display showing real-time planetary positions: which planet is currently visible, where it sits in the sky relative to your location, and when it rises and sets. Flip the device over, and a second, smaller screen on the reverse offers a close-up planetary render. The UI uses pixel-art-style graphics for its planet illustrations, landing somewhere between retro charm and deliberate restraint.

The interaction model is equally considered. A flip gesture switches between the two display modes, squeezing the body cycles through planets, and haptic vibration signals astronomical events such as meteor showers, eclipses, and alignments. The idea is that information about the cosmos arrives the same way a text message does, as a quiet nudge rather than something you have to actively seek out.

What the concept is really proposing is a dedicated single-purpose ambient device for astronomical awareness. Smartphones can technically do all of this through apps, but a specialized physical object changes the relationship to the information entirely. Carrying something whose only purpose is to connect you to the solar system is a genuinely different proposition than opening an app between emails.

The open questions are substantial. How the real-time tracking handles connectivity, how the device charges, and how positional accuracy works without confirmed GPS integration are things the concept leaves unspecified. The form is confident, and the interaction logic is coherent. The more interesting problem is whether a working version could fit into a jacket pocket for easy access.

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Coleman’s $200 Cooler Chills for 2 Days, Folds Flat in 10 Seconds

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Coolers are great until the trip ends. Then they become a large, oddly shaped object that takes up the entire trunk on the way home, sits on the garage floor for a month, and eventually gets shoved into whatever corner will take it. For apartment dwellers especially, owning a full-sized hard cooler is less a convenience and more a spatial negotiation that rarely ends well.

Coleman’s Snap ‘N Go is a hard-sided cooler with a patent-pending collapsible design that compresses to one-third of its open volume in under 10 seconds. The mechanism borrows logic from folding storage crates: the body panels snap down in sequence, and the removable interior liner folds flat and stows inside the lid. What was a full-sized cooler becomes a flat slab thin enough to slide under a bed or stand upright on a shelf between uses.

Designer: Coleman

The construction is hard polypropylene, which matters more than it sounds. Soft collapsible coolers already exist, but they sacrifice insulation to achieve that flexibility. The Snap ‘N Go maintains a fully insulated lid and body, rated to hold ice for up to 64 hours. That’s two full days of cold retention from something that, an hour later, disappears into a closet, which is a combination the soft-sided category has never managed.

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Setup works in reverse, just as quickly. From flat storage to loaded and latched takes under 10 seconds, and the removable liner handles watertight containment once the body is expanded. The liner also makes post-trip cleanup more manageable, since it pulls out separately rather than requiring the whole cooler to be rinsed out and dried upright somewhere. It’s a small detail, but one that addresses one of the more tedious parts of cooler ownership.

Three sizes cover most group sizes: 35 qt at $200, 45 qt at $220, and 55 qt at $240. The 55-qt model holds up to 93 cans without ice and supports 200 lbs. when expanded, though Coleman is careful to note it isn’t intended as a seat. Handles are designed to accommodate both carry orientations, vertical when the cooler is collapsed flat and horizontal when it’s fully open and loaded.

The one question the design raises, and doesn’t fully answer yet, is how the collapsible mechanism ages. The hinges, panel connections, and liner attachment points are all doing repetitive work that a standard molded cooler body never has to perform. Coleman backs it with a three-year limited warranty, which covers the expected lifespan question in practical terms but doesn’t tell you much about what happens in year four after a few dozen collapse cycles on a tailgate.

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