Tag Archives: Technology

Jojo’s Headphone Concept Adjusts Like a Yo-Yo, Without Sliders

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A headphone cable usually gets treated as the part you tolerate. It hangs off the ear cup, catches on things, and rarely contributes much to the design beyond getting sound where it needs to go. Jojo, a wired headphone concept by All Design Lab, gives it another job. The cable becomes the headband, addressing the visual bulk of a separate support structure and replacing sliding fit adjustments with rotating ear cups.

I like that the studio hasn’t tried to make the wire disappear. Instead, Jojo asks how much of the object that wire could become. That’s a more interesting starting point than dressing up another familiar headphone silhouette. It also makes the design easy to understand: two ear cups, black cushions, and a cord tracing an uninterrupted route between them.

Designer: All Design Lab

That route starts at a USB-C plug, passes through an inline remote, and winds into the first ear cup. From there, the cable arches over the head to form the band before winding into the second cup. The single-cable idea refers to this continuous path, not a claim that the headphones contain no other components. There are still drivers, cushions, covers, and an internal adjustment mechanism.

The yo-yo comparison explains the interaction. Turning an ear cup’s outer cover winds cable in or lets it out, changing the length available for the headband. Rather than pulling an arm out of a housing, you rotate a disc beside your ear. On paper, that feels like a satisfying way to connect an adjustment to the shape of the thing you’re holding.

A ratchet inside the hub provides small, stepped adjustments and holds the cable at the selected length. Crucially, the cushion is intended to stay still against the ear while the outer cover, hub, and driver rotate together. Keeping the contact surface stationary is a thoughtful detail. Having foam drag across your ear every time you adjusted the fit would take the charm out of that interaction pretty quickly.

The proposed materials give the mechanism a fitting visual language. A braided textile cable would make the headband read as a cord rather than a conventional rigid support, while frosted translucent covers could offer a partial view of what happens inside the cups. Black foam cushions keep the contact surfaces visually straightforward. I like the decision to give the cable such prominence instead of disguising it as a more familiar headphone component.

The compact inline remote follows the same restrained approach, housing a microphone and volume rocker. Keeping those controls on the cable leaves the ear cups dedicated to their more unusual job. That separation makes sense to me. You wouldn’t want a routine volume adjustment to become confused with changing the fit, especially when rotating the outer covers is the design’s defining interaction.

The larger practical question is how that narrow cable would behave as a headband. It needs enough structure to maintain its arch and help position the ear cups, yet enough flexibility to wind around the hubs. I’d want to know how pressure feels across the top of the head and how securely the cups stay put during movement. Neither question can be settled by the concept description.

Repeated winding also deserves scrutiny. The cable is doing electrical and structural work, so its bending behavior matters beyond keeping the object tidy. Repairability would be another consideration: a continuous cable is an elegant visual decision, but that alone doesn’t make replacement straightforward. These are development questions worth asking because the core idea is strong enough to deserve answers, rather than a reason to dismiss it.

Jojo remains a concept, rather than a demonstrated listening experience. Its appeal, for me, is the proposed adjustment: a familiar little twist that visibly changes the fit. If that gesture can feel dependable without making the headband uncomfortable, the cable will have earned its unusually prominent place.

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Scriben AI Ballpoint Pen Refuses To Act Like Other ‘Unnecessary’ AI Devices

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Tech companies love inventing new objects for you to carry around. Smart glasses, AI pins, little pucks you clip to your shirt that light up when they’re listening. Every year there’s a new shape competing for a spot in your pocket, and every year most of them simply disappear from group chats about gadgets that didn’t pan out. Meanwhile, the actual bottleneck in most professional days has nothing to do with a missing gadget. It’s the stubborn, unsexy fact that you cannot fully listen to someone and write down what they said at the same time.

The answer Scriben landed on was already sitting in the room. Instead of building a new device, they picked the one in your bag, your blazer pocket, or rolling around your desk drawer: a pen. Nobody in a meeting side-eyes you for picking one up, which is sort of the whole premise. It writes like a pen, sits in a room like a pen, and does considerably more thinking than a pen has any right to. Behind it is Sleepmind, Inc., led by Yidi Xu, a SPCr-backed founder whose previous job was helping build Microsoft Copilot.

Designer: Yidi Xu, Founder & CEO, Sleepmind, Inc.

Click Here to Know More.

Silver or matte black, 0.6mm ballpoint, leather sleeve, and a single button: the Scriben pen’s spec sheet reads like a design school constraint exercise. It ships with a quick-start guide and writes on any paper with a standard ballpoint refill. The pen records audio but doesn’t attempt to digitize handwriting, unlike the Nuwa Pen’s handwriting-scanning approach, which put it in a different product category entirely. A USB-C port hides under the top cap, and the entire interaction model is that one button: press it and the pen records locally, storing up to 18 hours of audio on 64GB of onboard storage, roughly 400 hours total, offline, with no phone required. It has won a Red Dot Design Concept award, which evaluates design intent before production rather than a shipped product, and a 2026 MUSE Design Awards Silver in Product Design.

Xu spent years at Microsoft watching genuinely capable AI keep routing people back to a screen. Her training at Tsinghua, followed by an MBA at Wharton, crystallized one design instinct above all: solve the problem at the root, not the surface. The root problem was the habit of asking people to adopt new behaviors in exchange for intelligence that was supposed to simplify their lives. “AI should learn how you work,” she says, “not the other way around.” That inversion is Scriben’s entire design brief in one sentence.

Saying no to a feature is a design decision, and Sleepmind made a lot of them. No screen on the pen, no LED readout, no haptic patterns to decode, no mode-switching between recording and writing. If a feature made the object feel more impressive but the interaction more demanding, it got cut. This is the philosophy sometimes called calm technology: tools that operate in your peripheral awareness rather than demanding your foreground attention. YD has covered a growing wave of products chasing the same idea, from the Flowtica Scribe’s agentic recording approach and the MedPen’s secure capture pitch to SwitchBot’s clip-on wearable format, and Scriben is the first where the deliberate omissions feel like the actual design story, and honestly, that’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

Most AI recorders stop at capture: record, transcribe, surface a summary, repeat. The gap Scriben targets is everything that happens after, the follow-up email, the task that needs logging, the decision from last Tuesday that reappears in Thursday’s conversation with no context attached. The system builds persistent memory across recordings, not a library of audio files but an evolving understanding of your work, your people, and your open commitments. Transcription covers 85 languages, with speaker diarization that resolves names when the system has enough context to match voices to identities. Xu is explicit that this memory needs to be vertical: what matters to a lawyer is different from what matters to a sales executive, and treating every professional’s context the same way is a failure of design, not just technology.

Scriben can draft the follow-up, prepare a document, or queue a task, but nothing leaves without a human sign-off first. This prepare, review, approve model treats autonomy as a governance decision rather than a default setting, which is a more honest framing of AI agency than the usual pitch that it just handles everything. The system connects to Gmail, Outlook, and over 9,000 tools through Zapier, generates a Morning Brief each morning built from your accumulated context, and supports Model Context Protocol letting it feed verified context to Claude, ChatGPT, and Zoom AI Companion. The intelligence sits in the middle; the person stays at both ends.

A pen that records conversations raises a real question before it raises any features. The social optics are context-dependent: a partner meeting at a law firm is a different environment from a first client call or a medical consultation. Scriben is clear that following applicable consent laws is the user’s responsibility, not the product’s. What the design does control is data architecture: audio is captured and stored locally until the user actively chooses to sync, so nothing streams to a server the moment you press the button. That’s a meaningfully different posture from most cloud-first recorders, and it matters considerably to anyone working in a regulated field.

Scriben is available now at scriben.ai in silver and matte black, both shipping with a leather sleeve and a quick-start guide in the box. Xu frames the pen as the first expression of a larger ambition: a multimodal context layer that understands professional work across sources, formats, and industries, compounding over time. If that thesis holds, the most capable AI in your next meeting might turn out to be the object you’ve been reaching for your whole career. And it may just also be the perfect Christmas gift for that difficult-to-gift-for family-member or friend with a corporate job and an obsession with productivity.

Click Here to Know More.

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EVOLIA’s Sculptural Bracelet Tracks Wellness Without a Screen

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A health tracker shouldn’t have to look like a tiny phone strapped to your arm. I like the idea of learning more about my body without adding another glowing rectangle to the day, and EVOLIA’s Founders Edition is built around that preference. Designed by EVOLIA in Valenza, Italy, the screenless biometric bracelet aims to make wellness tracking feel like wearing jewelry, with information waiting in an app rather than demanding attention on your wrist.

The design makes that ambition easy to understand. In the company’s product images, rounded metal links build toward a wider, sculptural center, with a dark circular detail interrupting the polished surface. The Rose Chrome version looks almost liquid where the light catches its edges. I’d happily see more wearable technology take this kind of aesthetic risk. It has a recognizable shape of its own, rather than looking like a familiar smartwatch with the display painted over. It’s jewelry you would notice.

Designer: EVOLIA®

EVOLIA specifies 904L stainless steel for the upper case and bracelet, with zirconia ceramic and sapphire crystal on the back. Matte Black, Chrome, and Rose Chrome give the same form quite different personalities. More practically, the company says its screwless bracelet allows links to be adjusted and removed without tools. That’s an appealing detail because the ownership experience includes getting the thing to fit, not simply admiring it in a box. Hidden mechanisms deserve attention when they remove an ordinary annoyance.

Underneath that jewelry treatment is a substantial list of promised tracking functions: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, sleep, stress, and activity. The hardware includes optical sensing and on-demand ECG measurements at up to 800 Hz. EVOLIA uses the phrase “research-grade,” but I wouldn’t treat that label alone as proof of better everyday accuracy. The company also states that the device is intended for general wellness and information, not medical diagnosis. That distinction matters more than an impressive-sounding specification.

The “AI” portion lives in the interpretation. EVOLIA says its companion app turns biometric data into AI-assisted personal insights, with support for iOS, Android, Apple Health, and Google Health Connect. For me, the useful test would be how clearly it explains a pattern and how carefully it handles uncertainty. A beautifully presented score isn’t automatically helpful. I’d rather get a comprehensible account of a trend than a confident verdict that leaves me wondering what I’m supposed to do next.

Screenless also doesn’t mean completely silent. The bracelet can use light signals and haptic feedback for notifications, which EVOLIA says can be switched off. I appreciate that choice more than a blanket promise of distraction-free living. Some people will want an incoming-call nudge; others will want the bracelet to leave them alone. Putting the detailed information on a phone creates a deliberate moment to check it, although the app still has to earn the attention it receives.

The physical specifications introduce a few practical questions. At 15.3 millimeters thick, the central body deserves a close look before anyone assumes this will disappear under a shirt cuff. EVOLIA claims up to three days of battery life and roughly an hour for a full charge. That means charging remains a regular appointment. I’d want to know how the complete metal bracelet feels overnight, too, since sleep tracking asks an object to stay on when most jewelry comes off.

The Founders Edition is currently a preorder, limited to 1,000 numbered pieces. The listed price is $1,899, with a $99 reservation deposit, and dispatch is estimated to begin in late November 2026. That puts considerable pressure on both halves of the proposition. At this price, I’d want jewelry I genuinely wanted to wear and an app that explained itself well. The sculptural bracelet gets my attention; whether its information deserves a place in the daily routine is the more consequential test.

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Compath Imagines Dementia Navigation Without a Touchscreen

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A familiar walk can become unsettling when the way home no longer feels familiar. For someone living with dementia, getting directions from a smartphone may introduce another challenge: navigating menus when they’re already struggling to get their bearings. The design problem goes beyond knowing where a person is. It’s making guidance accessible to the person who needs it.

That’s the thinking behind Compath, a wearable concept by designer Jonas Krämer. Its yellow Home button puts a recognizable destination ahead of a complicated interface, with proposed visual and audio cues to guide the wearer. I like that the idea begins with helping someone continue an everyday activity, rather than treating their whereabouts as the only problem worth solving.

Designer: Jonas Krämer

Compath was one of seven finalist projects in the 2025 RIMOWA Design Prize. It’s presented as a design project, not a retail launch, so its intentions shouldn’t be confused with proven performance. That distinction leaves room to appreciate the thinking on its own terms. There’s a useful ambition here: make the help accessible to the wearer, instead of putting all the useful information on somebody else’s phone.

The published imagery shows a round body with a dark central face, a substantial outer ring, and that contrasting Home button. Shown suspended from cords and chains, the device reads closer to a personal accessory than a conventional emergency pendant. A key and a rainbow heart charm appear alongside two versions. Those details give the object a social life beyond its function. That’s a more persuasive approach to personalization than offering a choice between two anonymous shades of gray.

Krämer’s interface proposal avoids touch controls and complex menus. Visual and audio cues would provide guidance and reminders, while the Home button would direct the wearer home or to another designated place. That restraint makes sense. A device meant to help someone get oriented shouldn’t make learning its interface feel like a separate assignment. Every additional decision needs to earn its place.

The proposed Safe Zone would be defined together by the wearer and caregivers around familiar places and routines. Leaving it would trigger an alert. That collaboration matters, because a boundary drawn with someone carries a different meaning from one imposed on them. The same spirit should carry through beyond the presentation, particularly when deciding who receives alerts and how much information gets shared.

Back home, a charging dock called the Lighthouse would give Compath a fixed landing spot, alongside keys or medication. It’s an ordinary domestic gesture, which is precisely why I like it. The system considers the moments before and after a walk. A wearable can be beautifully resolved on its own and still leave its owner wondering where it belongs.

The accessory-like presentation also raises a good design question: why should receiving assistance require adopting a completely different visual identity? I wouldn’t want a useful device to announce my medical history before I’d introduced myself. That’s an editorial preference, not evidence that Compath would feel comfortable or familiar to every wearer. Still, the visible attention to cords, chains, and personal additions makes the proposal feel interested in taste, not merely compliance.

Before treating a concept like this as a practical care option, I’d want answers about battery life, connectivity, location accuracy, and what happens when a cue goes unnoticed. I’d also want to know how the controls work for people with different abilities and changing needs. These aren’t reasons to dismiss the design. They’re the questions that would determine whether its reassuring simplicity survives an actual afternoon outside. A missed instruction on a sidewalk matters more than a perfectly legible interface in a presentation.

That leaves Compath in an interesting place for me. I don’t need a care device to look futuristic, and I’m not especially persuaded by a long feature list. I want the person wearing it to have a reason to choose it, understand it, and keep using it. The strongest idea here is that asking for help could begin with an object you’ve made your own, and a button whose purpose doesn’t need a sales pitch.

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Kord and Bark Give a Power Strip a Wooden Case Worth Leaving on Display

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Power strips tend to get the least glamorous spot in a room, usually behind furniture or underneath a desk. That’s understandable when the alternative is leaving a plastic block beside your carefully chosen furnishings. Kord and Bark Sweden offer another option with their Wooden Case for Cuboid+, wrapping the compact power strip in reclaimed elm that looks more at home beside wooden furniture.

The shape remains fairly simple, with a broad square top, softly rounded edges, and circular openings around the sides. Those openings leave the sockets accessible, while two smaller cutouts accommodate the USB-C ports and a notch clears the cable. The wood changes the surrounding surfaces rather than disguising what the object does. It still looks like somewhere to plug things in, thankfully.

Designer: Gustav Rosén (Kord) x Bark Sweden

The case doesn’t add any outlets or charging features, of course. The Cuboid+ underneath still supplies three sockets and two USB-C ports, letting a lamp and charging cables share one compact connection point. Kord says the shell slides on and off, so changing its appearance doesn’t require buying another power strip simply because the old one no longer suits the rest of the room.

The material has a more specific history than the usual reference to Scandinavian forests. According to Kord and Bark, the elm grew beside the River Tidan at Åreberg Farm in Sweden’s Skaraborg region. When Dutch elm disease forced the tree to be felled, Bark reclaimed the timber. Its natural variations now give the cases different patterns, despite their otherwise identical shapes.

Getting that timber around an existing electrical product takes more than carving out a rough opening. Bark uses precision woodworking and CNC machining to shape the cases, which are designed and manufactured in Sweden. The curved edges and carefully placed apertures follow the Cuboid+’s layout, leaving the elm to supply the decoration. There’s no need to print a pattern when the material already provides one.

There’s a personal connection behind the two companies, too. Kord’s co-founder and Bark’s founder studied mechanical engineering together at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm before following their own paths in design and manufacturing. Their reunion is a fairly practical meeting of those skills, matching the existing Cuboid+ geometry with Bark’s experience in machining reclaimed hardwood into everyday accessories.

Kord’s Swedish list price is SEK 695 (about $70) starting November 14, 2026, with the Cuboid+ sold separately. For US consumers, there’s another consideration before getting attached to that grain. The Cuboid+ uses European Schuko Type F outlets, rather than the sockets found in American homes.

Of course, a wooden shell won’t untangle the leads or hide the chargers plugged into those round openings. It also adds material around a perfectly functional device, even if that material has been reclaimed. What changes is where you might be willing to leave it. Reaching beside the sofa to charge a phone sounds preferable to fishing behind it for a power strip you’ve hidden.

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Turtle Beach’s Stealth Flip Controller Switches From Thumbsticks to Touchpads

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Playing PC games from the couch sounds comfortable, at least until a menu sends you reaching for a mouse. A controller might handle the game perfectly well, but Windows doesn’t always get the memo. Turtle Beach’s Stealth Flip tackles that awkward gap with thumbsticks that flip over to reveal touchpads, plus a separate trackpad for navigating the computer without abandoning those familiar grips.

The body itself doesn’t wander too far from familiar territory. Black surfaces, textured grips, and offset sticks give it the appearance of a conventional gamepad, with a circular D-pad below the left stick and four lettered buttons above the right. The elongated outlines around those controls are the giveaway, however. They mark the sections that rotate, rather than simply decorating the front.

Designer: Turtle Beach

Turn those modules over, and the sticks give way to two flat, circular capacitive touchpads. The D-pad and face buttons remain available, so changing how your thumbs move doesn’t mean losing the other controls. Unlike detachable parts you have to find somewhere to store, the alternative surfaces stay within the controller. There’s a physical choice here, rather than another setting buried in software.

The larger surface above them has a different assignment. This dedicated PC trackpad handles cursor movement and Windows navigation, leaving a way to deal with menus even when the sticks are facing forward. Choosing something outside the game needn’t involve balancing a mouse on your leg. That sounds particularly useful for a living-room PC, although a small trackpad still isn’t a full-size mouse.

There are other ways to avoid lifting your thumbs, too. Two mappable buttons sit on the back, while adjustable trigger stops offer a shorter pull or full travel. The latter lets the same trigger serve different needs, from quick firing to more gradual inputs. Four onboard profiles store different layouts, and the Swarm II desktop app handles mappings, macros, and stick sensitivity curves.

The sticks themselves use magnetic Hall-effect sensing, which Turtle Beach describes as resistant to drift. That isn’t a guarantee that moving parts will last forever, of course. The company also quotes polling rates up to 1,000Hz, but only with a wired PC connection. It’s worth keeping that qualification in mind before expecting the same reporting rate while playing without a cable attached.

Wireless PC play uses the included USB transmitter, while Bluetooth supports compatible Android devices and smart TVs. Despite the familiar button layout, Turtle Beach doesn’t list Xbox or PlayStation console support. A 3.5mm jack accommodates a wired headset, and the company claims up to 20 hours per charge. The supplied USB cable also lets you keep playing while the battery gets some attention.

The Stealth Flip launched with a price tag of $99.99 in the US. There’s an appealing flexibility to keeping both kinds of control inside one body, but a touchpad doesn’t provide the same resistance as a stick. Getting comfortable with that difference matters more than the novelty of flipping modules, especially when a misplaced thumb movement sends your character somewhere unfortunate.

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Nokia’s 2360 Flip Phone Offers Remote Setup but Sticks With 2G

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Smartphones can do almost anything these days, but that doesn’t make them the best choice for someone who simply wants to make a call. HMD’s Nokia 2360 Flip offers large buttons, family-managed settings, and a reassuringly familiar clamshell design. Unfortunately, that familiarity extends to its network connection. This new phone only supports 2G, limiting where those thoughtful features can actually be used.

At first, the design makes a fairly convincing case for keeping things simple. Large, clearly marked keys sit below a 2.8-inch screen, while a 1.77-inch outer display shows who’s calling before you open it. Flipping the lid answers the call, and closing it hangs up. Charcoal, Burgundy Red, and Teal finishes add some personality without making the keypad any harder to recognize.

Designer: HMD

The more interesting convenience is something that the person holding the phone doesn’t have to do. Family Assist lets a relative add contacts, set reminders, adjust volume, and configure SOS settings from an Android phone or iPhone. Instructions arrive over SMS, so the Nokia doesn’t need a data plan. Changing a doctor’s number needn’t turn into another lesson in navigating unfamiliar phone menus.

An orange SOS button on the back puts another important function outside the menus. Hold it for three seconds, and HMD says the phone calls one preset number while texting up to five emergency contacts. That’s a useful shortcut when searching a contact list is difficult, but it isn’t a substitute for public emergency services. It still needs a working cellular connection.

HMD also has younger users in mind, with parental controls protected by a Family PIN. Approved contact lists restrict calls and messages, while individual features such as games or the camera can be blocked. School Mode leaves only the clock and emergency calling available. These settings are handled on the handset, rather than requiring a parent to install another app to manage them.

There’s a removable 1,450mAh battery inside, along with USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Those are welcome touches, especially for a phone intended to remain familiar rather than demand frequent upgrades. The radio, however, supports only 900MHz and 1,800MHz GSM, with no 3G or 4G fallback. A replacement battery might keep the handset running, but it can’t restore a network that’s been switched off.

For US readers, this is more than a matter of checking reception in the backyard. T-Mobile retired its 2G network on August 3, 2026, leaving the country’s major carriers without 2G service. Elsewhere, compatibility still comes with an expiration date. The UK’s EE plans to begin shutting down 2G in May 2029, so an active network today doesn’t guarantee years of reliable service ahead.

HMD hasn’t established pricing or retail availability on its international listing. Before considering one, families will need to check supported bands, local 2G coverage, and their carrier’s shutdown plans. That’s an awkward extra assignment for a phone built around simplicity. Setting up a loved one’s contacts remotely is appealing, but having to replace their phone because the network disappears is rather less so.

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SOOOT Box Prototype Turns Punched Paper Cards Into Audio Controls

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Starting a podcast shouldn’t require navigating past messages, notifications, and whatever else your phone has decided needs attention. Of course, that phone also holds the controls for much of what you’re trying to enjoy. The SOOOT Box offers another arrangement, using punched paper cards to select sounds and functions. This working prototype makes choosing digital content feel closer to picking from a deck.

The box itself keeps things rather restrained, with a black, elevated body, a tilted front, speaker grilles on either side, and a slot across the top. A sparse red LED matrix supplies animation without turning the front into another screen full of menus. The colorful cards provide the more conspicuous decoration, staying visible above the enclosure so you can see what’s been asked to play.

Designer: three-2-one GmbH

Those cards aren’t miniature storage devices, despite having content associated with them. Made from playing-card stock, they contain no electronics, with their identity determined by their pattern of punched holes. Insert a content card and playback starts; pull it out and playback stops. You can write or draw on the surface, giving a favorite sound a label that actually means something to you.

The more interesting trick comes when you insert several cards together. SOOOT accepts up to four at once, letting one function modify another. Its sourdough example pairs a 30-minute timer with a x4 card to mark four rounds of stretching and folding. Rather than find a setting buried inside a timer app, you assemble the instruction from pieces sitting on the kitchen counter.

That logic follows you to the bedside table. Combine an audio card with a Sleep Timer card, and the sound gradually fades after the selected time. A Motion Sensor card changes the routine again, enabling playback when someone enters the room. Leave several soundscape cards inserted, and the box can greet each arrival with something different, without anyone reaching for a phone.

A built-in battery lets the box move between those spots without trailing a power cord. Soundscapes, timers, and stored audio files also work offline, although streaming still needs a connection. There’s a microphone for functions such as Party Mode, which turns surrounding sound into red LED animations. The studio says it activates only when needed, with an indicator showing when it’s listening.

The smartphone hasn’t been banished completely, of course. A companion app for iOS and Android handles Wi-Fi setup, settings, and preparing Custom Cards for your own content or functions. It’s still in development, so this isn’t a finished alternative you can already put through its paces at home. The aim is to leave that app alone once the everyday controls are ready.

SOOOT was presented at Dutch Design Week this month, with a commercial launch planned for 2027. There’s an appealing tradeoff here: fewer things to hunt for inside a screen, but more little objects to keep track of around the house. A deck of paper controls might be easier to understand than another menu, provided your favorite podcast hasn’t disappeared underneath the sofa.

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PlayStation 5 Prism Collection revives the nostalgia of see-through designs in a modern interpretation

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The iconic see-through trend of the 90s saw many big brands dress up their most trusted products in translucent hues. For me, that was the coolest era of gadgets from an aesthetics point of view. Remember how cool the iMac G3, Game Boy, Nintendo, and the portable CD players looked?

Sony found it hard to resist diving deep into the nostalgia of transparent gadgets, and they’ve finally revealed the official see-through DualSense wireless controller and face plates for the PlayStation 5 console. Dubbed the Prism Collection, the accessory for your gaming console revives the trend in a modern way just in time for the mega release of GTA 6. According to the PlayStation’s design team, the collection is developed in response to fans’ eagerness for the return of transparent designs in their PS5 setup.

Designer: PlayStation

These translucent controllers and the matching console covers bring a futuristic interpretation of Sony’s trusted gaming machine. The specifications and the hardware inside the three new colored controllers remain the same, with each one priced $15 more than the standard models. The high-gloss treatment on the controllers reveals the innards and the structural assembly, which is dope to look at. They are available in Flare Orange, Emerald Green, and Graphite Gray. I like the Emerald Green, which has a very deep hunter green hue with a touch of smoothness. Show me the understated Graphite Gray in a very smoky yet cool tone, and I’m surely going to buy that one as the second controller for my buddies to play with.

Sony has kept the central metallic panel opaque for a contrasting design ethos and to add a refined industrial touch to the controllers. According to PlayStation, “We wanted to bring back the iconic see-through trend of the late ’90s in a fresh, modern way that complements the PS5’s industrial design.” For the console covers the complementing face plate hues bring the PS5 to life.

The Prism Collection DualSense controllers and their matching console covers are set to arrive on February 4, 202. Pre-orders are going to kick off on November 10, so you better mark your calendars. The controllers will be priced at $85, and the console covers come for $75. For those looking to get new DualSense controllers for their setup, this is a no-brainer. The console covers are an option that you can weigh in on if you have some spare cash to buy goodies.

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Arctic Fox’s Super Mouse Doubles as a Touchscreen Control Console

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Computer mice have gained extra buttons and faster sensors, but most still leave the complicated work to your keyboard. Arctic Fox’s Super Mouse takes a rather different approach, putting a 3.1-inch touchscreen where you’d normally expect a plain palm rest. The idea is to bring shortcuts, quick typing, and even your calendar onto the device sitting underneath your hand throughout the working day.

That screen gives the mouse an unusual silhouette, closer to a tiny control console than the rounded pebble many of us are accustomed to. A broad, almost rectangular body has flared sides, with conventional click buttons and a black scroll wheel at the front. Yellow, white, and gray finishes offer personalities, although the yellow version isn’t interested in disappearing into your desk.

Designer: Arctic Fox

The 720×720 display changes what those fingers can do once they’ve finished clicking. Through the Flow app, you can build layouts for different programs, assign shortcuts, and create macros for repeated tasks. A designer could keep editing commands nearby, then switch to playback controls for another project. Two physical Hyper Keys offer another way to trigger commands without tapping the glass.

That same surface can become a multitouch trackpad, letting you navigate without sliding the mouse around. An on-screen keyboard offers swipe typing for short messages or quick edits, though squeezing a keyboard onto a mouse doesn’t make it a sensible place to write a novel. Arctic Fox promises haptic feedback, giving touchscreen interactions a physical response instead of relying on visual confirmation.

There’s more ordinary housekeeping tucked into that little screen, too. Google Calendar integration is intended to put appointments and reminders within reach, while a calculator saves you from opening another window just to check a number. The Rapid Task feature goes further, launching multiple browser tabs together. Preparing a familiar workspace could become one action, rather than the same routine repeated every morning.

Some controls don’t involve the screen at all. Built-in microphones support voice-to-text for notes or labels, while gyro controls let tilting and rotating the mouse trigger commands for presentations or media. These are different ways of interacting with the same object, rather than more buttons to memorize. Their usefulness, however, depends on how reliably the software translates those movements and spoken words.

The Super Mouse connects through a USB-C cable, with Windows and macOS listed as supported platforms. Flow handles the customized layouts and integrations, so this isn’t a miniature computer you can use independently. That cable might feel rather old-fashioned beside the colorful touchscreen, but it also makes the relationship clear. The software behind the screen matters as much as anything you can press.

Of course, putting more controls underneath your hand doesn’t automatically make them any easier to use. Reading a calendar or choosing an unfamiliar shortcut still means looking down, and that broad screen changes where your palm can rest. The interesting test will be finding which tasks deserve a place on the mouse before another collection of tiny icons becomes its own distraction.

The post Arctic Fox’s Super Mouse Doubles as a Touchscreen Control Console first appeared on Yanko Design.