Tag Archives: accessories

Razer Finally Solved the Bulky Controller Problem at Credit Card Size

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Mobile controllers have always faced the same awkward tradeoff: carry something bulky enough to feel like a real gamepad, or leave it at home and settle for touchscreen buttons. The Razer Prio picks neither option. It folds down to roughly the size of a credit card at 107mm x 67mm x 23mm, then twists open in one motion into a controller with a complete, full-sized button layout.

That twist-to-unlock mechanism is doing more work than it looks like on paper. Rather than hinging flat like a wallet or telescoping outward like most phone-bridge controllers, the Prio rotates its two halves apart, expanding from a dense 101-gram puck into something that spans phones up to 7 inches, including devices as large as the iPhone 17 Pro Max. The motion itself becomes the reveal.

Designer: Razer

Once open, the control surface doesn’t feel like it compromised anything to get small. A tactile 4-way D-pad, full face buttons, bumpers, and triggers all made it into the layout, alongside thumbsticks built on capacitive sensing rather than the usual mechanical potentiometers. Removing physical contact points means there’s nothing inside to wear down over time, which addresses stick drift at the source instead of patching around it later.

Picture a delayed train platform or the ten minutes between classes that usually gets wasted scrolling through a phone. The Prio exists specifically for that kind of narrow window, slipping out of a pocket, twisting open, and plugging directly into a phone’s USB-C port without any pairing screen or Bluetooth handshake standing between the moment and actually playing something worth playing.

That direct USB-C connection matters beyond convenience. Skipping wireless pairing removes the input lag that makes touchscreen controls and some Bluetooth gamepads feel disconnected from what’s happening onscreen, which becomes especially noticeable in anything reaction-based. It also means never worrying about a dead controller battery separate from the phone it’s attached to, since the phone itself is supplying the power.

The Prio’s reach extends past native mobile games as well. It works across Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Remote Play, Steam Link, and Razer’s own PC remote play service, turning a phone into a display for console and PC libraries rather than limiting the controller to whatever’s built specifically for touchscreens. A pocket-sized accessory suddenly covers a genuinely wide range of what someone might want to play.

At $99.99, the Prio positions itself as the opening entry in what Razer describes as a broader line of ultra-portable controllers still to come. What it gets right immediately is treating portability as a mechanical problem worth solving properly, not just a matter of making something smaller and hoping the compromises go unnoticed once it’s actually in someone’s hands.

The post Razer Finally Solved the Bulky Controller Problem at Credit Card Size first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Surgical-Steel Toothbrush Was Never Meant to Be Thrown Away

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I own a lot of things I’ll probably never actually wear out. A leather bag that’s outlasted three apartments. A watch that was my grandfather’s. A cast iron pan that will likely be handed down long after I’m gone. And then I have a bathroom drawer full of plastic toothbrushes, each one used for a few months and tossed, none of them meant to last, none of them meant to matter.

That contrast is what caught my attention when I came across the Berninox 316, a toothbrush designed by Swiss product designer Julien Bernard that flips the entire logic of oral care on its head. Instead of a disposable object you replace every few months, you get a handle made from 316L surgical stainless steel, the same alloy used in medical instruments, paired with a small replaceable head made from recycled ocean-bound plastic. When the bristles wear down, you don’t throw away the whole thing. You just click off the head and snap on a new one.It sounds almost too simple, which might be exactly why it works.

Designer: Julien Bernard for Berninox

What strikes me most about this design isn’t the material, though stainless steel is obviously the headline. It’s the clip system holding the head in place. Berninox has a patent pending on it, and once you understand why, it makes sense. Anyone who has used a razor with interchangeable blades knows the annoyance of a head that wiggles or pops off at the worst moment. Getting that mechanism right, so it feels secure during brushing but still releases easily when you want to swap it, is the unglamorous engineering work that actually makes a product usable long term. Good design is rarely about the flashy part. It’s about the hinge nobody notices until it fails.

I also appreciate that this wasn’t dreamed up purely as a sustainability gesture. The brand worked with dental professionals during development, which matters more than it might seem at first glance. Plenty of eco-conscious products lead with their environmental story and treat function as an afterthought. Berninox seems to have built the case for durability and the case for actually brushing your teeth well at the same time, rather than picking one.

There’s also something quietly satisfying about the ocean plastic detail. The heads are made through a partnership with a Swiss initiative that collects ocean-bound plastic from Southeast Asia before it ever reaches the water. It’s a small volume of material in the scheme of global plastic pollution, sure, but I don’t think that’s really the point. It’s a demonstration that a mundane, overlooked object like a toothbrush can carry a slightly bigger story if someone bothers to design it that way.

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for objects that feel like they were made by someone who actually cared about the details, not just the marketing copy. A stainless steel handle that can go into the dishwasher or be steam sterilized isn’t just a hygiene feature, it’s a signal that the people behind it were thinking about how the object behaves in real life, not just how it photographs on a shelf.

Is a forty-dollar toothbrush going to be for everyone? Probably not. Plenty of people will look at their nine-pack of drugstore toothbrushes and see no reason to change. And that’s fair. But I think there’s a growing appetite, especially among people who already collect watches, pens, or well-made kitchen tools, for everyday objects that don’t pretend to be disposable. We’ve spent decades normalizing things designed to be thrown away, and I think we’re slowly correcting course, one small object at a time.

What I like most about the Berninox 316 is that it doesn’t ask you to change your habits. You still brush your teeth the same way you always have. It just quietly changes what happens to the object in your hand once the bristles wear out. Sometimes the most meaningful design shifts aren’t the loud ones. They’re the small, practical ones that make you rethink something you never thought twice about, sitting right there in your bathroom cup.

The post This Surgical-Steel Toothbrush Was Never Meant to Be Thrown Away first appeared on Yanko Design.

xTool O1 Omni UV Printer Prints on Wood, Metal, Glass, and Your T-Shirts, All From One Desktop Machine

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When a desktop printer moves 6,000 units and clears $20 million in revenue on day one, something is clearly going on beyond the usual pre-launch hype cycle. The xTool O1 Omni Printer is a 4-in-1 desktop system merging UV, DTG, DTF, and UV DTF printing in one modular machine, a combination that previously required four separate devices and considerable floor space. For years, creators have been burdened by fragmented workflows, forced to buy separate, single-purpose machines for rigid substrates and textiles. Desktop UV printing has been one of the more notable maker-market stories of 2026, and the O1 is making a clear bid for category leadership. The central design proposition is capability consolidation, and day-one sales suggest it landed with the right people.

Units have already begun shipping, turning pre-order momentum into machines arriving at actual studios and workshops. On August 27, the first offline debut of the O1 Embroidery happened at the Next Level Conference x xTool SMB Summit, where live demos will give attendees their first hands-on encounter with the platform’s textile and dimensional output. That event was a deliberate venue choice: the Summit brings together the small business creative community the O1 is built for, and debuting the embroidery capability there sends a clear signal about where xTool sees the product’s core application. Three editions run from $1,899 for the Single UV configuration to $2,999 for the full UV + Fabric hybrid. The modular dual-printhead system is the engineering decision that holds the entire consolidation promise together.

Designer: XTOOL

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The dual-printhead architecture is what separates the O1 from every desktop printer in its class, operating more like a configurable platform than a fixed device. Users can run dual UV printheads for layered effects and accelerated throughput, or swap in a fabric printhead to shift between hard goods and garment workflows on the same machine. UV output covers wood, acrylic, glass, and metal with raised 3D texture effects up to 7mm deep, supported by a 2,000-plus texture library. The fabric side handles DTG and DTF workflows, including on curved and irregular surfaces, with an OEKO-TEX certified system that survives 50-plus washes without fading. A Rotary Attachment extends the platform to cylindrical objects like tumblers, with Automated 3D Modeling covering 90% of mainstream shapes for a 1:1 design preview before printing.

Positioning accuracy is delivered by xTool’s Pixel-Scan Vision System, combining Line Laser Altimetry and CIS Scanning. A Laser-Guided Auto-Focus detects each object’s highest point before printing, eliminating printhead collisions on uneven surfaces. Unlike traditional distorted fish-eye cameras, the 1:1 Distortion-Free CIS Scanning offers close-range, high-definition scans with zero dead zones, powering a jigless “Drop & Print” workflow that removes alignment jigs from the equation, which is a more meaningful time-saver than it sounds in an actual production environment. xTool Studio’s AI Contour Recognition instantly identifies irregular shapes to fill designs perfectly while automatically avoiding holes like camera cutouts. The Laser + UV Seamless Workflow lets users laser-cut a workpiece and move it to the O1, where the software automatically recognizes and aligns the print with zero manual recalibration.

Three editions cover the full range from single-mode UV to full hybrid, priced between $1,899 and $2,999, with each tier differentiated by workflow rather than arbitrary specs. The entry-level UV Edition at $1,899 targets rigid material personalization across wood, acrylic, glass, and metal. The Dual-Head UV Edition at $2,899 adds fluorescent neon inks for blacklight effects and specialized soft and hard white inks for materials like leather. The UV + Fabric Edition at $2,999 is the full cross-category hybrid, covering both hard goods and garment workflows through the OEKO-TEX certified fabric system. All three share the Pixel-Scan Vision System and xTool Studio, keeping the intelligence layer consistent across the lineup.

UV printing at the studio scale has historically required dedicated ventilation and careful ink handling, which kept the workflow inside commercial print shops. The O1 uses GREENGUARD-certified, non-reprotoxic inks and an advanced built-in air filtration system to eliminate odors in home studios. SmartCycle 2.0 automates routine care to prevent clogging, offering 14-day vacation-ready support that lets users step away with confidence and return to a machine that is ready to run. The Dual-Head UV Edition adds specialized flexible white inks, expanding the material list to leather goods and flexible substrates. Taken together, these decisions position the O1 as a machine built to live in a real creative workspace, not parked in the back corner of a commercial print shop.

The O1 Embroidery made its first public hands-on appearance at the Next Level Conference x xTool SMB Summit on August 27, putting the platform’s most dimensional textile output in front of the small business creators it is built for. Desktop UV printing has heated up considerably in 2026, with machines like the eufyMake E1 generating real market attention, and the O1 is making a clear bid for the consolidation position in that category. The 6,000-unit, $20 million day-one performance signals the market was ready for this hardware category long before the product arrived. Explore the full xTool O1 Omni Printer lineup and configure your edition at xTool’s website.

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30 Years After the Keychain, Bandai Just Made the Tamagotchi a Ring

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The original Tamagotchi was a plastic egg about 50 mm tall that you clipped to your bag and tried not to kill. Thirty years later, Bandai has announced a version you wear on your finger, the 39th entry in the main series, and by far the smallest one yet. The Tamagotchi Ring houses a 0.56-inch color LCD in a body 28 mm tall, roughly half the size of that 1996 keychain, and it took Bandai two years to figure out how to make it work.

Miniaturizing something this far doesn’t happen by shrinking the parts. It requires rethinking the entire internal layout. The Tamagotchi Ring contains 64 total components, 52 electronic and 12 plastic, crammed into a body measuring 28mm x 23mm x 35mm. The 0.56-inch display is the smallest color LCD ever fitted to a Tamagotchi, and the battery, now rechargeable rather than a replaceable coin cell, charges via an included case because there simply wasn’t room for anything else.

Designer: Bandai

What it does despite that size is the part worth paying attention to. Thirty raiseable characters are in there, along with minigames and a room customization feature. It’s a complete Tamagotchi experience, not a reduced one, running on hardware small enough that Bandai could mount it on a ring band. The design sits on the finger like a small wearable sculpture rather than a piece of consumer electronics.

The announcement arrived on August 27, 2026, timed to mark the franchise’s 30th anniversary. That timing isn’t incidental. The Tamagotchi has been through enough reinventions to know when a milestone deserves something genuinely new rather than a color variant. A ring-form virtual pet is a different object than a keychain pet, even if the creature inside behaves the same way. It changes where the Tamagotchi lives in your day and how visibly you’re tending to it.

The ring comes in three colorways: Black x Metallic Silver, Light Blue x Metallic Gold, and Pink x Pearl White. It’s designed for Japanese ring size 14, which sits at approximately 17.3 mm inner diameter, with an included adapter to bring it down to size 10. That translates roughly to US ring sizes 7 and 5.5, respectively, covering a reasonable range without requiring multiple SKUs.

Battery life hasn’t been specified, which is the honest gap in what Bandai has disclosed. The rechargeable approach means you won’t be swapping coin cells in the middle of the day, but runtime under actual gameplay conditions is still unknown. The charging case is included in the box, which at least solves the problem of where to stow it when it needs power.

Bandai hasn’t announced plans for a direct international launch, so international buyers are looking at third-party import channels for now. Shipping doesn’t start until February 2027, which is a long lead time for a preorder opened in August. It suggests the manufacturing challenge here is real and that Bandai isn’t rushing it to market. For 64 components in a ring, that patience probably counts for something.

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