Tentsile Elevated Tents
Cross a tent with a hammock and you won’t necessarily get a Tentsile, but you will get the general idea. This is a tent that you pitch up a tree. And just not by accident. It uses three pinning points to suspend a stealth-fighter looking tent. You need some seriously heavy-duty webbing and fabric to pull this off – or up, perhaps.
As the name suggests, it’s held in tension off the ground, well away from the threat of flooding, off rough terrain, say, or to prevent you becoming a midnight feast for some local wildlife. The accommodation itself involves individual, slung hammocks, so you won’t all find its occupants piled up in a heap in the middle of the night. There are a variety of scales and internal spaces, with two- to eight-person models available. All this comes at a price, needless to say, but what is it? Tentsile are decidedly coy in that regard, while suggesting their tents could be a low-cost solution for humanitarian and natural disaster situations: could the cost prove disastrous too?
From €2,220 plus shipping for a 2-person tent. Also available in 4-, 5- and 8-person models. See tentsile.com
Dual Eyewear
Think of these as active reading glasses – if that’s not too much of a seeming oxymoron. Dual Eyewear is for cyclists or runners who, for example, need reading glasses, though they have been described as “bifocals” too. That’s not strictly accurate as the main part of the Dual’s lenses doesn’t have any prescription. However the bottom has a magnifying zone, where a range of optical powers are available, from +1.5 to +2.5.
So many outdoor activities now involve reading screens while you’re on the move, from handlebar- mounted GPS displays to training watches with whole fields of data, from heart rate to altitude gained. And we’re all carrying on active lives way past the best-by dates of previous generations. The legs may still have it while the eyes are pulling up.
Dual Eyewear seems to feel a gap here, offering the outdoors equivalent of off-the-shelf reading glasses, but with proper sports chops and styling, including a selection of lightweight, wrap-around frames and shatter-proof polycarbonate lens colours. And they’d be just thing for an all-action reading of your Irish Times Magazine too of course.
$50 from dualeyewear.com
Xoom 2
Motorola has trimmed its Xoom to create the new Xoom 2 for a lighter, leaner, faster tablet. And now with curiously cut corners too – not in compromising, shortcut fashion, but actually angled-off. It’s distinctive- looking, but somehow disconcerting too, certainly if you’re a regular iPadder. One advantage is that it’s easier to hold for longer periods than the i-ubiquitous, but how else does it stack up? It’s running Android, not the latest so called “Ice Cream Sandwich” (beats me too) version, but Honeycomb which is still pretty decent. The Xoom 2 comes preloaded with a good selection of apps and there are plenty more to checkerboard your pages. Its screen is Gorilla Glass shielded which makes it super resilient and scratch resistant. But like virtually all tablets, you wouldn’t need to be in CSI to pull fingerprints off it. Still that comes with the territory.
On the go, there’s a decent 5MP camera with an LED flash, a brace of speakers and micro USB and HDMI slots, if you want to hook it up to your HD TV. A cool extra is the IR beam. This lets you turn it into a giant touchscreen remote. Just what a master of the sofa needs.
€449.90 (10” screen) from Carphone Warehouse