Elevation Dock Breaks Kickstarter's Fundraising Record

Elevation Dock is a simple to use, quick undocking dock for your iPhone made from beautifully precision-machined solid aluminum and it comes in a gorgeous set of surface finishes, setting a new bar for quality and something that looks really good on your desk.

Not only is it expertly crafted, but it is also a record-breaking product — record-breaking before it has even shipped. That is because the Elevation Dock has broken the all-time Kickstarter fundraising record. The design firm behind the iPhone dock is called Elevation Lab, and was started four years ago by a fresh-out-of-college guy named Casey Hopkins. For the past four years, Hopkins has been working with a number of startups, helping them with the designs of their products. Although this paid the bills and was rewarding – Hopkins described it as “a feeling like no other to see something you made sitting on a shelf somewhere” – Hopkins decided that contracting out wasn’t enough.

The Elevation Dock started out with the plan of only creating one for personal use, that would sit on Hopkins’ desk but that was not to be, as his friends and family all wanted the dock, so off to market he went. The problem with bringing a hardware product to market is one many startups face. To normally bring a product to market, it would cost at least $100,000 up front, and that is only for the first run of the product prototype.

After seeing the LunaTik project take off on Kickstarter, Hopkins realized that the fundraising site would be perfect. Not only would it be an excellent marketing channel for a virtually unknown design firm, but it would also negate all of the risks associated with an untested product.

So far with Kickstarter, Hopkins has seen success that he didn’t expect. While his original funding goal was $75,000, he has now gone far beyond that. Just north of $964,000 as at the time of writing this post and it still has 61 hours to go, making the Elevation Dock to surpass the LunaTik record of $940,000.

Hopkins mentioned that he has thousands of messages to go through, with hundreds of companies contacting him to help them with their designs. However, Hopkins currently has plans on shipping 10,000 Elevation Docks before moving on to his next project which he declined to elaborate on what they are.

With the success so far, the one thing he is waiting patiently for is a call from Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jony Ive telling him well done.

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Nokia N95 8GB outguns Apple iPhone 3G

Nokia has done it again with their N95 8GB outgunning the soon to be out (July 11th) Apple iPhone 3G. Though similarly capable, the iPhone was found to be less capable though it stood head-to-head with the N95 8GB, but N95 nevertheless came out victorious. Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is very high-tech but has more limitations than N95. (Should soon pickup one.) Some of the restrictive features of iPhone 3G are:

• non-removable battery, 1400mAh, replacement is via sending away to Apple
• Very limited RAM (N95 has around 90MB of RAM after booting)
• Limited multitasking (all apps can be runat once,if necessary;but I don't see why I'd want to do this)
• No Flash support
• No option for Bluetooth keyboard, at present
• 2MP camera- no flash, no recording,fixed focus (N95 has a 5MP camera with professional lens)
• In use, requires two hands to use most of the time, proving a little restrictive
• No MMS support (Emailed photos are all downsampled to VGA)
  

Though it sure has some features that you can't find on N95,like:

• Pouched/cased by necessity, to protect the touch-screen from damage.(N95's camera is not mechanically protected and picks up small day-to-day scratches which slightly impact photo quality)
• Better form factor
  

and some other ones, but the N95 still outshines it, but lets give it to Apple to have been able come-up with a device that can stand head-to-head with one of the highest-tech devices from a phone leader (Nokia). Come to think of it, this is Apple's first time coming up with a mobile phone. What Apple has always been known for is their excellent sense of aesthetics - I hope we all agree?

You can get to read the full comparison by Steve Litchfield here