Want to hang your iPad from a tree limb? Too far out? How about on your microphone so you can see your play list, or on the tripod of your camera? Otca has created the Monkey Kit, a unique product that lets you safely hang your iPad anywhere you can wrap a heavy duty “tail” to hold it secure. Other uses include attaching it to exercise machines, putting it between cushions on a couch, securing it while working on your car, and using it as a desktop stand.
The kit consists of two parts. There is a Vacuum Dock and a Monkey Tail. The two pieces can be taken apart for storage or travel. The Vacuum Dock is 1.95-in (4.95 cm) at it’s widest point. the Monkey Tail is 36-in (91 cm) long and together the pieces weigh 1.49 pounds (676 grams). The outer surface of the Vacuum Dock is hard plastic, and there is a soft rubber dome cap included to protect the connectors when storing or traveling with the dock. The tail is wrapped in soft, grippy silicon. The Vacuum Dock is interchangeable with other products sold by the company.
I have only one negative thing to say about this product so let me get this out of the way first. The written instructions that accompany the package are awful. The print is very tiny because they have instructions in several languages on a small sheet and then complicate it further by having color combinations that look good, but are impossible to read. As an example, pale green type on light green background. Fortunately, they have excellent written and video instructions on their website for every aspect of working with the Air purifier.
To attach the kit to an iPad (or iPad mini) you place the Vacuum Dock against the back of the iPad, making sure there are no air pockets anywhere, and pump the air pump five or six times. There is no reason to hold down the Vacuum Dock like you would ordinarily have to do with other vacuum seal products. When the pump handle remains all the way in, the seal is set. The instructions note that in some cases, it is wise to check the pump handle periodically to assure the seal is still set satisfactorily, but I did not experience any problems with that.
One outstanding feature of this product is that it will work with some iPad covers. The cover must be completely smooth and nonporous and, at least from my testing, have no front cover as the front cover seems to unbalance the vacuum seal. I had two covers available to test this feature, both were smooth, but only the hard plastic one worked. However, that one worked great and it was very nice to be able to use the stand without undressing the iPad.
Using the Monkey Kit as a table top stand works well as long as you follow the directions. You have to create a half or three-quarter circle on the table surface and then make sure the iPad’s center of gravity is lined up with the stand base you have created. It is a very logical formula and after trying it a couple of times, it was easy. My son-in-law who has hands three times bigger than mine set it up with one try and loved it.
It costs about ￡800, and for that money you get a fairly standard-looking 15.6-inch laptop in the typical Acer style. This V3 series looks a bit like the Timeline models from a while back. You won't find any aluminium here, just plastic. The stand-out feature is the matte 15.6-inch Full HD IPS display. IPS screens tend to have much better viewing angles, brightness and colors than the more common TN screens.
The modest design betrays the powerful hardware inside, however. While the Intel Core i7-3630QM is the entry-level model in Intel's quad-core processor series, it's a lot faster than a dual-core processor. The Nvidia GeForce GT640M has 2 GB of video memory, and while it's not a GPU from Nvidia's GTX series, it does provide better performance than the integrated graphics. It's a chip from Nvidia's Kepler family which has 384 Cuda cores (624 MHz) and a memory bandwidth of 1.8 GHz. It's one of the few GT-class cards that's actually fast enough for playing games.
It's an impressive laptop in other areas as well. Both memory slots are filled with 4 GB DDR3 RAM modules, of the DDR3-1333 kind. Storage is provided by a 1 TB, 5400 rpm hard disk. There's also a Pioneer Blu-ray player that can also burn cds and dvds. A pretty deluxe configuration, in other words. The only thing you're missing is an SSD.
Adding an SSD yourself isn't that difficult. Acer put the replaceable components like the hard disk, WiFi module and RAM underneath a cover that's kept in place by two screws. You can't fit both a hard disk and an SSD, however, so you'll have to choose.
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