If you have a funky, eclectic style like me, you’re always looking for something that’ll light up your space; literally.

And I’m not talking about the gaudy side lamp Aunt Milly gave you for your birthday. No. What I’m talking about — my dorky devotees — is the future of home decor.

Here is my list of the next five gems to hit the market.

Tree Trunk Tables by Nickadoo

Nickadoo wants to give you wood!

Bad joke, I know. But for the dorky outdoorsman or woman in you, these quirky tree trunk tables are a great green-asset to any home.

Selling points: There’s always the potential for great jokes beginning or ending with “wood”.  See?

Playstation Table

This is every gamer’s fantasy. And there’s only one in existence right now. I’m sure Australian high school student and creator, Mark M., will be happily selling his design for a few million soon.

Selling points: Unfortunately not on sale but when it finally is, you’re gamer boyfriend or girlfriend will be so grateful.

[Image: OCAU News]

iTable

First there was the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. Now, I bring you iTable! (Tada!). Don’t get too excited, it doesn’t actually have the working capabilities but it looks pretty cool, right?

Selling points: It’s a giant iPod…need I say more?

Kenan Wang Twist Chair

I bet you’re wondering what in the world this thing is. Want to take a few guesses? No? Alright, I’ll just tell you. It’s a…chair! This twist chair from Kenan Wang looks more like a Rubix cube if you ask me, but I still think it’s pretty neat!

Selling points: With this very modern art-deco look  you could probably spend hours trying to find a new way to sit in it.

Rowen Wagner Grandson Clock

It’s time to trade in Grandfather Clock for something exceptionally younger (and hotter). Rowen Wagner’s Grandson Clock is a modern twist on your grandparents’ bulky time-teller.

Selling points: The sleek , light-weight design will rival any clunky clock.

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Remember the old days, when a Nokia 3310 used to last half a week? Good times.

New technology is a massive battery suck. It’s the payoff for having constant access to your Twitter, Facebook, email and Angry Birds on the go. Which is why the average phone now rarely lasts longer than a day (if you’re lucky).

It’s not just phones either, cameras, laptops and iPods are our constant companions, yet often leave us in sticky situations with no power.

So, how do you get around the problem? For most people a portable charger is the best option, allowing you to give your phone a little extra juice for that vital phone call, or your laptop enough to send an essential email.

The Emergency Charger (right) from Firebox is only £6.99, plus it’s small enough to shove in your pocket or clutch. It’s powered by an AA battery, and you should get around half a phone battery charge out of it. Not bad for something so cheap!

Have a look at our four other suggestions for inspiration

Time-saver: Zipcharge Quick Charger

OK, it looks utterly dull, but the ZipCharge Quick Charger (Firebox, £39.99) claims to charge up at a ridiculously fast rate, meaning you should be able to plug it in 15 minutes before you leave the house to give you enough charge to juice up your gadget for the rest of the day.

In gadget terms, if you charge your Zipcharge for 15 minutes, you should have enough power available to give your iPod 20 hours of playtime or 10 hours of talktime on your phone (depending on the brand).

15 minutes too long for you? If you charge is for just one minute, you’ll give your iPod 2 hours of playtime, your mobile 8 hours of standby time or your camera enough power for 80 photos.

Green option: FreeLoader Solar Chargers

Eco-friendly chargers tend to fall into one of two camps: wind up or solar charged. Since you’ll look like a loon if you use a wind up charger on the train, a solar-powered charger is probably your best option.

The FreeLoader Solar Charger kit (Firebox, prices start from £16.99) comes with a dozen adapters for all your gadgets and three different sizes depending on your requirements. Charge it up by leaving it in the sun (admittedly, something of a rarity these days) and it’ll store the power for up to 3 months.

The FreeLoader should give you enough power for between 35 and 44 hours of stand-by time. From our experience, we’ve never managed to get the solar juices really flowing with this one, but thankfully you can charge it up properly via a plug first and let the sun keep it topped up.

Power up your Notebook: Power Gorilla Portable Power Device

Now more of us are travelling with a netbook or notebook, there’s more need for a portable charger to keep you going when you’re in the middle of a spreadsheet.

The Power Gorilla Portable Power Device (Amazon, £119.62) isn’t cheap, but it gets some of the best reviews on Amazon for a portable laptop charger. It should offer between 2-6 hours of power, depending on your notebook model.

You can plug your phone into the USB too, so you’ll charge both gadgets at the same time.

What’s your favourite mobile charger? Tell us!

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We don’t listen to the radio that much in my house. I blame this entirely on the lack of beautiful radios, rather than my penchant for trashy intellectually stimulating TV programs.

This could all change now with PURE‘s collaboration with Orla Kiely in creating a new DAB radio. The DAB radio, based on the Evoke Mio style, features one of Orla Kiely’s famous Stem Print designs in a leather effect on the front and back, and a wooden section sandwiched in-between. The result is a radio that wouldn’t look out-of-place in an episode of Mad Men.

Designer DAB

I was lucky enough to meet Orla Kiely and take home one of the EVOKE Mio by Orla Kiely radios last week, and I’m pretty smitten. The radio comes with iPod/MP3 connectivity, 30 preset radio stations and an energy-saving function for the eco-friendly. Although Orla admitted there are no plans to extend the style to other electronics quite yet, I’m quietly hoping they’ll bring out a range of pretty vacuum cleaners, kettles and toasters.

The EVOKE Mio by Orla Kiely will be available from John Lewis in early November, and available elsewhere from March 2011, for £149.99.

Love it? Hate it? Bored of designer/tech collaborations?

More radios on Dork Adore: Students redesign iconic PURE radios.

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Twitter/Facebook + iTunes x music = Apple’s Ping

Another end-of-summer evening, another Apple press conference. They have become a way of marking the eternal passage of time and your own undeniable mortality, right morbid gadget fans?

Well, this conference bought the announcement of Ping, which is in no way related to Microsoft’s Bing. Obviously.

Ping is a social network for music lovers. But it’s not Spotify. Obviously. Or MySpace. Obv. This is primarily a social network for music lovers who spend their cash in iTunes.

And here’s why it won’t work.

It’s all about the music you buy. It’s not the music you add to your library or the stuff you already own that you listen to a lot. Imagine if someone tried to decipher your music taste from the stuff you bought in the past two months. Would they get a fair picture? My picture would look suspiciously origins-of-ska heavy, which I can safely safe doesn’t really fit with my folksy roots. I don’t want to know what my friends have bought — I want to know what hidden gems they’ve got that I’m missing.

Who buys from iTunes? If you’re buying your music from iTunes, stop and go and buy it from Amazon — it’s generally cheaper. Or maybe you still buy CDs. Sorry, ripping them won’t contribute to your Ping profile. Or maybe you just ‘acquire’ your music. Well, obviously your stuff’s not going to be added. Pirate.

iTunes makes you want to get in, do what you need to do, and get out. Syncing never works as smoothly as it does in an Apple press conference, and I only open it under duress when it turns out my iPhone is full. It’s not the place to go and while away the hours. Sorry Steve.

In fact, if you want the stuff Ping promises, there are two places to look.

Spotify is an obvious first – not only can you see what your Facebook friends are listening to, you can see what playlists they’ve made and subscribed to. And because they’re not being asked to part with cold hard cash for each album they add, it’s a much more interesting feed. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve managed to only make friends with tightwads.

The other thing you need is Songbird, which has been billed as an alternative iTunes for a good long while now. It’s long had the ability to scan your entire music library and then suggest local gigs you’d be interested in. Which is a step above having to subscribe to every artist you like in order to get updates, a la Ping.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty of stuff that looks like fun in Ping. But in my humble Apple-loving opinion, I don’t think it delves deep enough into your music collection to offer true value, and I don’t feel warm and fuzzy enough to hang out in iTunes to find myself proved wrong. Or am I wrong?

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We’ve looked at speakers in the past for children, wireless speakers for those fed up of tripping over USB leads all the time, and the high tech BOSE SoundDock 10.

But what about those of us who like to combine our dorky love of gadgets with our preference for seriously pretty products?

Finding stylish yet functional speakers was a tougher challenge than I anticipated. Crawling through hundreds of Barbie, Hello Kitty and Hannah Montana speakers, I finally came across this IXOS Speaker Cube, Amazon, £4.25 which is definitely girly and budget friendly. Whilst you might not want to rely on it for a HD movie marathon, it’s perfectly suitable for a spot of outdoors musical entertainment.

Moving away from the barbie pinks, I came across this Branex Design iTam Tam Blue (Madeindesign, £359) a product that allows you to play your tunes whilst taking a seat! I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to do that, though I guess the bass vibrations might have something to do with it…

It also charges your iPod and works with a remote controller. It comes in an assortment of colours, so you can get one of these speaker stools to suit your bedroom decorating scheme.

Another cube shaped speaker comes from Tesco with this iHome iH15WE LED Colour-Changing Stereo System, £59.97. Like a modernised version of a lava lamp, the iHome stereo system scrolls through a variety of colours at the touch of a button whilst playing your favourite tunes through the iPod docking station.

It also comes through adaptors for other MP3 players and an auxiliary line.

Finally, the Limit IP-CR100 Alarm Clock Radio Speaker and iPod docking station, Play, £17.99 is a multi-purpose option for morning wake up calls and late night dance tunes.

Search for pretty radios and you’ll be inundated with Cath Kidston DAB radios, candy coloured PURE Digital radios and retro designs by Roberts. Speaker manufacturers, take note! We don’t necessarily want bright pinks, gimmicks and cartoons splattered across them, just a bit of a style.

Missed your favourite? Let us know!

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C’mon now, you didn’t think we’d get through February without at least one Valentine’s Day post, did you? I know it’s all a scam thought up by Hallmark to get us all spending money, but well….it’s all a bit of fun really.

Floundering for ideas for the dork you desire? We’ve come up with a few suggestions,

For the cosy couple

Since Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday this year and Sunday is the day for loafing about, I can’t resist suggesting the Double Slanket, (Firebox.com, £49.95). The big brother of the classic Slanket, it’ll make life a little easier for the newlyweds joined at the hip.

For the old romantic

For a modern take on a classic love token, consider the USB Mix Tape by Suck UK from Prezzybox.com (£9.95)

The USB Mix Tape allows you to create an hour long playlist of ‘your songs’, load them onto a USB stick and store them in the retro cassette case with your special message on the cover. There are six styles of cassettes available.

For the computer geek

This red love heart shaped USB PC optical mouse is from Amazon (£9.49) and will happily compliment the laptop accessories of your favourite computer geek. Sure, it’s cheesy, but isn’t that what Valentine’s Day is all about?

For the music fan

Everyone loves iPods,but now you can take it to the next level and get your very own personal (and possibly embarrassing) message engraved into the back.

Engraving is free, so all you need to do is order your iPod from the Apple website.

Prices for the video iPod start at around £118.

For the Folksy fan

Folksy has some wonderful and thoughtful gifts this year for the cash-strapped. These love tokens on the right are only £1.50 for five, and you can customise them with your message. Give them one for 3 hours of uninterrupted PS3 time, a massage or a Star Wars marathon.

Loose cables are the bane of my working life. Between my phone, netbook, Nintendo DS and iPod, I’ve got wires all over the place.

Even with an extension lead, I’m still using all the available plugs. So how can I reduce the amount of cable clutter in my room?

The designers at Powermat think they’ve got the solution, and they’ve sent one over for me to try out.

The Powermat Home & Office edition is a hoverboard- shaped charging mat for a multitude of devices. The mat connects to the main with one cable….and that’s all the cables you’ll need.

To charge your gadgets, you click the phone/iPod/Nintendo DS into a receiver, and place it on the mat. Then with a joyful little beep, it starts to charge at the same speed as if you’d plugged it straight into a normal charger.

The benefits of this device are varied, including:

• Space saving: You can charge up to four devices at once (with the extra USB port) so you’re not tripping over a web of cables.
• Easy to use: Once you’ve clicked the receiver on, you just need to place the device on the mat and it’s charging. Job done.

However, it loses points for

Additional receivers: The mat doesn’t come with any basic receivers, so you’ll need to order one for each device you want to charge separately. And they’re not cheap at around £30 per receiver.

You’ve still got clutter: Unless you want to walk around with the receivers clipped to your gadget all day, you’re still going to have to store them somewhere. So you’re replacing wires with chunks of plastic.

Conclusion

For the ultra tidy gadget queen, this is a tempting product. Stylish, compact and convenient, it’s a clever gadget. It’s worth remembering though that you’re effectively paying around £70 for the mat, and an extra £30 per receiver to simple save you a little space and mess.

You can buy the Powermat from Amazon for £67.80. You can also get a package deal of the Powermat, iPhone 3G receiver and Powercube for £131.85.

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I’ve lost count of the amount of time I’ve spent puzzling over why a gadget is refusing to work. A recent study suggests I’m not alone in this area.

Research carried out by Confused.com has discovered that consumers constantly come across problems and confusion with their gadgets. And what was the biggest offender? The Wireless Router, of course.

Having spent hours in my old student house sitting on the phone to BT after conceding defeat to my router, I can sympathise with this top choice.

Coming in a close second is the iPod or MP3 player. I’m assuming this is more down to the actual set-up rather than the day-to-day use.

Perhaps one of the reasons behind all this confusion is that in our excitement to try out our latest purchase, we skip past reading the directions. Of the 2,000 participants in the survey, 48% admitted that the instructions book sits gathering dust. This leads to 55% of participants connecting up the leads incorrectly, and 45% incorrectly inserting the batteries (seriously? How hard is it to insert batteries?).

So, aside from the Wireless Router and MP3 player, what other gadgets made it to the list?

1. Wireless router (27%)
2. iPod/MP3 player (16%)
3. Mobile phone (20%)
4. Digital camera (19%)
5. Sat Nav/GPS (14%)
6. Sky+ (10%)
7. DVD Player (9%)
8. iPhone (7%)
9. Ninendo Wii (6%)
10. Video camera (6%)

Source: Confused.com

What gadgets have caused you the most confusion?

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There’s still a smidgen of time left to order a Christmas present for that lovable dork in your life! Here’s a few suggestions from us at Dork Adore.

For the vampire fan…

Have you got someone in the family who’s as addicted to Vampire shows as we are at Dork Adore? I think I’ve found the best gift to keep them happy and quiet.

Browsing Ebay, I came across this set of True Blood books for £16.99. They’ll be able to get ahead on the story, and sit through series 2 smug in the knowledge that they already know what’s going to happen.

For the games fan…

Head over to Argos and you’ll find some great console package deals to keep everyone happy. Don’t have a Wii yet? Argos are offering a package deal for £169.99 including the Wii console, Wii Sports game and Wii Sports Resort, along with a bunch of accessories, Big Beach sports game and docking station for free.

For the music fan…

Save yourself a bit of time by nailing your Christmas food shop and present shop in one at Tesco.

They’ve got this iPod Nano, the brand new version with a built in video camera and FM radio, for just £114.97. That will give you enough change out of £150 for a set of speakers like the ones we featured in our Stocking Filler post recently.

For the craft fan…

The Make Lounge is a studio that offers workshops on everything from cupcake decorating to creating your own jewellery. They’re offering vouchers that can be printed or e-mailed to the recipient on Christmas Day.

For the shopping fan…

Pretty much every shop on the high street has some form of gift voucher. This year however, Oasis has stepped up their game with a mobile gift voucher. Simply pay online, and they’ll send your recipient the voucher over text message, which they can use in any store. You can also choose when you want the text to be sent. A great very last minute gift if there’s anyone you’ve forgotten!

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Everyone and his gran seems to have an iPhone/iPod/MP3 player these days, which makes it a hell of a lot easier for you to find a suitable present.

A set of portable speakers are small enough to fit in most stockings, and cheap enough to fit most budgets.

The Rockstar from Urbanz (£17.99) (right) is a speaker I’ve recently been using with my iPod Nano. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but it actually packs a pretty good punch when it comes to the sound. Plus the headphone lead splits off into a USB lead, so you don’t have to drag loads of connection cables around.

These Headphonies (£24.99 each from Firebox) aim to combine quirky art figurines with travel speakers.

Connect them with your MP3 player and you can play your ‘Best of Christmas’ album through the speaker in the back of their head.

Which is nice.

Still, I’m sure your emo niece will appreciate using ‘Skully’ the skeleton to share her favourite “no one understands me” playlist.

These speakers are aimed at any X Factor wannabes or anyone who fancies something a bit more rock n’ roll on the desk.

The MP3 Mini Amp Speaker (£19.99, IWOOT.com) features bass and treble volume control, a nice additional feature considering the price.

The speakers also have a USB port, allowing you to hook it up to a laptop or PC.

These Saturday night speakers will get the lucky recipient in the right frame of mind for a good boogie on the dance floor.

They also remind me somewhat of that afro blessed gentleman from X-Factor who got kicked out a few weeks ago. His name seems to have already escaped me.

You can grab them from Tesco for £9.97.

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