Call me a tech junkie if you will, but more often than I’d like to admit I find myself wanting a screen in front of me. It’s bad, I know. But smartphones and especially tablets have become so damn useful that I use mine for pretty much anything from watching movies in bed, keeping up with the latest tech news over the kitchen stove or occasionally as a second screen on the desk.
Now whilst a 10-inch tablet isn’t huge, it’s large enough to take up valuable space and sometimes in awkward or unusual circumstances, it’s hard to find a “sweet spot” even if you use a smartcover or dedicated stand for it. That’s where the Spiderpodium comes in, a smartphone and tablet stand made by a UK based company called Breffo.
A “cross functional and universal holder” for smartphones and tablets, the Spiderpodium makes it easy for adventurous technology users to adapt their devices to those awkward situations. With this arachnid-inspired stand, you’re able to adapt your tablet to different environments in a way you simply wouldn’t be able to do with an average case or stand. I’ll run through some of the possibilities a little later but for now, let’s look at the design.
The Spiderpodium is made of a lightweight, soft-textured rubber material that when used as part of a stationary setup – on a desk or bedside table for example – will give your device a strong frame but with minimal presence. Although the textured rubber does well to grip to the surface it’s placed on, it isn’t the best at dealing with touch; bobbling back and forth every time I tap the screen.
The arachnophobic may struggle to fall in love with look of it at first, but even they’ll quickly enjoy the versatility and options that the Spiderpodium offers. All eight legs can be moulded into any form you need it to take which really gives you a chance to think outside the box about how you can use your devices.
Need your phone to be a GPS? No problem – hook up the Spiderpodium to your car’s air vents or bicycle handles to use your phone’s navigational apps. Want to follow a recipe without worrying about damaging the screen? Hang it off a kitchen cupboard handle. What about on the back of a car headrest to keep the kids entertained on a long journey? The build of the Spiderpodium is strong enough to be able to handle all of these different situations – so the options are only restricted to your imagination and creativity.
Unfortunately though, its greatest design feature is also its weakness because it can quickly become tiresome to set up if you’re going to be moving the same Spiderpodium from place to place. Whenever I reconfigured its legs, they needed to be perfectly aligned once again to balance my device steadily on flat surfaces. Even when I latched it on to my car’s air vents, the Spiderpodium need a little moulding to make it look good wrapped around my phone.
Of course once you’re happy with the way it’s been set in place you’ll be fine – but the issue always comes back to bite (metaphorically speaking of course) when you want to move the Spiderpodium around.
For a more basic user, a common smartphone or tablet stand will suffice but they’re commonly bulkier and less versatile products than the Breffo Spiderpodium. The bottom line is, if you use your device in non-conventional situations and want a stand that’ll keep them safe and secure in the process, then you’ll find some serious value in picking up either of the smartphone or tablet Spiderpodium stands.
ORDER FROM BREFFO