There’s lots to see and do in this month’s Reviews section. If you’re a graphic designer or a digital artist, we’ve got the second version of Affinity’s trio of amazing design apps. In the hardware section, there’s a fantastic new router, some powerful repeaters and a couple of devices for your music. When you’re ready to relax with a game or two, we have an adventure, a strategy offering, some shooters and even an Apple Watch game.
Device Guide
While most of our reviews cover most devices, we have added these icons to give you a quick reference to what device is best suited for the product or software.
Pivo Pod Lite Creative Phone Mount
Crippled by content creation calamities? Help is at hand...
This inexpensive gadget designed for iPhone and iPad selfies is clearly aimed at teenaged social media content creators. Available in a range of colours, Pivo Pod is a palm-sized, drum-shaped device with a vice-style clamp on the top to hold your smartphone in portrait and landscape orientation. When in place, the Pivo Pod can rotate the iPhone through 360 degrees, but there’s no native way of tilting it backward or forward.
Pivo Pod connects to your Apple device using Bluetooth, and is controlled with free apps. There’s a standard tripod screw hole on the base, so you can fit it to a regular photography tripod if you wish. As well as making it easy to raise or lower the camera perspective, a decent tripod lets you tilt it too, giving back a feature the Pivo Pod natively lacks.
Creating on the quick
The app offers 12 Quick Create modes, making possible all sorts of effects. Capture Mode, for example, tracks your every move, keeping you in the centre of the picture. Many Me lets up to 15 versions of you appear the same video. Double Take records two separate videos one after another; great for Tik Tok costume reveals. You can also take Time Lapse videos, hands-free Panoramas, content that’s half photo and half video, Tiny Planet for spherical 360-degree photos that look like mini globes and more.
Our only real complaint here is unlike the regular Pivo Pod, the Lite version doesn’t include a hand controller to rotate your phone, pause and unpause the recording and more, though you can buy one separately. It could be argued that most of the effects offered by Pivo Pod Lite are possible anyway, but the device takes the tedium out of producing them and makes it fun. Definitely recommended for social media fans. ML
Info//
Pivo Inc https://uk.pivo.ai £69.99, $89.99, 89,99 € Compatibility: iOS/iPadOS 13.0 or later
