Jason Fitzpatrick
If you’ve ever purchased a product with a dock for your iPhone, you know all too well the dilemma: sometimes you want to use the product but not in docked mode. This handy and inexpensive lightning extension cable makes that possible.
Whether the product is a speaker dock or, say, a cool little portable photo printer like the one seen above, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to connect your iPhone to the dock to use the device but, at the same time, you want to easily hold the iPhone in your hand instead of hunching over. We love the Prynt Pocket photo printer but in order to fit our hulking iPhone 8 Plus into it we have to take off our chunky Speck case. While that’s fine if we want to actually attach the printer and phone together to create a retro-looking photo toy, if we just want to print a quick photo it’s a pain.
Enter the lighting extension cable. It functions like like any other extension cable you’re familiar with, be it USB, audio, or electrical: there’s a male end, a female end, and you simply mate the female end to the dock and plug the male end into your phone.
Boom, now the iPhone isn’t stuck right on the dock but tethered to it like a wire remote and whatever functions you could perform in the dock you can perform with the phone moving freely about: selecting songs, printing, or otherwise using the device.
The cable is available in black or white to match your dock and/or phone, and in 1 meter ($8) and 2 meter ($13) lengths.
