THE LEICA LUX GRIP
Take better photos on your smartphone with the help of a removable grip
Last year, as we reported here, there were two interesting and unexpected developments from the German photography Meisters, Leica.
The first was the brand’s June launch of a terrific iPhone app, Leica LUX, which enables you quite convincingly to simulate a top M-series Leica and a bagful of their searingly expensive lenses.
The results the app produces on a late-model iPhone aren’t quite Leica photos, but they are remarkably close in both the look and, to a lesser extent, quality. The app squeezes the most juice possible out of the latest iPhones’ sophisticated cameras.
Then, in August, came Leica’s acquisition of a Norwegian tech start-up, Fjorden, which at that point was heavily promoting on social media an accessory that turns an iPhone into something ergonomically more like a real, and very compact, camera. It turned out that Fjorden had also developed the Leica LUX app.
Our feeling was that the Fjorden gadget was novel and cleverly designed but a little flimsy and fiddly to be part of the Leica stable. Your columnist had one for a time, but while the Leica LUX app became a mainstay, the Fjorden mostly remained in a drawer.
Well, now Leica has a surprise. Apparently, without Fjorden’s input, they were developing their own hardware companion to the Leica LUX all along. It’s a much more substantial and, dare we say, Germanic piece of equipment: the Leica LUX Grip.
The admirable Fjorden remains in Leica’s armory, but the LUX Grip is sensational. Its ergonomics are a level up, to the extent that, with the LUX’s metal grip in hand and a proper shutter release and two assignable function buttons located in just the right place, you really feel you have a Leica camera in your hand. I’ve found myself waking up these past days with the excited feeling I’ve always had when there’s a new camera in the house.
A couple of caveats. The new grip isn’t as pocketable as the Fjorden, which is designed to be an alternative case that stays clipped onto the iPhone. The LUX Grip instead clamps onto the phone magnetically and isn’t designed to be left on.
The iPhone–LUX Grip combo is a little bulky, and you may feel it needs a neck strap—I hope Leica figures one out soon. As it is, they make a nice leather case for the Grip, which I’d recommend.
Another small thing I’m sure Leica will attend to: I had a lot of trouble pairing the Grip with my iPhone 16 Pro. This was because some Dummkopf at Leica forgot to mention in the quick-start guide that you need to pair the Grip using the LUX app, not just using the Bluetooth settings on the phone.
A still-smaller thing—if someone calls while you’re taking photos with the Grip in place, it would be a little unwieldy to answer it. But, really, who calls these days?
The Leica LUX Grip is nonetheless a wonderful innovation and one I think will become a constant companion for me. There is an argument, possibly, for having it and a Fjorden.
Be aware, though, that the LUX Grip is currently in heavy demand and hard to get hold of. So be prepared to be patient.
THE FENIX PD36R PRO Rechargeable FLASHLIGHT
Ridiculously powerful, but compact enough to bring anywhere
You might well imagine that the battery-powered flashlight was the first portable electrical gadget, but apparently it goes back to only 1899.
The battery-powered telegraph beat the flashlight to market by 30 years, and even the first portable hearing aid appeared a year before David Misell, a British inventor, patented the flashlight and sold the rights to the American Electrical Novelty and Manufacturing Company, later renamed Eveready. Eveready donated several flashlights to the New York City Police Department, which greatly appreciated them. There’s probably a Netflix series in there somewhere.
Flashlights are still, I would say, the most fundamental technological tool we have. Defying darkness was surely the first device-aided task humans needed to devise after inventing stone tools and weapons.
But, asked one AIR MAIL editor recently, where are we today with flashlights? Your columnist was uncommonly lost for words on the subject, beyond knowing there was a drastic change in 2006, when Maglite, in California, released one of the first L.E.D.-based flashlights, offering much more light for less battery power.
From then on, it turns out, flashlights have gotten brighter and brighter, to the point where many are powerful enough to act as a legal personal-safety weapon that will temporarily blind and disorient an intruder or mugger. The best modern flashlights are also mostly rechargeable, ruggedized, and waterproof enough to work underwater.
So which is the best according to a breed of hobbyist I was unaware even existed: the, ahem, flashlight community? It’s possible to go a bit crazy. You could spend $600, for example, on an Imalent SR32, which will light up a spot a mile and a quarter away. It produces 120,000 lumens—the first L.E.D. Maglite was 114 lumens, while a typical traditional flashlight pre-1980 hit around 10 lumens.
In the realm of the sensible, however, one name comes up repeatedly—the Chinese brand Fenix. So I’ve been trying the $120 Fenix PD36R Pro, which is the most frequently recommended Fenix, and it is very, very bright, while at the same time pocketable at under six inches long and less than six ounces. It’s so bright—2,800 lumens—that the head gets quite hot when you select full power, and you can illuminate stuff a quarter of a mile away and render your burglar helpless. The PD36R Pro will run for up to 42 hours on a charge, and the bulb will last some 50,000 hours.
It’s worth noting that competing Chinese flashlights with impressive-looking specifications and implausible-looking lumen ratings (990,000 in some cases) can be found for $20–$40. They’re probably O.K., but maybe don’t trust them to save your life on a hiking trip.
Word Frequency Analyser
Avoid tiresome repetitiousness in your writing with a free word counter
An older colleague at your columnist’s first newspaper once used a neat Latinate word to describe the fear of repeating the same word in a single paragraph, and I’ve spent decades trying to recall what the word was. The Internet suggests it might have been “lexical recurrenciphobia,” but it was less florid than that.
Nevertheless, repeating a word too soon is woeful—all writers inadvertently do it at times, and avoiding it is a phobia we ought to have.
My partner recently asked me to read a final draft of a novel with a special eye to such repetitions, and I wondered if there was an A.I.-enabled way of doing it. At 80,000 words, the document was too long for the ChatGPTs and Claudes of this world, but, amazingly, we found a free tool that did it in a few minutes.
There’s no clue I can find on the Word Frequency Analyser Web site as to who set it up or why—maybe it’s a literary agency doing a spot of sneaky talent spotting?—but it’s extremely good.
In five minutes or so, it revealed that the text contained “the” 4,517 times and “and” 2,085 times, which is fair enough. However, we felt there were slightly too many “something”s (70) and “gallery”s (40, although the book is set in the art world). On the other hand, we were able to see that out of the 11,320 different words she used, there were almost no adverbs (a good thing) and that 6,078 words were used only once.
Lord only knows how long it would have taken a human being to do this tedious but incredibly helpful job, nor why and how someone has gotten a program to do it for nothing, but good on them.
THE DOOGEE s200 SMARTPHONE
A smartphone that you can bear to lose
Data from most countries indicates that Apple and Samsung phones are the most attractive to thieves by far—and that smartphone thefts are rising steeply everywhere.
So, given that we all walk around with our phones on display, whether that’s because we’re texting or following Google Maps, the case for having a separate basic smartphone to use in public or on trips is rather cogent.
The cheapest can cost as little as $40, but they are rather unpleasant, and even if it would be fun to see a disappointed mugger, they are probably better avoided.
One budget-smartphone brand I love, however, is Doogee, whose tough and very well-specified Android devices come in as low as $229—this for a phone the criminal element will still not want.
Doogee’s latest, the mid-range, $400 S200 model, is really rather wonderful. It’s almost unbreakable, works underwater, and is kind of good-looking. It will do most of what you need well. If you’re tempted, though, do check that it will work on your network—it won’t on some.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
