Bright Ideas

I'm a sucker for shiny gadgets. That's no surprise to anyone who has ever exchanged more than three words with me in my life.

Sometime last year, blogs were chatting up Iain Sinclair's offerings. Specifically, his knife and his flashlight were being touted about.

They had a deal where you could reserve a place in line and pre-pay an amount that would be applied to the final total. The knife was due... February 2011 or so, at first while the flashlight was due around March.

Somewhere around March I guess there were production problems. My reserve money was refunded and Sinclair's site swapped over to a new payment gateway. The price of the items changed, as did the release date.

Good times. These things happen. Initially I was kind of annoyed with them. They weren't terribly-responsive to email. Then, suddenly, around March they were super responsive.

I reserved both knife and flashlight again via the new gateway.

The release date got pushed back again. I had other crazy things going on in my life so I just let it ride.

The site updated with actual release dates and I got enthusiastic again. I ping'd them a couple of times and got prompt responses as to what's going on.

I'm glad I was patient. Today my Eon Extreme light arrived.

*breathe*

Okay, so here's the skinny:

The flashlight is a skinny thing. It's a bit thicker than a couple of credit cards, but about the same width and height. It's got one depression button that takes some doing to press.

Two clicks and you get the lower light. Three clicks and that puppy shoots out 230 lumens of blinding light. Dracula would fry under this thing.

It comes with a micro-USB cable for charging. The battery is apparently rechargable and I guess USB is the way they opted to go. Whatever works.

My one complaint is that the control is a tad fussy. I've had it... I dunno... lock, I guess. When showing to a friend, the light stayed on the bright setting for... oh... two, three minutes? And it gets hot. Oh boy does it get hot.

Eventually, I managed to turn it off. I still don't know what the problem was. Hopefully it was just a fluke.

I'm looking forward to the knife's arrival.