bluelounge Soba
Latest
Bluelounge Soba cable director organizes your wiring mess
Wiring and cabling, especially when you have a lot of computer equipment, can quickly get out of control. The space between my Apple Wireless Keyboard and iMac, as an example, looks like someone dumped a bowl of black and white noodles into a pile. That's why Bluelounge's new Soba cable director (US$24.95) is an aptly-named way to organize those crazy cables, since Soba is the generic Japanese term for noodles made of buckwheat. Soba comes in two colors -- black and white -- and uses a unique Vortex tube that zips open and closed to take up to three cables and hide them away. Each Soba comes with 10 feet of that tubing, a pair of end caps to make everything look beautiful, three mounting caps for attaching the Soba tubing to a wall or back of a desk, a Y-splitter if you have cables that need to go to two destinations at the end of a tube, a handful of small rubber bands, and a "zipper" tool to help insert the cables. Bluelounge's website shows the Soba cable director in use with some of their CableBoxes, which are a useful way to hide "wall warts" and power strips. With such a setup, it's possible to have one power cord coming from a wall outlet to a hidden power strip covered with AC adapters, then route the individual DC cables to their destinations with the Soba tube. I found the entire process of popping three small cables into the Soba Vortex tubing to be easy. I can see where with Macs like the Mac mini and Mac Pro, Soba would be valuable in keeping your desktop tidy instead of having a number of "noodles" running around. It's also a great way for MacBook owners to capture those various cables that are running to external drives and monitors, and replace them with one sleek looking tube. Conclusion Soba is a product that is long overdue. Through the use of an innovative tubing and proprietary caps, Bluelounge has created a very useful and quick method of organizing and hiding the spaghetti of cables that tends to surround most of our favorite devices. Rating: 4 stars out of 4 stars possible
