To inaugurate our new series of hardware and gadget reviews, I’d like to cover a product that, in the past months, has completely changed the way I carry my iPhone around and charge it. The Powermat, a combination of case and charging mat for the iPhone we first covered in October, allows you to charge your iPhone wirelessly, without any cable, through a case you’ll have to put your iPhone 4 into.

Courtesy of the great folks at Powermat, I was sent a single mat, a receiver case for the iPhone 4 and another mat that can charge up to two devices on a single surface. So far, my experience with the charging system has been very good; then only issues I ran into involved some kind of difficulty trying to find the “right spot” on the 2x mat. But overall, I do believe the Powermat is one of the most innovative, powerful and, why not, cool gadgets you can buy for your iPhone right now. Read more

In these past months on MacStories, we have covered two apps that aim at becoming replacements for the standard Apple Phone app: Favorites and Dialvetica. By leveraging the APIs of iOS that allow for 3rd party apps to access your contact’s list, these apps are focused on letting you quickly access your favorite contacts and either call them, text them or email them with a few taps. Favorites and Dialvetica are not really focused on the number dialing part of the phone experience (although the latest Dialvetica update introduced a dialpad), they’re rather simple interfaces to get to your most contacted friends and do stuff. Shortcuts, that is.

QuickBins, a free iPhone app by Chalk, is very similar to Favorites, but it’s based on drag & drop. The app displays your favorite contacts (which you’ll have to add manually) as profile pictures on a grid, and you can even create multiple pages of contacts. As you fire up the app, you’ll notice 4 big buttons at each corner: those are shortcuts to initiate a call, send a text message, an email and check on a contact’s address. How do you activate these commands? Simple: you take a contact, and you drop it on a button. QuickBins will then forward you to an external app (third-party software can’t send calls or text without loading Apple’s stock apps) to perform the action.

That’s it. QuickBins will soon introduce support for Skype, Twitter and Google Voice, it’s free and ad-supported, but you can remove the ads with a $2.99 in-app purchase. QuickBins also happens to have a beautiful UI design that makes it a real pleasure to tap on its icon and look at the dashboard.

QuickBins is available for free here.

…Or maybe it’s not really a GTD app at all. Little List is an iPhone app developed by Caleb Thorson, the same guy behind the Trickle Twitter client we reviewed here. And just like Trickle, Little List is a minimal, elegant and focused app that takes a simple approach at a complex system: getting things done. Instead of providing tags, folders, projects and contexts, Little List is, well, a simple and clean list of things you have to do.

Many apps in the App Store have tried to go extremely simple against the most fundamental GTD principles. Little List, however, has a cool trick up its sleeve: it’s got yet another implementation of Loren Brichter’s “Pull to refresh”, but instead of refreshing, the gesture sorts items. The command is, in fact, called “Pull to sort”. So what do you sort? Normal items and starred ones. You can create a new entry by tapping on the + button and start typing; if you have important tasks you’d like to highlight, you can star them with an additional tap. “Pull to sort” will put the starred items on top.

Little List is as simple as it gets. It’s available at $0.99, it doesn’t have any kind of OTA sync – it doesn’t have any kind of anything, actually. It’s just a list, with starred items. And with a nice icon. Give it a try if you’re looking for a different take on aggregating your to dos.