Skip to main content

The Wype cleans up your fingers to protect your gadgets

The Wype - Your Personal Desktop Snack Rag
Crumbly cookies, greasy pizza, or a particularly nasty bout of influenza — these can all leave your fingers covered in muck, and as you may have already learned to your cost, gunk-covered hands can soon lead to messed-up tech gadgets.

To keep your equipment protected from all the mess, Utah-based Open-Vision Labs has come up with the Wype, a “personal desktop snack rag” designed to ensure your fingers always stay clean. At least, that’s the theory.

The Wype is a round piece of custom-made carpet consisting of microfibers that take dirt from your fingers with a quick wipe. It also includes an antimicrobial solution to kill any germs that may have been using your hands as a home.

“If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time on your computer, your phone, your gaming console,” Open-Vision Labs’ Seth Konopasek explains in his Kickstarter video. “You know that napkins don’t really get your fingers clean, neither do paper towels or wiping it on your pants. And we all know what happens if you have dirty fingers.” Yes, it screws up your gadgets.

The Wype’s cloth is removable and sits on a secure base that you can place beside your keyboard or console so it’s easy to reach. When it gets so gross that you don’t want to touch it anymore, you can either throw it in the laundry or donate it to scientific research — you never know, they might discover some new strains of bacteria living in there.

The team suggests a variety of scenarios besides PC and gaming sessions where the Wype might come in handy. You can use it to protect your TV controller when you’re snacking in front of the box, for example, or when you’re cooking in the kitchen and using a tablet to read the recipe.

Provided the campaign reaches its $15,000 funding goal, the Wype will be ready to cleanse your fingers in December, 2017. Pledge $15 and you’ll score yourself one Wype set comprising a black base and three covers; $30 will get you double that, while a $40 pledge offers better value for money with three black bases and nine covers coming your way.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Belkin’s sleek 3-in-1 MagSafe pad charges up your iPhone 13, other Apple devices
Image of the Boost Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Pad with devices ontop.

Belkin has announced two new additions to its MagSafe charging lineup. The first is the Boost Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Pad with MagSafe for the iPhone 13 and other Apple devices. And the second is the Boost Charge Pro Portable Fast Charger for the Apple Watch Series 7. Both are part of Belkin's Made for MagSafe collection.

We've received a review unit of the charging pad, and will be testing it to see if it's worthy of adding to our roundup of the best iPhone MagSafe accessories of 2021 before the year is up. Another of Belkin's chargers, a different 3-in-1 MagSafe charger, is already on the list, but it is made for slightly older models of Apple devices.

Read more
This Amazon facility worth $1.5B is aiming to speed up your deliveries
boston couple unwanted amazon deliveries package

Amazon this week opened its $1.5 billion air hub in northern Kentucky, a massive facility that will enable the e-commerce giant to take even more control of its ever-expanding shipping operation as part of ongoing efforts to speed up customer deliveries.

The facility at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport will serve as the central hub for Amazon Air’s U.S. cargo network, processing millions of customer packages every week. Up to 100 Amazon-branded planes can use the facility at any one time, with as many as 200 Amazon flights per day coming in and out. Several thousand jobs have been created by its opening.

Read more
Cross your fingers that NASA can fix Hubble by switching to backup hardware
NASA Hubble Space Telescope

NASA Hubble Space Telescope NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the great achievements in modern science, with a career of over 30 years that has included taking measurements that revolutionized how cosmologists think about the expansion of the universe -- not to mention producing some of the most breathtaking images of space ever seen. But the hardware in Hubble is getting on in years, as much of it was designed and built in the 1980s. There have been various upgrades and fixes made over the decades, but some recent problems with the telescope's hardware are proving hard to fix.

Read more