Griffin’s Clarifi is the best iPhone case I have ever seen.

As nice as the iPhone’s little camera is, it’s a bit farsighted.  Close-ups of people’s faces, objects, and especially text, all end up being blurry.

Paul Griffin at Griffin Technology noticed this and asked one of his case designers to see if a corrective lens would help.

Thus the Griffin Clarifi iPhone case was born.

Not only is it a really sleek, tough polycarbonate case for the iPhone, but it has a little monocle that you can slide over the top of the iPhone camera lens, and suddenly the things closer to you become nice and sharp.

Now, here’s the thing.  If this were just any camera phone , the story would end there, and most people would yawn and say, "So what?  Big deal."  But the iPhone is not just another camera phone — it’s a full blown computer in your hand with all sorts of ingenious, web-connected, distributed-processing applications just a screen-touch away.  So not only are your close-up portraits now clear, and the trinkets you sell on eBay now sharply in focus, but the iPhone has — thanks to the Clarifi — become a powerful text scanning device.

So what?  Why is that a big deal?

Add the application Evernote to the picture.  I love Evernote.

Evernote is an external peripheral for your brain.  Not joking — that’s what it is.  It’s a database to help you remember everything, with several ways to enter things into it — from keyboard, via copy-and-paste, via voice, and (here’s where Clarifi comes in) via pictures.  Load the free app up in your iPhone, connect to their website, and start taking pictures.  Every picture is run through very powerful and accurate Optical Character Recognition that can even read your handwriting, so the text is scanned and put into your personal database, where it can be sorted and searched.

Imagine it.  Every business card you come across … every ingredients label … all your napkin-idea scribbles … every recipe … all of it scanned, stored, and available for instant recall.

But not without the corrective lens on the Clarifi.

Another iPhone application that exists only because of Clarifi is the 1D barcode reader produced by Snapper.net.  This fledgling service allows you to snap a picture of a product’s barcode while standing in a store, and it returns comparative pricing information.

According to Jackie Ballinger at Griffin Technologies, the Clarifi is selling really well, and feedback from customers indicate they would be interested in more Clarifi models.  "Many people have requested color options other than black, and a zoom model," she says.  "We’re certainly investigating these ideas, the concept of a case like Clarifi that adds functionality and is more than just a fashion accessory is really appealing to us and something we’re continuing to explore."

Final word: this is one awesome case, adding functionality to the iPhone that greatly expands its capabilities.  I’m a raving fan, and I hereby officially declare the Clarifi a Groovy Gizmo.

This is just squishy-cool:

Not only does it fold up like a wallet, but it’s actually powered by human interaction via an array of tiny piezoelectric generators.

Finally, a cell phone you don’t have to worry about cracking the screen when you sit on it!  Not to mention that you never have to worry about a dead battery.

Full details on the Inhabitat Blog.

While trying to decide what to do with my poor crushed iPhone, I bought a brand new Motorola F3 off of eBay for a whole $29 (unlocked, with no contract and no strings attached).  I’d been looking at these with avid curiosity since they came out in 2006 and, after finding a place on eBay called Monster Cellular, I plunked down my PayPal and within two days was holding one in my hand.

It took my AT&T SIM and logged right into the network.  I was making phone calls within a minute.

This little phone is as Zen as you can get.  Running a tiny Linux kernel and using e-ink for display, I’ve had it over four days now and it’s still running on the initial charge.  The reception is excellent.  The sound quality isn’t the best, but it’s definitely good enough, especially considering the cost.  It features a phone book and and an alarm, and while it will do text messaging I wouldn’t recommend it because of the display.  This is a phone and nothing but a phone.

Like I said, it’s very Zen.

And the cost — at least from Monster Cellular — it included a house and a car charger, as well as a little belt clip carrying case.

You can bet, however, I will not be using the belt clip carrying case.  I’ve had some extremely bad luck with those.

My conclusion: this Zen little phone is hereby officially proclaimed groovy.