Beyond the fact that its products are always cleanly designed, one of the things we really like about blueLounge is its approach to accessorizing: it finds and solves a real-world problem, rather than dreaming up answers to questions no one has asked. CableDrop ($10) is a package of six simple, soft, and adhesive rubber mounts that can be stuck to your choice of surfaces for cable management. They’re designed to be strong enough to resist the typical pushes and pulls of moving cables in and out, but also tapered to make insertion and removal easy.
blueLounge envisions them as attaching to the desk where you use your computer, keeping a power or Dock Connector cable always at the ready to plug in to a laptop, and that’s how we spent several weeks testing them: between the weight of Apple’s Cinema Display connectors and the number of separate plugs we deal with for external hard drives, iPods, and iPhones, we find ourselves dealing with cable slippage every day and knew precisely why these would be useful.
Generally speaking, they are. We applied CableDrop to a desk surface and had no issue with the adhesive losing grip during the weeks we spent testing, nor did we have a problem with the cable accidentally coming out of the rubber pinchers… except when we didn’t place the cable in a proper position to deal with the distribution of its weight. Apple’s older Cinema Display connectors have FireWire, USB, and DVI connectors all on the same super-thick pipe, which CableDrop holds with less than complete confidence; it does better holding solely the DVI connector and letting the other cables dangle.
Finding the right position on your desk and the right position for the cable can be a little challenge with a thick-gauge connector like this one; slightly hardened rubber at the edges of the rip might help to keep tricky cables in place. Everything else, from standard USB and FireWire to power and Dock Connector cables, is a comparative snap for the CableDrop to manage.
If there’s any other small issue with CableDrop, it’s the color scheme: blueLounge packages the cord managers in a single container holding two pieces each of three colors—a putty-like light gray, dark gray, and a wood-ready pumpkin brown were in the “muted” set, with another “bright” set containing pink, green, and yellow versions. Ideally, sets would be available with just one color, so those with earthtone or gray rooms could just buy the ones they need, but these mixes will work for many users, and the aggregate price for six pieces is fair.
