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I'm in love with an iPhone battery case. Yeah, I still can't believe it either. But hear me out.

There are tons and tons of iPhone battery cases to pick from. Last year, I highlighted the seven best ones for any situation. iPhone battery cases usually forsake form for function. After all, they exist to keep your iPhone powered up, not to make a fashion statement.

That's why Mophie's popular Juice Packs are thick and bulky. Tylt's Energi Sliding Power Case and the Boostcase are good compromises since they're two-piece battery cases, but they're still on the big side.

The closest "slim" iPhone battery case is Apple's own Smart Battery Case. While it's not nearly as chunky as some others, the battery bump made the company the butt of a million online jokes. Critics and fans slammed Apple for losing its design chops with such an ugly accessory.

The Air Case by Innoant, and currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo, is quite possibly the best battery case I've ever used that balances thinness and power.

I've been testing this ultra-thin battery case — the world's thinnest according to the company, as it's a hair thinner than the ThinCharge — for the past week and I didn't once feel the urge to take it off.

With the Air Case on my iPhone 6, it only adds an extra 0.15 inch of thickness. That's thinner than some regular iPhone cases. With other battery cases, you're looking at adding two to three times the thickness of the Air Case and some significant height as well.

The Air Case for the iPhone 6 and 6S has a 2,400 milliamp-hour battery (mAh) — the Air Case for the iPhone 6+ and 6S+ has a larger 2,800 mAh battery — inside its super-slim design. The case holds 1.3x a full charge for an iPhone 6.

The case can charge an iPhone 6 1.3x.

It's not quite the 2x Innoants advertises on its Indiegogo page, but it was more than adequate for even my heaviest usage days.

The Mophie Juice Pack Air has a higher 2,750 mAh capacity battery and the Tylt Energi Sliding Power Case has an even larger 3,200 mAh battery capable of charging an iPhone 6 about 1.5x and 1.75x. Apple's Smart Battery Case has the smallest battery: 1,877 mAh, or just enough for an extra full charge with very little left over.

Again, the tradeoff for the larger batteries is the extra thickness and weight.

I'm not writing off the benefits of battery cases with higher-capacity batteries, but I think if I, a power user, can get through 16-20 hours of heavy iPhone usage with the Air Case as a lifeline, then most people will be able to, too. 

Obviously, if you're Snapchatting (the app is a notorious battery guzzler) or literally using it non-stop, a larger battery case is more useful and pocket-ability is probably not as high on your checklist. For the very, very active iPhone user, a higher-capacity case is probably called for. But that is, if you'll excuse the pun, an extreme case.

Putting on the Air Case is easy. Pop the metal frame over your iPhone and then slide the slim battery through the frame's rails. That's all there is to it.

There's a button on the back. Press it once and it'll illuminate the LED indicator to its right, letting you see at a glance how much power the battery case has left. Press and hold the button and it'll start charging your iPhone; to disable the charging, press and hold the button once more. 

The case also has another nice feature many other battery cases don't: Lightning port pass-through, which means you can charge the case and the phone at the same time, via a single cable. The Mophie Juice Packs and Tylt's Energi case both plug into the iPhone's Lightning port, but they charge through the Micro USB port, which means you'll need another cable. 

The pass-through Lightning port also means it'll play nicely with charging docks like Twelve South's adjustable Hi-Rise; no need to remove the case at all.

The metal frame recesses the headphone jack a little but not as much as other battery cases. Apple EarPods will still fit perfectly, but the enclosure around my OnePlus Icon earbuds' jack are just a millimeter to thick. It's something to be mindful of, or just go with Bluetooth headphones.

I don't normally nerd out about iPhone accessories, let alone a battery case. But color me impressed with the Air Case. The case is going for $39 for early backers on Indiegogo, but once those run out, it'll cost $49. It's supposed to come out in July.

Like the company says, the Air Case is the battery case Apple should have created. If I was running Apple, I'd buy Innoants and rebadge this baby as an official Apple product.

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LG Innotek has developed a fingerprint sensor that's placed under a glass surface instead of in a physical button, the company announced Sunday.

The new sensor could lead to smartphones that you can unlock by placing your finger on the phone screen. 

The LG-owned electronics parts manufacturer achieved this by cutting out a 0.01-inch thick slot in the lower part of a smartphone's cover glass, and then inserting a very thin fingerprint sensor into it. In other words, the sensor is still under the cover glass, but the slot moves the sensor close enough to the surface to read a fingerprint.

That way, the sensor is protected from water and scratches, and can be installed anywhere under the phone's glass surface. 

LG says the recognition accuracy of its module is comparable to that of a button-based fingerprint scanner. The probability of the sensor accepting the wrong fingerprint is 0.002%, the company claims. 

There's no word on when we'll see the new sensor installed into actual phones, but LG is already talking with potential customers.

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Ever wondered what it'd sound like if the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa" were mixed with a little bit of A-Ha's "Take On Me"?

No? Never? Well, that's just one of the wonderfully weird mashups you can create wth Clash Up, the latest series of interactive music videos from Interlude. Each video in the series features a group of artists across genres and decades — Biggie, the B-52s, Jason Derulo, and the Flaming Lips, for example. 

In the inaugural video, "The Six Degrees of B.I.G." you start with "Big Poppa" and choose between three artists — A-Ha, Jason Derulo, Traveling Wilburys. Then you choose between another three, and another three, before you arrive at The Flaming Lips, where you can choose between "She Don't Jelly," "Turn It On" and "When You Smile."

There are 81 possible combinations in each video — so chances are you won't make the same mashup twice. 

Episode 2, which is also launching today, features Tinie Tempah, Seal, David Guetta, Flo Rida, Jill Scott, R.E.M., House of Pain, Third Eye Blind, Trey Songz, and the Bee Gees.

While these combinations may seem random, the videos also give a little dose of musical history, explaining what each pair of artists has in common. 

Brandy and A-Ha? They've both "come out" as Coldplay fans, the video informs. The B-52s and Jason Derulo? Both have had their music featured in Ubisoft's "Just Dance" game series. 

New videos will be released every Monday on www.helloeko.com, Interlude's new platform for interactive entertainment. There are eight episodes total.

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LG Innotek has developed a fingerprint sensor that's placed under a glass surface instead of in a physical button, the company announced Sunday.

The new sensor could lead to smartphones that you can unlock by placing your finger on the phone screen. 

The LG-owned electronics parts manufacturer achieved this by cutting out a 0.01-inch thick slot in the lower part of a smartphone's cover glass, and then inserting a very thin fingerprint sensor into it. In other words, the sensor is still under the cover glass, but the slot moves the sensor close enough to the surface to read a fingerprint.

That way, the sensor is protected from water and scratches, and can be installed anywhere under the phone's glass surface. 

LG says the recognition accuracy of its module is comparable to that of a button-based fingerprint scanner. The probability of the sensor accepting the wrong fingerprint is 0.002%, the company claims. 

There's no word on when we'll see the new sensor installed into actual phones, but LG is already talking with potential customers.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

If you want adults to learn to code, stop serving pizza.

That's just one of the lessons Kathryn Parsons, cofounder and co-CEO of global coding education provider Decoded, learned while helping people make the leap into programming. 

Not everyone will learn to code as an obsessed teenager in their bedroom. Some will need to learn digital skills as part of a change mid-career, while others may be managers fed up with not knowing what their developers do all day.

Speaking with Mashable Australia at the CeBIT technology conference in Sydney Monday, Parsons shared some of the tactics her company, which famously claims to teach coding in one day, uses to help people overcome their fears and get started with digital skills.

1. Put a human face on it

The media have made Sergey Brin and the rest of the current Silicon Valley founder crop into demi-gods, so it's no wonder coding seems imposing to outsiders. To help people begin the learning process, it's important to pull back the curtains and make it clear the Internet was created by humans, Parsons said. 

If you want to put coding on a human level, she suggested starting by answering these questions for students: "Who are the human beings who created this stuff? What does code actually look like? How can I use [code], contribute, collaborate, and become part of the community of the web?"

2. Build a community

At Decoded, learning to code is always a team activity. 

"It's not a lonely place," she said. "The smallest groups we do it with are 10 people. The largest group we've ever taught in one experience was 5,000 people. Talk about communal coding."

If people feel there is a world of coders and coding they can join, it might feel more welcoming. "There is this global community of coders, this open source community, collaborating and creating together," she said. "That's a really profound thing for a lot of people, because they just don't work in environments like that."

3. Make learning creative

While online learning has promise, it still suffers from incredibly high churn rates, Parsons said, with many dropping out halfway through the teaching process.

Students might find it easier to stick with coding if they think of it as a creative skill set. They should ask themselves, "How can I use the languages of the web to create the ideas that I've had in my head?" Parson said. "Creating and crafting those ideas without the tools? You can't do it."

"How can I use the languages of the web to create the ideas that I've had in my head?" 

That idea has informed the company's approach to teaching, added Chris Monk, Decoded's head in the Asia-Pacific. "We don't start with 'this is a variable and this is how it works.' We say, 'we're going to build an app.' We start with that creativity and then go on a journey, and I think that's the key to learning," he said.

"It's a mindset, Parsons added. "Convincing people that it's relevant, that it's something creative, that it's something anyone can do."

4. Don't teach, guide

Parsons said she aims to have Decoded's class facilitators act as guides rather than strict teachers.

The idea of guidance plays out in how they interact with students. "They never lean over anyone to correct their code," she explained. "That's incredibly disempowering."

Rather, students are encouraged to focus on problem solving. "It's kneeling down next to somebody, and not saying 'you're missing a semicolon on line 27' and just sticking it in," Monk added. "It's saying 'let's look again at that bit of code that's between line 24 to 30, and see if you can spot what's in there.'"

5. Think about the space. And the snacks

Decoded considers the physical environment important in the learning experience. "Generally, the space will be incredibly large," Parson said. "A real feeling of space and light. Why do we teach people in little dingy rooms?"

All the food is brainfood. "Coder food. Not pizza," she said. It could be lentils or a vegan lunch, but the aim is to keep your mind ticking over.

Best of all? "No quiche," Monk said, referring to the dull pastry that has been served at every tech event ever.

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Ever since Facebook was a mere twinkle in Mark Zuckberg's eye, all-white, all-male panels at startup conferences have been the deplorable status quo.

On Monday morning, Alan Jones, startup evangelist at the Sydney accelerator BlueChilli, was set to speak on a fintech panel at the CeBIT technology conference in Sydney. That was until he checked out his co-panellists. Their blinding similarity — old, male, white — was dismaying, so he put out the call on Twitter to find himself a more diverse replacement.

Speaking with Mashable Australia before the panel, Jones, who hadn't yet found a stand-in, said the situation was very familiar and very disappointing.

As an experienced tech conference panelist, he explained his theory about how on earth this can keep happening. "Underlying everything, when you are putting together a conference, your primary focus is your keynote," he said. "Usually, you're trying as hard as you can to secure some big names from overseas. That's the primary goal. Diversity sits well down the list of goals."

In the hierarchy of how large technology conferences are structured, he suggested panels were the lowest rung for organisers. "You put panels on to include stakeholders — they may be sponsors or have a big booth at the event. Then you've probably got some vacant seats, so that's when you turn to me," he laughed.

Supporting diversity in technology plays a part in his agenda at BlueChilli, Jones said. Nevertheless, he decides how to deal with all-white, all-males panels on a case-by-case basis. "I would have done a bit better with this one if I had looked at the panel before this morning," he explained. "Usually I look earlier and send some emails." 

As a representative of BlueChilli, however, he said he's not in a position to give up his seat entirely. "My only way of marketing BlueChilli is through non-cash means, so we need to be on those panels," he explained. "I just know how many successful, powerful women deserve that voice."

Ultimately, no woman replaced Jones on the panel. He still managed to bring the issue up, however, throwing his opportunity to answer the moderator's first few questions to any woman in the audience who wished to speak. 

Unfortunately, there were about five women in the room available to take up his offer out of around 30 attendees. Louise Long, head of human-centred design at NABLabs at the National Australia Bank, who was chairing the afternoon's fintech talks, thanked Jones for bringing up the elephant in the room.

The organisers of CeBIT have been contacted for comment.

The endemic lack of speaker diversity at conferences has been back in the news lately, with five of Australia's most popular male conference speakers declaring they would boycott panels that did not include women, according to Fairfax Media.

The five, including Adam Fraser, Jason Fox, Dan Gregory, Matt Church and Darren Hill, who have expertise that ranges from motivational speaking to business advice, told the publication they will no longer participate in or moderate panels that don't ensure better representation.

"There are plenty of women who are experts in their field and highly talented speakers," Gregory said "And, to steal a line from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 'it's 2016'. The thing is, research tells us diversity makes groups smarter, so why are we dumbing panels down?"

As for Jones, he's going to keep bringing the issue up, whether it makes for an awkward panel discussion or not. "I'm sad that I'm now becoming an old white man, but I'm not going to stand by and let it happen," he laughed.

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Note: The following descriptions may be considered NSFW.

This morning at my breakfast table I learned how to pleasure another woman with my boyfriend.

Sex education site OMGYes is starting conversations about female pleasure, via some experimental new methods.

In a recent chat with currently controversial feminist icon Gloria Steinem, actress and women’s rights activist Emma Watson endorsed OMGYes, encouraging fans to “definitely check it out...It’s worth it” (“it” being the site’s $29 subscription fee).

The interactive site, backed by several research studies about the pleasure preferences of over 1,000 women, features video interviews with real women talking about their real experiences of sexual pleasure. Most notably, touchscreen video lessons of sexual stimulation techniques allow users to tap and caress a variety of virtual vulvas on-screen.

What is sexual pleasure? And how does it happen?

But what is a site like OMGYes actually teaching us about female sexual pleasure? Most notably, when we’re invited to learn about sexual pleasure via a futuristic touchscreen, are we framing sexual pleasure as something to talk about or just another thing to type about from the isolating safety of our handheld devices? Though Emma Watson got gutsy to publicly praise OMGYes as a concept, her language was still vague, peppered in the age-old euphemism for sex — “it” — and still left female sexual pleasure in the background of the site itself. Are we really ready to use OMGYes as its creators intended or is this just another piece of a human sexuality, untranslated from the web to real life?

How it's packaged

OMGYes certainly makes strides in breaking the silence, by packaging female sexual pleasure in new, educational ways. But its one-sided sexual stimulation experience (created by viewing and virtually touching these women through a screen) runs the risk of continuing to promote female sexual pleasure as something to be achieved rather than cooperated, intuited rather than asked about, and perfected rather than made genuine. This could reinforce the disconnect between pleasure and communication that mainstream porn has already vastly propagated.

At times this is even presented in similar packaging to porn: The women featured on the site conform to many classic beauty standards, and their pre-recorded moans of pleasure are soft, dainty and (notably) never audibly climactic, an intentional decision on the creator’s part. OMGYes co-creator Lydia Daniller says, “We’re actually working to counteract the orgasm as goal-oriented view of sex through the entire site, and through the simulations in particular. We wanted to emphasize pleasure for pleasure's own sake and not pleasure to reach an ‘end goal.’”

"Hey! We won! This is like a video game.”

Nonetheless, when my boyfriend and I took OMGYes for a spin on his iPad one morning, we couldn’t help but direct our eyes to the prize. We chose to learn about one woman on the site who was teaching us the technique “layering,” via video. We listened to how exactly she likes to experience this kind of touch and why. She cautioned us against moving too quickly or venturing away from her clitoris too far or for too long, which rang realistic. After watching her video and reading the site’s blurb about “layering” we ventured to the virtual vulva, taking turns to practice the moves we were just taught.

The virtual video was good at responding quickly and accurately when we disobeyed our new sex partner’s instruction. After a few minutes, in place of her climax, the video just ended. That’s when my boyfriend exclaimed, "Hey! We won! This is like a video game.”

Christina Vasiliou, OMGYes Experience Designer and Co-Director who created the touchscreen functions of the site, says this goes against the hopes of OMGYes. “We took many measures to avoid any kind of similarity or connection to video games. The only feedback the user receives is verbal feedback from the participant — there is no score.”

In our current digital age, it’s only natural that OMGYes’s touchable virtual reality videos are the crowning jewel of the site and that its 45,000+ users (split 50/50 men-to-women) are drawn to it. But the virtual reality may be distracting from the site’s mission — communication about sexual pleasure in real life — in ways similar to mainstream porn.

What's porn got to do with it?

When I’m not writing about sex or testing products and services, I’m teaching workshops about sex to teens (covering topics like consent and healthy communication) and adults (on topics like sexual pleasure and sex toys). In every workshop one of the first things we do is talk about porn.

First, I ask the group, “What did you learn in sex ed class?” Responses range from “Nothing” to “I guess gay people don’t have sex then, huh?” but always include “pregnancy” and “STIs” on the short list of not-so-useful information gleaned from our nation’s often medically inaccurate, abstinence-based and rarely gender-and-sexuality-inclusive sex education programming.

Then I ask a series of questions about porn: “Who is having sex in the porn most widely available to us?”; “What kind of sex are they having?”; and then, most importantly, “Who’s doing the talking and what are they saying?”

Women in porn are rarely ever saying words.

Because their critical minds are sharp and fresh to the happenings in this world, teens are usually the quickest to conclude that women in porn are rarely ever saying words (let alone complete sentences) and, most impactfully, they’re almost never speaking directly about their own sexual pleasure when they do.

It’s hardly new information that women are done many disservices by mainstream pornography (and the writer would like to note that not all porn is created equal and some is even created feminist). However, it is new(er) information that young people are definitely watching porn especially with the ease-of-access via their smartphones.

What I’ve found from doing these brainstorms in my workshops is that while adults may be watching porn for sexual excitement, experimentation and enhancement, young people, caught in the beginning stages of their introduction to the confusing world of sex, are likely seeking porn because it offers a version of sex education to fill the void left by what their schools offer. Two examples: What is sexual pleasure? And how does it happen?

When we learn about sexual pleasure via mainstream pornography, we’re taught that sexual pleasure is wordless-yet-seamless, limited to heterosexuality, penetration and scenes like pizza deliveries, locker rooms and high rise offices. But rarely are we taught the specifics of genital touch — what it looks like, what it feels like and how to do it.

OMGYes aims to fill the need for this kind of education. The site boasts an impressive team of designers, creators and sexual advisors such as Annie Sprinkle and Carol Queen, the latter of whom suggested to the site’s creators that the site initially focus on the specifics of female genital touch: “It’s completely missing from sex education. Porn distorts it terribly. And taboo and embarrassment surround the issue. Consequently, people think women are all roughly the same in their sexual reactions — women aren’t explaining what they like, and their partners aren’t asking.”

So, OMGYes co-creators Rob Perkins and Lydia Daniller set out to fill in the pleasure education gaps by directly responding to what women said they want and need for greater sexual pleasure: communication.

"What makes for ‘good sex’ varies from person to person,” says Daniller. But when they asked a representative sample of 1,055 American women ages 18 to 95 to tell them what makes for a good sex partner, the three most common characteristics were:

1. He/she takes the time to find out what I like. (91% of women)

2. He/she is attentive to me — listening and being aware of whether I’m enjoying sex. (89% of women)

3. He/she asks me what feels best for me. (81% of women)

“[Our] research showed that a major barrier in accomplishing great sex was the lack of specific enough language and a comfortable way to describe what one likes or wants,” says Daniller.

OMGYes, Carol Queen and even I agree: Communication is the key to genuine, real-life, non-pornofied sexual pleasure education.

Let's just agree to be awkward

But are we learning what OMGYes wants to teach us?

Upon reviewing the site for Refinery29, Sara Coughlin wrote, "The female orgasm has garnered a reputation for being so complex that many women have taken it upon themselves to draft specific instructions for partners. But a new online training program, OMGYes, aims to lessen that educational burden by teaching people how to make any woman climax.” Bobby Box for AskMen.com observed, "The website understands that videos needn’t be too long, nor should the copy."

The vast majority of women require over 20 minutes of continuous and consistent clitoral stimulation in order to climax. OMGYes’s very own research unsurprisingly unearthed huge amounts of variety in the particularities of how women desire and respond to erotic touch person-to-person. Female orgasm is complex and unique and yes, Bobby Box, takes a little longer than some brief copy might convey.

All sexual partnerships should include the safety, space and expectation of specific instruction and a lengthy learning curve when it comes to pleasuring each other. Neither should be cast as a time-consuming “educational burden” but rather a chance to connect via verbalizing our unique erotic make-ups.

One of my favorite sex educators Al Vernacchio says of sex: “The most freeing thing we can do is allow ourselves to be awkward. And no one in porn is ever awkward.” Rarely does the suave guy we see in porns fall off the bed, get a leg cramp or ask his co-performer, “Remind me exactly where your clitoris is again, babe?” All of these negotiations happens off-screen and mistakes are edited to present picture-perfect-penetration and opulent orgasms. In order to finally allow ourselves to bring conversations about real female sexual pleasure out of the perfect porn world and into the messy reality of our bedrooms, orgasms and relationships, we must first embrace the value of awkward sex.

When we make mistakes, we build trust. When we laugh at ourselves, we build connection. When we ask for direction, we build consent. When we state our desires, we create pleasure. And when we can unplug from our devices and experience all of this for real with our partners, we create intimacy.

OMGYes is undoubtedly making strides. It will take work to lift the shroud of mystery, shame and deprioritization that has cloaked female pleasure for a long, long, long time. But we also can and should go further.

What questions can I ask my partner to learn about her unique sexual pleasure? What should I do if these techniques don’t pan out in the sack? How can I instruct my partner to do what pleasures me without hurting his/her ego?

Because tapping and rubbing one of OMGYes’s virtual reality vulvas certainly won’t equip you to “blow any woman away in bed,” but breaking taboos with conversation might — as long as people can take it off-screen and get real.

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