Before it sold Apple accessories under its own name, PC peripheral developer Cooler Master used the Choiix brand to sell mobile gear. Choiix’s lineup included one of our favorite iPad stands to date, the Wave Aluminum Stand. JAS mini ($30) is a spiritual successor to Wave, incorporating several improvements over the already great accessory. Advertised for use with iPhones and the iPad mini, it will actually work with any of Apple’s iDevices, at the very least as a passive stand. Cooler Master certainly knows how to work with metal, and JAS mini got pretty much everything right.
Portability is an important factor when it comes to stands, and despite its support for numerous products, JAS mini meets this criterion. The stand folds down to roughly 4.5” long and 0.75” thick, remaining 2.4” wide at all times, a size that’s similar in footprint to an iPhone and easy to carry around. Like Wave, it’s mostly made from machined aluminum, but the feet are accented with black plastic and non-slip rubber. There are also two rings of rubber around the hinge, preventing your device from directly touching the metal.
When it’s closed, JAS mini has a slightly concave shape.
You open it by splitting the legs apart to form your desired angle of device recline, moving one of the legs forward and the other backward. The front leg has a small scoop to hold your bare or encased device, and although not all cases fit, many will. Like most stands, JAS mini accommodates iPads, iPhones, and iPods in landscape or portrait orientation. The legs extend to support angles anywhere from around 30° to 70°, or pretty much any viewing or typing angle you may like. JAS mini works perfectly as a stand for viewing and typing with everything smaller than full-sized iPads, but due to the stand’s narrowness and small front scoop, large iPads may wobble a bit when you type on them.
At $30, Cooler Master’s newest stand matches our only A-rated iPad stand, Belkin’s FlipBlade Adjust, in price.