Ultimate umbrella

Sudden showers could leave your Burberry and BlackBerry waterlogged.

Perhaps, you need a Nubrella.

Priced at $60 (Dh220), the hands-free umbrella is marketed as the ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon (or sunned-upon, if it's the UAE we're talking about.

Folded up, it's the size and shape of an Olympic regulation archery bow.

Then you pop it ... right ... er, wait, how does this thing work? Don't panic, just log on to www.nubrella.com for a tutorial and get that baby open in five simple steps.

Five? But my old umbrella opens in ...

Changing the equation

But is your old umbrella the ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon? “Hands-free changes the whole game,'' says Nubrella inventor Alan Kaufman, who was running Cingular outlets in Manhattan, New York City, the United States, when watching his wet customers struggle provided inspiration.

Think of the 21st-century possibilities. No more one-handed texting. Chatting, waving, toting, umbrella-holding: four tasks that were never before simultaneously possible.

The Nubrella is worn with a harness and closes around its user like a clear, private cocoon, guaranteed never to turn inside out. Inside, it feels secure and soundproof.

Progress! Or is it?

The sleek umbrella has been around since Babylon and ancient Egypt. Its ingenious engineering has remained essentially unchanged, although man is a tinkerer.

You have your collapsible canopy, you have your central supporting stick. (You have umbrella hats, but those are more gags than ultimate tools.)

The “brolly'' hit England in the 18th century. The Brits took a while to warm up to it.

Public opinion improved and centuries' worth of carrying such a device has informed the present etiquette of rain, one in which small groups of wet people form impromptu communities.

The communal behaviour of “Homo Umbrellicus'' is seen everywhere.

A mother-type ushers three co-workers under her canopy, where everyone is too polite to point out that they are still getting hit.

A man in a business suit, who is much more important than everyone else, stands alone under a golf umbrella made for four.

Those without umbrellas find excuses to talk to those with them.

For centuries, people have been trying to build a better umbrella.

The US Patent and Trademark Office in Crystal City, Virginia, has 97 on file from 2007 alone, 487 from 2002 on.

“Mostly, people want to improve opening and closing mechanisms,'' says Robert Canfield, one of five patent examiners who work with classification 135 — the division that deals with tents, canopies, umbrellas and canes.

Canfield has seen just about every umbrella under the sun. Even the search for a hands-free umbrella is not new; the office has applications on file going back to 1978.

Kaufman is not concerned, because he thinks that previous products have totally missed the point of an umbrella.

“There's a precise pitch on this product,'' he says.

The whole logic of it

When the Egyptians invented the parasol, it was meant to protect from sun, not rain, and no umbrella in history has ever achieved perfection.

Kaufman believes so strongly in the Nubrella that he invested $400,000 (Dh1,469,120) in the product.

So far, he has sold about 500. But to look on the bright side, two buyers are extremely satisfied.

Worthy investment

“I saw it and I thought, now that is right on the money,'' says Scott Novosel, who works for a golf instruction company in Kansas, the US. He likes the fact that he can talk, text, e-mail — do it all — under his Nubrella.

Skye Grapentine of Youngstown, Ohio, the US, bought the Nubrella for her birthday.

She likes walking, and she likes catching up on reading the newspaper when she walks — a pleasure not possible with an umbrella. “With an umbrella, you're busy gripping it,''

Grapentine says. Hands-free is great because “the less you have to worry about, the more you can get done''.

Getting something done. Not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of walking in the rain.

Hands-free umbrellas might have been knocking around the patent office for 30 years but they are an invention meant for now — a society obsessed with multitasking, where everyone is connected but isolated in their own bubble, in their own Nubrella.