Well it came in the mail faster than I thought it would. Here is my mini review of the mini tripod.
The first thing anyone says when they see it is "It's cute". I'd have to agree it definitely has a cuteness factor to it. SheDevil even went further to notice it looks like the robot WALL-E from the animated movie of the same name. She also made another connection to WALL-E by noticing it too has a name printed on it; STANLEY. Except for having a tripod instead of tracks and one eye instead of two, STANLEY could pass as a relative of WALL-E. Ok, enough of how it looks.
The build quality is what I would call acceptable. It's not great and it's not bad. The legs are spring loaded and held in place with a magnet. Pushing a button on the head moves the magnet and all three legs pop out simultaneously. Kinda cool how this works. The head has about four positions it clicks into. However the head is tight enough it easily remains in any position between a click.
The output isn't much. It has a low and high setting and they are almost the same. Might as well have just used an on-off switch. The beam is narrow and projects a spotbeam similar to the old Inova X1. One improvement in this generation of tripod flashlights is the ability to adjust the beam from spot to flood, and this makes it a lot more versatile. Testing on a white wall shows a number or rings, and the tint appears to be an uneven blue. This is probably on par with what others have reported with the 9 AA big brother version of this flashlight.
I went outside to do a little field testing. The light output is just too weak to make this a decent hand held flashlight in my opinion. It works, just not much better output than a cheap 2 D cell flashlight. I then set it up next to a car to simulate using it as a work light to change a tire. For such a purpose this works well and would be a good choice to keep in a car.
I'm tempted to mod STANLEY with a Cree XR-E LED. The head appears to have 3 allen screws that if removed should expose the LED and lens mechanism. Then again, leaving it stock isn't bad either as I suspect this little light has a very long runtime, and the output really is adequate for roadside repairs. I think I'll take STANLEY on my next camping trip and see how it performs for tasks like cooking and setting up tents and such. I can always take it to modamags garage another day if I really want more output.