If your device is Bluetooth Smart Ready then it’s compatible with Bluetooth Smart and Bluetooth but if it’s Smart then it’s not compatible with regular Bluetooth. Got that?
The Bluetooth SIG, never content to leave well enough alone, as introduced three new “icons” for their new 4.0 standard. “Best” Bluetooth devices will support both “old” Bluetooth and 4.0 while Smart devices will only support 4.0. In short, Smart Ready devices will support dual modes and work the way with which we are currently familiar in devices like laptops, phones, and PCs, while Smart devices will support ultra low power devices like heart rate monitors and pedometers, allowing Bluetooth to come up against wireless standards like ANT.
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This stuff writes itself. At the grand opening of a new Windows Store in Seattle folks were camping out for most of the night only to stream in, breathlessly ready to partake in the one exciting product Microsoft could offer – a free concert by the Black Keys.
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Do you mind if Microsoft drops a little future on you like a ton of bricks? This HoloDesk uses a half-silvered mirror and a Kinect sensor to “see” your hands in 3D space then project visible objects on and around them, allowing you to juggle virtual spheres, play with phones, and generally get all Minority Report up in this piece.
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In the future, when imagination dies, scientists will point to the Crayola Trace & Draw as a watershed moment. “Kids weren’t drawing, after this thing,” they’ll say. “Art died. They just traced.”
The Trace & Draw is a shatterproof case that goes around your iPad two and, coupled with a free app, allows you to slap a sheet of paper over your iPad and let the wee ones trace images and animations. It includes a marker and “50 sheets of pre-sized tracing paper” which suggests that this might be a sort of razors and blades sort of situation, which makes it even more confounding.
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Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the “shoulder-worn” system will locate the surface you’re working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect.
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Now that HP has sufficiently disgraced the vision of Mssrs. Hewlett and Packard, they continued to gyrate wildly into odd business that no one wants. To wit: in a joint press release with Condé Nast, the company is offering two odd consumer-facing propositions. First, they’re going to charge you $5.99-$10 a month to subscribe to a replacement ink service, called Instant Ink. When your printer runs low, it will send a message to Meg Whitman who will personally ship you a new cartridge. Considering ink cartridges already contain less than $5.99 of ink and parts, it’s a bum deal all around but, also considering HP jacks the prices up on ink enormously, I suppose if you’re mad about printing this may work out. Oddly, I don’t see anyone spending $60-$120 on ink cartridges per printer per year (unless HP jacks up prices even more).
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Fresh from Japan we have the Eye Slack Haruka, a $131 skin toner designed to reduce unsightly bags under your apparently pre-teen eyes. The kit is powered by two CR2032 cells and runs in two modes – “hard” and “soft.” “Hard” mode sends tiny jolts of electricity into your eyes, ensuring your eyes will get a sufficient amount of energy while soft vibrates your eyes gently, which sounds like a real treat.
I personally just love the image of the lady getting her eyes zapped. → Read More
The Kenbak-1 apparently predates the Altair and is the earliest “personal” microcomputer in existence. To use it you flipped a bunch of switches and watched the lights. A PS3 this definitely wasn’t.
A tinkerer named Mark Wilson recently rebuilt a mini version of the Kenbak using an Arduino board, timing chip, and some memory, allowing him to add realtime clock functions and storage to what amounts to a very smart Lite-Brite. → Read More
If you’ve ever dreamed of getting an super-realistic replica of your face for whatever reason, here’s your chance: a Japanese company called REAL-f [JP] is creating so-called 3DPFs (“3 Dimension Photo Forms”), copies of human faces “in 3D”. The startup offers two versions, a mask type replica and the so-called mannequin type, a replica of the head.
The way it works is that REAL-f first shoots pictures of a person’s face from various positions and imprints the image on vinyl chloride resin stretched over a mold. According to the company, it’s unique production technology makes sure that even details like the iris and blood vessels are replicated accurately (see the pictures to judge for yourself). → Read More
Ahh, July. We miss you so. The world was newer then, the air fresher, the people a little nicer, and there used to be something called Qwikster. Built as a solution to the heady problem of renting videos to people who still use optical media, Qwikster was supposed to be the part of Netflix that still slipped disks into little sleeves. Netflix proper, on the other hand, would simply stream videos over the Internet and never the twain would meet.
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Panasonic took the wraps off a new version of it’s super-strange (and awesome) hair-washing robot at the CEATEC 2011 tech exhibition that currently takes place in Japan (the first version is about one year old). The robot handles the entire process of hair washing autonomously: wetting, shampooing, conditioning and drying.
The new version washes your hair with a total of 24 (instead of just 16) fingers. Panasonic also says they improved the scanning system (the robot scans the head’s shape before it does its magic), allowing for a better “experience”. The old model also lacked the conditioning and drying functions. → Read More
Although in this economy you can probably hire someone to walk behind you who will occasionally remind you of your mortality, it is probably a bit more efficient to just put up this Mr. Jones Accurate Clock.
Based on the popular Accurate Watch, the hands of this clock say “Remember you will die” – a sobering thought over a breakfast Pop-Tart and a Pumpkin Chai Latte, but there you have it. It’s available now for $119 at Watchismo and should probably put a spring in your step next time you decide to put off doing that big project you planned to finish. After all, memento mori. → Read More
If you told me two-and-a-half decades ago that this tow-headed youngster from Columbus, Ohio who spent his evenings looking up at the stars, engrossed in endless wonder at the boundless horizon of the invisible universe, would one day be able to print on toilet paper in his lifetime, he would have spit at you and then kicked your dog. He was a pretty crappy kid. But it has happened: we can now use off-the-shelf components to print on toilet paper. This is the end of history. → Read More
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head to the point where you just need everyone else in a six-block radius to hear it? Apparently that’s a common affliction in my neighborhood. Last time it was Paul Simon at 4 in the morning. But at least they were only playing it on a boombox, not a 4000-watt sound tank.
Berlin-based artist Nik Nowak has created an actual track-based vehicle, as in a tank, with over a dozen speakers on it. Built on the frame of a Japanese industrial dumping vehicle, Panzer is the final answer in the boombox wars. → Read More
Here’s a little inside baseball for you all but I wanted to get a pet peeve off my chest: all these darned watermarks on gadget imagery. It got pretty egregious this morning over at BGR where they posted some pictures of some purported iPhone 4S parts that (surprise) look very much like iPhone 4 parts. I was struck, however, by the plethora of watermarks boldly slapped onto the face of the image, one from some site in India (no URL so I don’t know what it is, thereby reducing the value of the mark) and a big honking watermark for BGR. So BGR got the images from some dude in India and they made them theirs by marking their territory, much like a cat sprays that musk stuff in your closet to ensure you can never wear your clothes again.
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No? Well here it is: it’s the Click watch and it’s a standard digital timekeeper with either DIP switches or a tiny rotating switch that you use to set the features. Thats right – you need a small stylus or paperclip to look at the date on this thing.
I get a kick out of nearly everything about this watch except that I can’t imagine when anyone would wear this in real life. The band looks like an IDE cable and it comes in multiple colors and styles including midnight black (for those late night LAN parties). It costs about $150-$175 and is available now at Watchismo. → Read More
The folks at MIT’s Electronics Research Society know how to put on a show. In this short video they show us a Tesla coil connected to a keyboard that can play jaunty tunes using pure, unadulterated energy. While these guys are no musical virtuosos, they make up for their lack of training by creating an instrument that can feasible flatten you like a blast of heat lightning.
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In honor of the Iron Man Triathlon in Hawaii, Panasonic has created a tiny EVolt mascot that will run, swim, and bike the course’s full 142 miles in about a week. The teeny little robot will run on EVolt batteries and, since he’s 10 times smaller than a human, he gets to take much longer to finish the course.
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Are we in the post-PC era or aren’t we? A tipster sent in this Verizon “quick tip” that suggests the best way to keep your smartphone fresh and fun is to reboot it once a day.
Your phone has capabilities that make it almost as powerful as a computer, so like a computer, for optimal performance, give it a fresh start by rebooting it once a day. Turn it off for one minute, then restart it. Rebooting refreshes your phone software and your connection to the nearest cell tower. It can also help extend your battery life.
