Month: September 2016

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Uncategorized

The DOT lets your phone more easily connect the dots

There’s an issue inherent with the idea of a smartphone with apps: it constantly needs to be fiddled with in order to access the appropriate app at the right time. DOT tries to alleviate that problem.

DOT is a small, LED-equipped device that acts as a beacon. With it, users can use it to better contextualize an environment and program a smartphone or tablet to adjust accordingly. For instance, should someone be reading a book on a tablet, sitting down on the couch will prompt the nearby DOT to launch the app with book being read to the page they left off.

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Smartwatches/Bands

Lose the dorky Bluetooth headset with the Sgnl smart strap

At one point in time, it seemed like the smartwatch was all but dead in the water: most of them boasted sluggish performance and lack of truly must-have features that prevented them from becoming anything more than just a novelty. The deluge of them over the past recent years didn’t help matters, either.

Now, though, seems to be a sort of renaissance for the much-heralded smartwatch with the impending releases of products like the Apple Watch Series 2 and Samsung Gear S3 — at least if the renaissance means they’re finally becoming what they should have been in the first place. Alongside these fresh releases is the Sgnl, Innomdle Lab’s Bluetooth-enabled smart strap that functions by itself or as a companion to a smartwatch to let users conduct phone calls with just the tip of their finger.

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Camping

Always be cool with the Zero Breeze portable air conditioner

In certain places and situations, it’s usually not possible to enjoy the luxury of cooled air. And while portable air conditioners do exist, they’re usually very bulky and need to use ice or water when being operated.

The Zero Breeze remedies this problem by reducing the size of a portable air conditioner down to just 14 pounds and having it operated using either an outlet or a 40 mAH battery that can be charged in just three to five hours. It has a rotary compression system within that uses an environmentally-friendly coolant that can cool a 50 square foot space down to 44°, perfect for a small home, office, tent, RV, college dorm, or even the beach. (If indoors, a hose can be extended from the device outdoors to expel warm air.)

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Chargers/Batteries

Plug’s beefy battery can power anything you need off the grid

Once a novel idea, our growing need for smartphone connectivity has spawned an endless supply of battery chargers. Many of these range from tiny keychain trinkets to more substantial slabs that offer two to three charges of smartphones boasting the biggest internal batteries.

To really stand out, though, you need to something big and different. ChargeTech knows this as the company has released a series of portable charging units including this charger charger that can keep a series of charging bricks topped off.Aafter hitting Indiegogo back in 2014 with what it claimed was the world’s smallest battery pack with an AC outlet, it’s with Plug, which houses a massive 48,000 mAh battery and two AC outlets as well as a USB-C port. How is capable of outputting  250 volts, which means it is robust enough to handle a desktop computer, a monitor, a television, a blender and many other electrical items one normally wouldn’t expect to use away from a wall.

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Connected Objects

MOTI is a little dome that can make you a lot better through habits

editors-choice-300x96The ‘there’s an app for that’ attitude of the modern, smartphone-wielding person makes it seem like the answer to any problem can be downloaded. And while that may be the case for some situations, the majority of people are overloaded with apps, push notifications and other distractions that have proven more easily ignored than anything else.

Smartphones and now wearables compound that problem, aiming to offer accountability and agency and failing to deliver. The team behind the MOTI smart companion for better habits is looking to change how people approach the things they should be doing for better health and happiness. Instead of creating just another reminder app, they’ve instead created a charming physical device that acts as a small, distinct and actionable environmental trigger, satisfying what the brain needs to form a habit: a trigger (check), a routine (by pressing in MOTIs satisfyingly-designed button) and a reward (R2-D2-style bloops and beeps).

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Categories
Connected Objects Fitness

The Peloton stationery bike lets you compete globally, costs more than airfare

These days, simply having a spinning machine at home isn’t enough unless whoever’s riding it has the type of motivation needed to really see results. For everyone else, group classes at the local spinning club is the way to go, but the time needed to get there and back can sometimes be hard to find.

With the Peloton Bike, riders don’t need to leave their own home. The compact, carbon steel-framed home bike features a full HD touchscreen that streams challenging live and on-demand spinning classes. Beginners and advanced users alike will find exactly the classes they need throughout the week using the class scheduling feature. And with built-in sensors to monitor everything from heart rate to cadence, reviewing past performance and setting future goals are easy to do.

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Connected Objects Imaging

Unleashed unleashes full potential of your camera via remote control

Placing all the controls of an interchangeable lens camera (ILC) into the palm of a user’s hand can make it much easier to get that perfect photo.

Unleashed is a small Bluetooth module that attaches to an ILC and offers full wireless remote control of it. The device is used in conjunction with an app for Android and iOS mobile devices. The app lets users change all the important camera settings, including aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance and exposure compensation. Unleashed automatically reconnects to the user’s smartphone using Bluetooth Low Energy, so there’s no need to reconfigure Wi-Fi settings each time it’s used.

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Imaging Wearables

TimeCap helps you capture once-in-a-lifetime moments

One problem with cameras — no matter how good they are — is that it often takes too long to take a photo or start shooting video with one. The result is that many people often miss unexpected, but highly memorable moments that they would have loved to capture and share with others.

TimeCap is a wearable camera that attaches to one’s shirt or other garment and continuously records video. The device then streams the video footage through the user’s smartphone and stores it in the cloud. It also takes 5-megapixel still images. TimeCap turns on and off by holding the power button for three seconds. Other features include Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi support, as well as 32 GB of internal NAND flash memory, good for 24,000 photos or 4 hours of HD video.

The device works in conjunction with an Android and iOS app that lets users control recording, as well as various other features including social media sharing.

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Smart Home

Make sense into your energy bill with the Sense smart home monitor

The thing about most smart home solutions is that they force those interested in one to buy a wide array of devices for each individual appliance or item to be tracked. But with Sense, only one is needed exactly where it counts.

The Sense home energy monitor is a small box that attaches to a home’s energy panel. It is programmed with algorithms designed to identify each appliances individual “voice,” or the electrical signature it produces when consuming energy. In this way, Sense can distinguish the washer from the refrigerator from the air conditioner — avoiding the hassle of having a separate device for each.

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Connected Objects Music

Fi Station is a gorgeous wedge of sound editing goodness

Products created for making music can feel pretty technical, alienating all but the most hardcore music makers. They’re often expensive, too, and multiple are needed: a professional sound card to record, a Hi-Fi player to listen back to lossless audio and a separate box to playback HD video. And even then, most don’t interact with each other.

With over 15 years in the music industry, Fay Wong used his expertise to create the Fi Station, a single device that combines all of these needs into one product. For one, it’s beautifully designed, sporting a fully metal casing with rotary knobs that makes it rugged and durable yet still attractive. 

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