Tag: android

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Smart Home

For connected home alarms, HEVO gives others the heave-ho

Legacy alarm systems often require the use of landlines to function, making them quite the dinosaurs in the age of connected products. By forcing homeowners to keep a landline and offering no flexibility when it comes to all the other devices in most people’s lives, the time is long overdue for something to give.

A portmanteau of Home EVOloution, HEVO is a hub that connects to the BUS of a current alarm system backed by the PATROL proprietary OS. In using PATROL to secure the home, HEVO operates by a tiered system of alarm. When an intruder is detected — even with an unarmed legacy alarm system — HEVO sends an alarm signal through the Internet. Failing that, HEVO’s included GSM subscription service kicks in and sends the alarm that way. If that ends up not working for some reason, real-time monitoring of each HEVO will see the company send the alarm signal themselves. Users are informed of each of these steps with real-time SMS alerts, keeping them up to date no matter what.

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Reading Technology

Illumina XL seeks to light up the e-reader market with greater variety

Amazon’s pioneering Kindle leads among several popular e-readers on the market. But most of them require users to buy e-books from the device manufacturer’s own online store.

Illumina XL is an 8-inch Android-based e-reader that uses e-ink technology just like the Kindle Paperwhite and a few other premium e-readers. But Illumina XL allows its users to select from a wide range of apps, including Kindle, to buy e-books. Unlike most other current e-readers, Illumina XL also supports the MP3 audio format, so users can listen to audio books and music. It’s equipped with a 3.5mm audio jack.

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Connected Objects

Raincheck’s smart, artful design puts other umbrella stands in check

Rain and snow: the city slicker’s most hated enemies. Everything becomes just a little bit harder when either enters the picture, which is why getting caught unprepared is the epitome of a bad day. Designer Nick Jonas’ (not that one) Raincheck is an umbrella stand with a touch of smarts to ensure that never happens.

The product is comprised of beautifully lacquered, dark walnut wood sculpted into a tall, rectangular stand perfect for a few umbrellas. What makes Raincheck special are the eight dots of light installed within that are connected to Wi-Fi that are constantly updated on the weather.

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Aquatics Health and Wellness Smartwatches/Bands

Surfers ride the fitness band wave with the Glassy Zone tracker

Although it seems that fitness and activity trackers exist for every sport, their conquest is not quite complete. Curiously, there’s nothing out there specifically for surfers which means an entire population of athletes that don’t have a choice at all when it comes to wearables.

GlassyPro’s Glassy Zone is that wearable device specifically designed with these board enthusiasts in mind. Its Fitbit band-like exterior houses a set of three LED lights for different notifications. Glassy Zone covers a wide range of variables so that users don’t have to fill their wrists up with different bands.

In conjunction with a companion iOS or Android app, Glassy Zone tracks sleep, monitors forecasts and keeps an eye on UV levels to ensure users received healthy amounts of sun. When it comes to actual surfing, the band tracks distance, time, speed and the actual conditions of both the weather and the waters at the time, all saved for review later on.

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Smartwatches/Bands

Trivoly slips under your watch to make it a smarter partner

Although smartwatches offer all sorts of conveniences, the problem with them is that most people already own watches and most of the time, they like their own watches more than whatever Apple, Google, or Pebble is offering.

The team behind the Trivoly recognizes that watches are timeless and well-designed in and of themselves, so it decided to smarten them up rather than make a watch that tried to compete. The Trivoly is a thin disc that adds connected capabilities to any watch. It’s small enough to fit under pretty much any timepiece, offering users vibration alerts for notifications, fitness tracking capabilities, tap-controlled music control, a camera function, and a general interface with which to stay connected with apps like Uber.

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Smart Home

With a smart lock, Monkey lets one key replace all others

The biggest issue with the sea of smart locks on the market is their design. As they can only really be used by homeowners, a large population of apartment dwellers miss out on the convenience having a smart lock provides because they still need a physical key for the front door of the building.

Locumi Labs thought it was time for a solution, creating the Monkey keyless entry system. Instead of being a typical smart lock, the monkey takes the form of an extremely compact, Wi-Fi enabled chip that is easily installed in the intercom in an apartment or home. From that point, a companion iOS or Android app is able to open the building’s main entrance using an app command, time-restricted access, or smartphone proximity for hands-free access.

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Television

HUBI Stick marries Android and your TV for big-screen bliss

With all this talk of the new Apple TV, it’s easy to forget that he Android platform is blessed with an unending amount of content made specifically for its many variations. While sheer variety is always a good thing, it’s not the best for the device ecosystem.

The result is a fragmented experience that the team behind the HUBI Stick wants to address. The device is a small HDMI dongle that comes in 8GB and 16GB varieties. By plugging it into a supported television, it gives users access to the entirety of the Google Play store. So all manner of internet TV apps—smartphone or tablet versions—along with the dizzying number of games are all fair game. Any smartphone and their embedded sensors (even iPhones) open up the opportunity to have a Wii-like experience when playing video games.

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Smart Home

Nucleus intercom system avoids the horror of walking to another room

The intercom of yesteryear is a patently outdated fixture in most homes. So much so, in fact, that most homeowners probably don’t even use it. Considering the increasingly connected direction homes are going in, intercoms are wildly limited in scope and unpleasant to look at to boot.

Taking a product name page out of Gavin Belson’s playbook, Nucleus hopes to become the modern intercom system for the connected home. The Wi-Fi enabled, slimly-shaped slab can either be mounted on a wall or propped up on a table to facilitate instant communication with any other Nucleus device around the world with a tap or voice command. The company boasts connection speeds of less than 200 milliseconds, or about the time it takes someone to blink, through tight integration of all components and software.

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Sensors/IoT Smart Home

Koto trio of sensor cubes monitor your home’s environent

One of the keys to a healthier lifestyle is as basic as the air we breathe, but that can easily be forgotten because of hard it can be to know exactly what to do to make it better even in our own homes.

To help, the Koto family of smart sensors has been designed to make sure you have all the information needed to make the proper health decisions. The system actually consists of three products. The Koto Blink is a tiny box filled with sensors measuring temperature, humidity, light, and noise, all in an effort to make your living space more comfortable.

The Koto Air is an upgraded Blink, combining its sensors with an air pollution and dust sensor to create a fuller picture of the home and a more robust set of data with which to make the subtle adjustments to the home necessary to stave off mold in older homes, for example.

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Networking

Strone Roam keeps your number home, calling fees low

Even with certain carriers getting more aggressive about attacking roaming fees, it’s possible to rack up big cellular bills when traveling if you’re not willing to hop from hotspot to hotspot.

The Strone Roam may be an alternative. To use it, users connect the cylindrical, Amazon Echo-like device to Wi-Fi and leave it at home with their SIM card inserted. Doing this routes all incoming and outgoing calls through their own number at local rates using the Strone iOS, Android, or Web app — no matter where they are in the world.

For this functionality, users will still need to buy Strone credit with which to make these calls or browse the internet, but that’s still far less expensive than alternatives such as Skype or aninternational packages direct from a carrier. Calls between Strone app customers are free.

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