All the devices required for a connected daily life make things
better. Unfortunately, many of them need to be constantly monitored as well. Notifications can add up, making things much harder later on when addressing 400 emails or 1,200 group text messages. So, it’s important to stay on top of it all; a little help couldn’t hurt.
The Tribble is a connected, wearable companion aiming to be an all-in-one intermediary between a user and their smartphone or other devices. Its small, round body is made of stainless steel for durability and houses a 2.0GHz Quad-Core AR Cortex A9 processor along with 1GB of RAM. This powers a combination of LED touchscreen, 1080p video camera, and motion sensors for the Tribble wide array of functionality.
At home (or the office, or the warehouse, etc.), the device can attach to any smooth surface and be used as a video camera (with night vision!) for security purposes and send notifications of disturbances and live streams to a smartphone. Or the camera can simply be used for better selfies. The resulting videos and photos can be stored locally (16 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB versions are available) or uploaded to the most popular cloud services on the market through the Tribble’s Wi-Fi connectivity.
Tribble users can also use its LED display to control music played through services like Spotify and iTunes, stay on top of messaging notifications from major social media and messaging services, dictate responses to said messages, and even answering calls with its embedded microphone. When traveling, users can toss the Tribble into luggage and use it as a GPS tag to keep tabs on their goods (or anything else for that matter).
And when it detects a user’s return after a long absence, it’ll even throw out some kind words to brighten up the day a bit. What can’t this thing do?
$169 gets backers a 16GB Tribble in grey or black by August 2016. Its Indiegogo campaign is looking for $1,000 by April 21st, 2016 to make it happen.
No one can ever say the Tribble lacks versatility. Its impressive number of features are all pretty useful ones, even on a daily basis — a welcome idea in a world of products that can sometimes be too one-dimensional for the sake of minimalism. However, its reliance on an LED touch display highlights its major flaw: lack of full on voice control!
Having to manually control the Tribble makes it a device that’s a lot less useful than it could have been otherwise, especially with the tech industry in general trending towards more hands-free, seamless experiences. Until then, the newly released Amazon Echo Dot gives it (and many other products) a run for its money.