Unreconstructed fans of Palm and PalmOS will be glad to hear that LG Electronics continues to build on WebOS. The company's press conference at CES today talked a lot about connectedness among its devices -- TVs, washer/dryers, and phones -- based on WebOS. But although the company showed diagrams of the ability to tell your watch where you're going when you leave the house, … [Read more...]
CES: Withings Activité Pop Smartwatch
Withings pretty much created a high-price segment for the smartwatch business last year with its $450 Activité watch. At CES, the company has now moved to claim a piece of the value market with a $150 Activité Pop. The original Activité is an elegant timepiece with a dial that tells what percentage of your daily fitness goal you've achieved. The Pop uses essentially the same … [Read more...]
Sony Talks A Little About Their Add-On Glass Prototype
Sony is working on a prototype of a visor that clips onto an existing pair of eyeglasses. The working name for the module is "SmartEyeglasses Attach!" (the exclamation point and InterCap are theirs), and they'll unveil it at CES next month. It weighs 40 grams, and uses a 640x400 pixel OLED display that's light-piped to an optical unit that sits in front of the glasses. In … [Read more...]
The Ass of a Jawbone: UP3 Misses Christmas
We saw a lot of wearables products promising a holiday delivery. Here's a big one that missed: Jawbone won't ship its $180 Up3 fitness band until after Christmas. Ouch. Bloomberg has a lot of background about Jawbone and its position among venture capitalists (but doesn't mention that Fitbit far outsells it). When the UP3 was announced in November, the company said it would … [Read more...]
Apple Watch Reportedly Set for January Production
If you're going to start selling 5 million units of a new product in February or March, you'd better start building it in January, if not earlier. After months of rumors, Apple reportedly has worked out manufacturing bugs for the Apple Watch, which has been rumored to hit the streets in late February or so. Sourcing on this article is a little bit like a game of Telephone … [Read more...]
Luxottica Seals Wide-Ranging Development Deal with Intel for Glasses; Doesn’t Rule Out Google
Luxottica, the world's largest maker of eyeglasses, has a deal with Google to make Glass-derived products. But that's not keeping the Italian optical goods giant from working with other companies, like Intel. Intel and Luxottica announced today a particularly wide-ranging development partnership. The two companies will establish an R&D lab in California, the New York … [Read more...]
Nabu Razer to Take Pre-Orders Next Week in Small Quantities
Remember the Razer Nabu? It's a sleek notification band that tracks activity, but it's main claim to fame was social connectivity aimed at gamers. A video at the Nabu site implies that you'll be able to swap contact information by shaking hands with another Razer wearer, which is pretty cool, but an earlier emphasis on the gamer community seems to have evaporated. The … [Read more...]
That Sony E-Ink Watch Was A Crowdfunded Project
Remember that experiment wearable from Sony that we wrote about a few days ago? Techcrunch has found that the watch was available a few months ago on a Japanese crowdfunding site from a group of Sony employees calling themselves Fashion Entertainments. The underlying story, you'll recall (if you clicked through on the original story) was that Sony is trying to encourage its … [Read more...]
will.i.am Demos the PULS on The Tonight Show
Demoing your about-to-be-released product on a top-rated television show ranks way up there on the scale of bad-ass things to do. The first rule of product demos is this: they never go right, and the higher the stakes, the more likely a catastrophic failure. (This is why the iPhone engineers went out and got drunk for a week after the not-nearly-ready phone was unveiled and … [Read more...]
ShotTracker, a Basketball Wearable, Ships
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a crowdfunded project called ShotTracker, which tracks your shot attempts, misses and makes. Earlier this week, the company announced that it's shipping product. ShotTracker has three pieces: a sensor on the net, a small sensor on your wrist (which fits into a wristband or compression sleeve), and an app. The wrist sensor watches … [Read more...]