Hasta La Gadget!

The fabric of the future won’t be just plain chiffon, silk or cotton. Instead electroluminescent material, microprocessors and LEDs may be woven together with clothing fibers to create smart textiles.

“Clothing can be considered a second skin and by implementing technology in it, you are bringing it into your intimate space,” says Nicky Assmann, an e-textile designer whose work was part of a recent exhibition in the Netherlands. “You are not just carrying technology like a laptop or an iPhone, but wearing it constantly.”

The exhibition, Pretty Smart Textiles, which closed last week, gave a glimpse into what happens when technology meets fashion. Among the exhibits were a dress made entirely of circuit boards that could also be used to generate music, a garment that when worn takes the sound of a heartbeat and other sounds from the body and remixes it into music, and a trenchcoat that reads fabric punch cards and tells stories.

Electronic textiles are outgrowing their geeky reputation, says Melissa Coleman, who with Dorith Sjardijn curated the exhibtion.

“The open source hardware movement has allowed for quicker and easier development of electronics and made it accessible to artists and designers,” says Coleman. “The result is that smart textile applications have become more interesting conceptually and aesthetically.”

The exhibition, which ended last week, featured 16 works and seven interactive samples.

Most of the artists who showed their work were women. “Electronic textiles appeal more to women than men,” says Sjardijn. “Women who are already in technology find it a nice way to combine the stuff that they find appealing with the more clinical world of technology and programming.”

A Musical Circuit Dress

A dress with 35 old circuit boards stitched together is not for everyone. But Nicky Assmann, who built the dress over a four month period, says she chose circuit boards as the fabric for her dress because she liked their look.

“There’s a certain aesthetic about them — they have many details and are very systematic, like a grid or a city map,” she says.

The circuit dress is not just clothing but also a musical instrument. The dress is based on the idea of circuit bending, which involves deliberately short-circuiting electronic musical devices to get unexpected noise.

Twelve coils are incorporated into the dress, each of which is played by connecting it to one another through copper finger plates. The musical composition results as the fingers explore the dress. There are two speakers on the front of the dress, and the entire dress runs on batteries.

The straps on the dress are made from electric cables that are are used for rewiring the circuit-bended board from the back to the coils to the front. “It’s very functional,” says Assmann, since it solved the problem of where to leave the wires.

Overall, the dress weighs about 20 pounds. Assmann says if she’s practicing for a performance, she can’t wear the dress for more than hour because the straps hurt her shoulder.

Ultimately, the idea of the musical circuit dress is to display what many people consider ugly when it comes to technology: the innards of a device with its circuit boards, the wires and the chips. Assmann, an artist who’s studying for her graduate degree in Music at the Royal Conservatory and Academy in Hague, says the circuit dress put an aesthetic that’s normally hidden out in the front.

“The unwearability of the dress defines its performance,” says Assmann.

The Microsoft Kin, Microsoft’s widely panned line of semi-smartphones for text-happy teenagers, is dead – or at least it doesn’t have a future as a standalone product.

Microsoft on Wednesday released a statement suggesting that it’s cutting bait on the Windows Phone 7 spinoff and folding the project’s staff and technologies into the main body of Windows Phone 7.

Here’s the official word from Microsoft:

“We have made the decision to focus on our Windows Phone 7 launch and we will not ship Kin in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our Kin team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from Kin into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current Kin phones.”

The chipmaker’s annual science fair for its researchers shows the company is thinking about where technologies just now coming to consumers will be now and years in the future. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20009331-260.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Circuit Breaker/a/p

Microsoft’s attempt to be hip and cool in mobile is a bust. The company has decided to stop introducing new Kin-branded phones and will scrap the device’s European launch. Instead it plans to integrate Kin into its existing Windows 7 Phone team.

It will continue Kin sales in the United States, Microsoft said in a statement.

The move comes just two months after Microsoft introduced two phones under a new brand called Kin. The devices, called Kin One and Kin Two, were built with social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter at their core. Manufactured by Sharp for Microsoft, and available exclusively on Verizon Wireless, the phones were targeted at teens and social networking addicts.

But, from the start, Kin devices seemed doomed. The phones got tepid reviews and were plagued by reports of extremely poor sales.

Here are four reasons why we think the Kin failed:

Fuzzy Kin OS Creates Confusion

Microsoft has been pouring resources into beefing up Windows Mobile and seems poised to introduce Windows Phone 7 in time for holiday season this year. But in a surprise move, Kin made its debut in April running a flavor of the new operating system.

Kin’s OS isn’t exactly Windows 7 Phone but it’s not entirely a new operating system either, Microsoft executives attempted to explain. Call it a fork in the road of Windows Phone 7, they said at launch.

Kin had features such as easy sharing and automated backup that didn’t seem part of the announced Windows Phone 7 OS.  But that only confused mobile phone enthusiasts. Now Microsoft seems to realize splitting its OS brand could be a problem.

Microsoft executive Roz Ho who headed the Kin project, will “oversee” her team’s move into the Windows Phone 7 fold, and then move to another role in the company, says Engadget.

Expensive for an Incomplete Smartphone

The Kin isn’t a smartphone, but it sure had a monthly cellphone plan priced like one.

At launch, the palm-sized Kin One — which had a 2.7-inch screen — cost $50 with a two-year Verizon contract, while the Kin Two with its 3.5-inch display cost $100. A few weeks later, Verizon dropped the price on the two phones to $80 and $30 respectively.

Sounds cheap right? Not really. The fine print is in the monthly cellphone plan for the device. All Kin phones require a data plan. That means a $70 a month minimum on the bill.

For someone flipping burgers at McDonald’s for their summer job, that’s a lot of money to be handing over to a cellphone company.

If only Microsoft had offered all those social networking features on the Kin without requiring a data plan, Kin might have had a better shot at survival.

Microsoft executive Robbie Bach was confident enough to wear a pink shirt to the unveiling of the Kin, but it didn't save the phone — or his job.

No Apps, No Games

Though Kin forced a data plan on its users, they’re not really smartphones.

Kin phones have a browser and can access social networking sites through widgets. But Microsoft crippled the overall functionality of the device by not allowing apps or games on the phone.

That means users ended up paying for a smartphone but got an amped-up feature phone instead.

Consumers, even teens, are smarter than that. Many just gave the Kin a pass.

Lack of Cool Factor

Kin made a bold move into an extremely competitive cellphone market. But the devices lacked the cool factor and never really made it clear why a user would want a Kin over a Motorola Cliq or a HTC Hero.

Microsoft’s marketing of the Kin seemed to make it worse. The company focused on projecting a faux hipster vibe for the product.

Kin would be a device that would make it easy to share photos, videos and access social networking feeds, promised Microsoft’s ads.

However, almost every smartphone today can do that, and at times better than the Kin. At launch, Kin’s Twitter client, for instance, was half-baked. Users couldn’t view @ replies, search, or post photos. Similarly, Facebook features were limited to showing or posting status updates, though you could post photos.

What Microsoft failed to drive home were the truly innovative features of the phone — mainly the automated cloud backup. The Kin backs up the entire device, including photos, videos, message history and call log into a free online storage area that can be accessed from any browser — all without the user doing anything to trigger it. It’s a feature that can come in handy when the phone is dead or missing.

But you wouldn’t have known that from Microsoft’s Kin ads.

See Also:

• Microsoft Gets Social With New Kin Phones
• Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two
• Hands-On: Can Kin Phones Make Microsoft Cool Again?
• Video: Hands-On With the Kin One and Kin Two
• For Cellphones, It’s Hip to Be Square

Top photo: Kin One and Kin Two

Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

For those who can afford it and those who obsess over design, your keyboard has arrived via Art Lebedev.