Hasta La Gadget!

Pebble smartwatches have been hitting doorsteps for a little while now, but my colleague Darrell Etherington and I have only just been able to join the party. The reasons for the extra wait differed for the two of us — I was a late backer, and his got stuck in Canadian customs — but the timing seemed right, so here’s our tag-team review of the device that helped kick start a new era of smartwatch hype.

Darrell: The Pebble has one huge advantage over other smart watches right out of the box: aesthetics. This is a watch that lets your geek flag fly without being ass-ugly. The watch face options aren’t necessarily all that awesome, but set it to the text face that comes pre-installed and don’t worry about the rest. Also, black was the right choice, even if it was the only choice if you wanted one of the first shipping devices. Black watch on black strap in the Pebble looks fantastic on most any wrist.

The screen is legible enough, but in some light the glue becomes visible to the point of annoyance, which is a rookie mistake and should not make it into production units, if the Pebble team is worth its salt. It affects all the Kickstarter units I’ve come across so far, however, so that’s not a good sign.

Chris: I don’t think the Pebble is quite as handsome as Darrell does — it’s not bad looking, but it’s hardly a fashion-forward timepiece. Still, some of the promises that Pebble has made to its backers have positively influenced the watch’s look — rather than including something like a standard microUSB port for instance, the Pebble sports a magnetic charger so as to keep the whole shebang waterproof. The included rubber strap is plenty comfortable too, if a bit on the drab side. That’s easily remedied though — the Pebble apparently works fine with any 22mm watch band though, so the sky’s the limit as far as customization goes.

While we’re talking about design, the Pebble’s iOS and Android companion apps are both intuitively laid out (which is critical since the Pebble would be largely useless without them). The sync process is very brief, and once that’s done you’re quickly guided into setting up notifications — the whole process can be knocked out in just a minute or two. And of course a tiny vibration motor whirrs whenever you get a notification, though the wrong kind of aftermarket watchband may make it harder to feel.

Darrell: Compared to the MetaWatch, using the Pebble is like a breath of fresh air. It’s almost the difference between proving that a smart watch as a concept is a good idea vs. something no one needs. From display, to overall look, to usefulness and dependability of features, the Pebble just blows the MetaWatch out of the water. Some might miss features like weather, stocks, and more that you get with the MetaWatch, whereas the Strata struck me as a novelty that quickly lost its charm, the Pebble already seems like something I’d have to at least adjust to living without.

Chris: Unlike Darrell, the Pebble is my first foray into this whole crazy smartwatch thing, and my time spent with the thing has generally been very positive For the past few days I’ve been switching between linking the Pebble with my iPhone and my Droid DNA, and it wasn’t long before I began to prefer the experience on the latter just because of the extra granularity Android affords me. Under Android, I’m able to pass along notifications from Facebook and Google Voice (!) in addition to more standard fare like calendar entries and text messages.

Thankfully, the four-button navigation scheme used to handle all these notifications and menus is incredibly straightforward. The top and bottom buttons on the right side allow you to (what else) scroll up and down through menus, while the two remaining buttons take you forward and back. Hardly a flashy way to get things done (especially when some smartwatch rivals lean on touchscreens for operation) but it mostly works like a charm.

Darrell: There are still issues with the Pebble. Email notifications cut out when using it on iOS when it drops the Bluetooth connection and reconnects, for instance. Caller ID and message notifications work consistently, however, so this isn’t a huge issue. The menu system could also use work; it’d be nice to be able to rearrange items in the list to make frequently-needed ones easier to access. Adding watch faces from the app just puts them at the bottom, and that’s going to become a bigger issue once you have third-party apps to manage from the Pebble. The backlight is also immensely inconsistent; don’t even bother with the automatic ambient light sensor, just turn it on at night and off during the day, or keep it on all the time if you’re not that concerned with eking out as much battery life as possible.

On iOS, despite the fact that limitations are limited, the ones that it does provide work well. I actually prefer it to Android, since the limited support (only iMessage/SMS, email, phone and calendar notifications come through) means you won’t face a constantly buzzing wrist.

Chris: I’ll agree that notifications work, but the way they’re implemented leaves plenty to be desired. Let’s say you get more than one message within a short period of time — the Pebble will only ever display the most recent one, so you’re going to have to go digging for your phone anyway. Now, I never expected the Pebble to replace my phone(s) for these sorts of tasks, but I was looking for something that would at least help me triage the constant flow of messages and updates and the Pebble isn’t quite there yet.

I haven’t had much luck with the ambient light sensor, but that really hasn’t been an issue for me. I’ve been leaving the backlight setting on pretty much all the time and haven’t seen a huge loss in terms of battery life — I can get about 5-6 days out of it with everything turned on, and the backlight is off most of the time anyway.

Since we’re talking about inconsistency though, what about these screens? They’re not always the prettiest things to look at while in direct sunlight, mine in particular — it’s not as notable when the Pebble is just displaying a clock face, but there are some cloudy patches of coloration visible when I navigate the menu outdoors. Apparently it’s just a natural thing, but it’s still sort of unpleasant to see every day.

Darrell: The Pebble is still a little rough around the edges (visible glue at some angles under the display, which isn’t a problem limited to a few isolated units), but it’s much closer to the vision I had in my mind of a wrist-mounted, smartphone connected computer than anything else I’ve used so far. It still feels like a first-gen device, but it doesn’t feel like a prototype. But now that rumors of an Apple smart watch are swirling, most users who don’t feel a pressing need for this kind of device would do best to take a wait-and-see approach, especially if they’re already using an iPhone.

Chris: I’m frankly a little torn when it comes to the Pebble — it’s very limited in some key ways, but as a whole it’s a portent of very exciting things to come. People who haven’t already bought into all this smart watch hype probably won’t find anything particularly revelatory or earth-shaking here, though I can’t say I feel like I’ve wasted $150. If anything, I think of it more as investment in what the Pebble platform can actually become as it matures and garners more developer support.

We’ve already seen how the fashion industry can make use of robotics to make life easier for shoppers. But a Japanese clothing chain called United Arrows also found a way to use robots to make things more fun for window shoppers. The company installed a robotic mannequin in one of their stores that mimicked the movements of the person in front of it.

The mimicking mannequin is called MarionetteBot. It uses a Kinect to capture and help analyze the movements of a person. A motor moves a total of 16 wires to match the mannequin’s pose. MarionetteBot isn’t fast or limber enough to perfectly mimic the moves of a person, but it still proved to be a hit.

How come no one thought of doing the robot dance?

[via Akihabaranews]

I have known Joseph Ratzinger since we were both young men at the Second Vatican Council in 1963-64. After the death of John Paul the Great, I very much wanted his great friend Ratzinger to succeed him, old and frail of health as he was.
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More on Pope Benedict Resignation

Online banking is becoming more prevalent nowadays, with many of the big banks offering their services for free online, but what about banks that only operate online? Would it be inconvenient? Maybe a little strange? A new service called Simple looks to revolutionize online banking by taking the entire banking experience online and giving users a clean and easy user interface. However, Simple isn’t a bank, but rather a service that operates under an actual bank — in this case, Bancorp Bank. We ended up checking out the service for ourselves — namely the iOS app — to see what all the fuss is about.

What is Simple?

The service was named Simple for a reason. It’s just a simple online-only bank account that also comes with a debit card that you get in the mail a few days after you sign up for the service. The debit card is what you use to make all your purchases, and once you use it at a store, you’ll get a notification of your purchase on your iPhone, and the app will automatically show the transaction on the recent activities page, similar to how any other online banking service would work.

You can only transfer money to your Simple account through a bank transfer or by depositing a check. However, new users are subject to a 30-day probation from depositing checks. We weren’t told of the exact reason for this, but it most likely has to do with security purposes and such. However, if you contact customer support, which you can do easily right through the app, you can request that the 30-day period be modified a bit, and if they want to, they’ll allow you to deposit checks within this period, but the checks will be held onto for nine business days before it will be deposited. After the 30-day period is up, though, you’ll be able to deposit checks and have the funds appear in your account by the next business day or so.

Customizations

Inside the app, you can customize a handful of different things. You can edit each transaction by renaming the transaction itself, adding a memo, and even adding a category to the purchase, such as groceries, office supplies, etc. The memo line even supports hashtags for search purposes, just in case you want to search for all transactions dealing with “#businessexpenses” let’s say.

The “Payments” tab allows you to create contacts for which you regularly pay bills to or send money to for whatever reason. You can enter in your utility company and set up a contact for them, that way all you have to do is just tap on the contact and send a payment over without entering in the details every time. Of course, many banks already do this in their online banking service, but we’ve never seen it this simple and easy before, especially in a mobile app. Plus, most mobile apps from banks are rather featureless, and only let you do a handful things that are offered on their web interface. However, with Simple, you can control your entire bank account from the mobile app.

Customer Support

There’s a dedicated “Support” tab that lets you quickly start a support ticket if you’re having trouble with the service or if you have any questions. We found customer support to be very helpful and even more responsive. We ended up getting answers to our questions within a half-hour of asking them. In fact, customer support is a big feature in the Simple app. The “Account” tab even features a button that you can press to call their customer support directly if you don’t want to use the ticket system. The “About” tab also includes pretty much everything else that you would need, including an ATM finder, account information (like the routing number and the account number itself), and even a place where you can “block” your card if it becomes lost or stolen.

Simple does have a web interface if you prefer to manage your account through that, but there doesn’t seem to be any big features that are exclusive to the web interface itself. However, you can print out direct deposit forms, as well as statements through the web interface, but other than that, many of the same features are available on the mobile app, which is something that a lot of banks don’t do with their mobile apps.

Caveats

Of course, there are a couple of things to be aware of when using Simple, other than the unfortunate 30-day probation period. First, the service is obviously online only, meaning that there are no physical locations that you can go to if you need to deposit or withdraw money. That might be a deal breaker for those who prefer physical interaction when dealing with money, but personally, I hardly ever go to a physical branch to do a banking transaction anyway. The web interfaces and mobile apps do everything I need to bank efficiently. Plus, online-only banking isn’t anything new. PayPal has been doing it for years, but the fresh perspective that Simple offers makes it an intriguing option.

The other caveat is security. Of course, Simple is a brand-new service, so it hasn’t been available long enough to know how secure the service is, but let’s be honest, if you’re worried so much about security, you’re probably not banking online anyway.

Wrap-Up

Currently, Simple is invite only, so you can either sign up to be on the wait list, or find someone already using Simple to get an invite for the service. In the end, Simple is an easy-to-use banking service that isn’t necessarily anything too special, but it offers a unique user experience without feeling like you’re being controlled by a big bank. I never experienced any problems with it, and while new users will definitely not like the check-depositing limit during the first 30 days, there doesn’t seem to be any reason not to try out Simple if you get the chance. It may not be for everyone, but those that like the idea of online banking will truly enjoy it. The app is available for free on both iOS and Android.

Simple iOS app Review: online-only banking made easy is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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With just two days to go until Sony makes their big announcement at a press event in New York City, we’re almost certain what will be unveiled will be the PlayStation 4, especially when you consider their Evolution of PlayStation video series which was published over the weekend.

We’ve already heard reports of what the PlayStation 4 could include in terms of its hardware and possible refocusing on new playing options, and today, we’re hearing a new report which highlights what kind of additional sharing methods we could expect from the PlayStation 4. (more…)

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