Paperboy has gone down in the history books as one of the best video games ever, and some may say that if you’ve never played it, then you’re not a true video gamer. Either way, the game is a classic, and a new Oculus Rift hack brings the 1984 title back into the 21st century
Pebble not meeting your needs? The Basis knows just a little too much about you for your comfort? Is the Metawatch too meta?
Well then meet the Hot Watch, out of Dallas. The company just launched the product on Kickstarter, and though the campaign is mostly bull shit (with arguments like: “your phone is too expensive to risk taking out of your pocket”), the product seems to be pretty fly for a new guy… in the smartwatch space. I’m funny, dammit. Laugh!
Anyways, the Hot Watch claims to be different from any of its competitors by offering more full-featured functionality when it comes to making calls, sending and receiving messages and emails, and checking up on your social world.
Like the Pebble, the Hot Watch has a 1.26-inch E-paper multi-touch projected capacitive display from Sharp, with a Cortex M3 processor running the show and a secondary DSP processor to handle things like Bluetooth, call control and various audio features. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled phone, but the founders say it works best with Android and iOS phones.
You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and vibration motor in there, and if that weren’t enough, the Hot Watch is water-resistant. Plus, it can detect when your phone is out of reach and will send you alerts that it may be lost or stolen.
But perhaps more interesting than the specs themselves is the fact that the Hot Watch allows for private calling. When you hold the Hot Watch up to your ear, the cup of your hand as it naturally holds up the watch will amplify the call into your ear.
This allows for entirely private calling, the same way it would be on a smartphone. Of course, the Hot Watch covers all the bases when it comes to calling functionality, allowing you to use speakerphone as well. Users can also receive and reply to messages, social feeds, and emails.
Also like the Pebble, the Hot Watch comes with customizable watch faces, as well as an SDK for third-party developers who want to build snazzy apps for the forthcoming watch.
The Hot Watch also has a number of gestures for answering calls, rejecting them, dialing, muting, ending a call, or even calling your favorite number. In fact, the sensors built in can detect when you’ve fallen down and will dial an emergency number if you haven’t responded in 30 seconds.
Plus, there are Hot Gestures that let you get straight to a feature from the lockscreen. For example, write a D on the screen and go directly from the lock screen to the dial menu.
The Hot Watch has just launched its Kickstarter campaign and already received $42,000 of its $150,000 goal. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to check it out.
It’s getting hot in here, so put down all your phones.
The Viteo Shower is a portable outdoor shower that sprays water from below. It’s not just a fancy name for a hose, either. At least we think.
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You may have thought Facebook couldn’t become any more of an artificial orgy of nostalgia than it already is, but if today’s new test feature takes hold, get ready to wallow like you’ve never wallowed before. Very much in the vein of Timehop
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"Quiet on the set! Glass filming in progress!"
(Credit: Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)
Will Google Glass soon flood the world with documentary filmmakers? That’s one possibility the company is encouraging through a partnership with film and design schools dubbed the “Glass Creative Collective.”
Announced this week via Google+, the program works to get Google Glass into the hands and onto the heads of film students so they can “start exploring how Glass can be used in production, documentary filmmaking, character development and things we haven’t yet considered.”
So far, five schools — The American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, UCLA Schoo… [Read more]
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The world’s first Google Glass porn movie
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We’d all be printing money if it were easy, and that’s why government folks try so hard to make it hard. This crazy visual effect could be the latest trick up their anti-counterfeiting sleeves. And man is it awesome to watch.
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Tough loss for AT&T, which will lose some business from Starbucks thanks to a new deal with Google that will see 7,000 Starbucks locations replaced with Google WiFi in order to provide faster speeds. The transition will happen over the next 18 months, and Google claims coffee drinkers will experience speeds 10-times faster than AT&T’s
The only thing nerdier than keeping an old NES hooked up to your TV to play your favorite old games is recreating your favorite old games using virtual reality equipment. That’s exactly what this crew of programmers did recently with Paperboy.
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Today brings another victory for transparency as the US government has just declassified three documents pursuant to the collection of telephonic metadata authorized by section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. The documents, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, include the 2009 and 2011 reports concerning the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act as well as the order for business record collection. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject, NSA Deputy Director John Inglis made public for the first time the mechanism for accessing the metadata at the government’s disposal. According to Inglis, telephonic information — which does not include names, addresses, or social security numbers — exists in databases but cannot be accessed without reasonable suspicion of association with terrorists. Deputy Attorney General James Cole went on to say, “Nobody is listening to anybody’s conversations.” This revelation might be cold comfort to those concerned about the government’s ownership of this data to begin with, but it does pull back the curtain somewhat on the NSA’s policies and procedures. To read these declassified — and heavily redacted — documents in full, head on over to the source link below.
Filed under: Misc
Yesterday, it was reported that Samsung had rigged the Galaxy S4
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