Hasta La Gadget!

Accessory maker Jawbone on Wednesday unveiled "Up," a lifestyle gadget designed to encourage health and wellness. (Photo courtesy Jawbone)

For about a month, Hosain Rahman has worn the same wristband 24 hours a day, even while he sleeps, exercises and showers. The wristband isn’t his favorite watch; it’s the lifestyle gadget his company has been developing for years.

Accessory company Jawbone on Wednesday revealed Up, a hardware and software system that tracks your eating, sleeping and movements to give you a reading on your general health. The wristband, which is about the same size as a Livestrong strap, contains sensors to track your activities, and a complementary smartphone app collects the data.

“[Up] is a total system that encompasses hardware and software to help attack this bigger problem that we see around health and wellness and utilizing all the things we’re good at and making really really good technology smaller … combining that with fashionable, wearable design and integrating that into a social, connected experience,” said Rahman, Jawbone’s CEO, in an interview with Wired.com

Jawbone’s Up joins the fray of smartphone accessories and software designed to help customers monitor their health. A smartphone’s wireless communications can enable accessories to deliver up-to-date, personalized data on a regular basis to track patterns and get feedback on improving workouts, eating habits and sleep patterns.

Silicon Valley startup Lark, for example, sells a similar wristband that you wear to sleep. The sensors inside the strap detect when you fall asleep and wake up, and Lark’s iPhone app collects all this data when the alarm goes off.

Looking forward, researchers also foresee that real-time health monitoring can potentially help prevent disease. University of Washington researchers have been developing a digital contact lens that collects data about blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels from the surface of the eye, to provide real-time feedback on your vital signs. This type of application could potentially inform people when they’re getting sick, so they can treat themselves before the illness settles in and avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor.

Rahman noted that Jawbone’s Up is not a sickness-prevention tool, but a lifestyle gadget designed to encourage wellness. The device’s sensors monitor your activities, then transmits the data to a smartphone app, which “nudges” you to improve your health with some helpful tips.

Jawbone’s goal was to make the device fashionable and comfortable so a customer can slip it on and forget it’s even there, Rahman said.

“I’ve been wearing it 24/7,” he said. “That’s a big proposition. The more you wear it, the richer and more accurate everything becomes.”

Jawbone has been developing the Up accessory for about two years. The product will ship later this year for iOS and Android devices. The price has yet to be determined.

See Also:

• Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs
• Touch-Sensitive Jawbone Era Headset Has Serious Face Appeal …
• CES 2011: Jawbone Jambox Wireless Speaker – Video – Wired

The Crayola iMarker looks just like a real marker, minus the healthy solvent smell

Kids love the iPad. They love to jab their sticky little fingers at its screen, they love to drool over its elegant glass and aluminum curves and they love to drop it onto floors, hard tiles and soft carpet alike. Clearly, they should be kept away from my iPad.

But if you have kids, and you’re willing to let them use your $500+ tablet for such dubious reasons as “education” and “development,” then you might like to spend yet more money on the Crayola iMarker (made by Griffin). It’s a $30 stylus for kids which differentiates itself from other chunky styluses by looking like an actual Crayola marker, and by costing double the price.

Thus equipped, your offspring can attack your iPad and record their scrawlings. A free companion app, called the Crayola Color Studio HD, allows them to do all the usual things kids do with crayons: coloring messily over the lines, drawing pictures of mommy so poor that they’d be a fight-worthy insult if done by an adult, and making machine-gun noises with their mouths while they draw trails of bullets raining down on “mommy’s” head.

Or they could, were the app not so crashy. The App Store reviews say that the Color Studio HD crashes on launch, and when it does work, it lacks “sensitivity”, which causes the user to press harder on the screen than they should, even though doing so makes no difference.

Luckily, there are all kinds of excellent drawing and painting apps for the iPad which can be bought separately.

So why buy the Crayola iMarker in pace of something like the Alupen? Because it’s plastic, so when your progeny drops the thing onto the glass screen of the iPad, it won’t crack it. Available now, online or from Best Buy.

Crayola ColorStudio HD [Griffin. Thanks, Jennifer!]

See Also:

• Crayola Keyboard Teaches Kids to Comply
• PixelPad, the Ultimate iPad Accessory
• Scribbly: A Fat Marker-Pen Stylus for Tablets
• Wacom Stylus for iPad Is Not What You're Hoping For

The odd-looking Sportive replaces a GPS, a camera, a watch and a cellphone

Despite somewhat polarizing looks (I kind of like them, and some of you probably hate them), the Sportive “watch” from French company VEA looks like the idea runner’s companion. Not only does it pack in the tracking, altitude and speed-recording features of a wrist-mounted GPS device, it also replaces your cellphone, camera and — yes — your watch.

As a phone, it’s certainly not smart, with EDGE connectivity, MMS and Bluetooth, but it is pre-loaded with the “apps” you might need. It’ll measure your speed, distance, calories burned and — as it’s sat right on your wrist — your pulse. You can play music and grab video from and to the internal 8GB memory, and hook it up to a a heart-rate monitor via Bluetooth (although why this is any better than taking your pulse I’m not sure).

If you’re used to juggling a GPS, a phone and an iPod while you train, this wrist mounted super-watch is just the ticket. Unfortunately, it costs the same as all of those other gadgets put together: €500, or around $720. Available November.

VEA Sportive press release [VEA via Engadget]

See Also:

• $200 Watch-Phone Is a Fun, Affordable Accessory
• Garmin Reveals Touchscreen GPS Watch, the Forerunner 610
• Review: Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS Watch
• GPS Watch for Leisure Athletes
• Wired Video: Sony OLED, a GPS Watch and a Tiny HD Camcorder …

What’s long, brown and sticky? A stick!

I can think of precisely one use for a headphone jack splitter, and that’s for watching movies on the iPad when I’m on a plane or train, traveling with The Lady. However, I am also aware that there are couples whose individual musical tastes don’t make each other physically sick, and who might like to share a jack socket as they walk romantically down the street.

Now, these promiscuous listeners can engage in a dirty aural threesome.

The Music Branch Headphone Splitter comes from Kikkerland, and splits the signal three ways. Lord knows how you’re supposed to walk when connected to two other people by the ears, or even how loud the resulting music would be after being split like this, but the price is certainly right: The Music Branch costs just $10, and comes in a variety of stick and non-stick-like colors: white, brown and light blue.

It also solves another problem of regular splitters: they’re tiny and easy to lose. The Music Branch is not only chunky, but it can hang off a keyring by it’s chain and end-cap. Neat.

The Music Branch is available now.

Music Branch Headphone Splitter [Kikkerland via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Online Retailers: Zune is Second-Most Wanted Black Friday Item …
• Griffin DJ Cable Splits Output Between Headphones and Speakers …
• Gadget Musician Directs iPhone, DS Orchestra
• Eight Great Tips for Traveling with the iPad

By Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

The first Thunderbolt compatible peripherals — Promise’s Pegasus RAIDs — started shipping on Tuesday. Using the RAIDs with a Thunderbolt equipped Mac, though, requires a rather expensive $50 cable that is only available from Apple. We dug into the design of the cable to find out why Apple felt justified in charging $50 for some plastic-wrapped copper wire, and why Thunderbolt may have a hard time gaining traction outside of the higher-end storage and video device market — a fate similar to Apple’s FireWire.

Promise’s RAIDs do not come supplied with a Thunderbolt cable. Instead, users are directed to buy a Thunderbolt cable directly from Apple, which costs $49 for two-meter length. We contacted Promise to find out why a Mini DisplayPort cable could not be used in its stead, since the Thunderbolt port is based on Mini DisplayPort. A support technician told Ars that Apple’s cable is a “smart” cable that “has firmware in it.”

Intel confirmed that Thunderbolt requires specific Thunderbolt cables. “Only Thunderbolt cables can be used to connect Thunderbolt products using Thunderbolt connectors,” Intel spokesperson Dave Salvator told Ars. “The cables have been designed for the 10Gbps signaling as well as power delivery that are part of Thunderbolt technology.”

Active cabling required

Apple didn’t respond to our requests for further information about the “firmware in the cable,” but an EETimes article from earlier this year noted that in addition to having different electrical characteristics from Mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt alsouses active cabling to achieve full duplex 10Gbps transmission.

A source within the telecom industry explained to Ars that active cables are commonly used at data rates above 5Gbps. These cables contain tiny chips at either end that are calibrated to the attenuation and dispersion properties of the wire between them. Compensating for these properties “greatly improves the signal-to-noise ratio” for high-bandwidth data transmission.

Our friends at iFixit made a trip to a local Apple Store to find out what hardware powers Apple’s Thunderbolt cable. CEO Kyle Wiens told Ars that Apple’s cable contains two Gennum GN2033 Thunderbolt Transceiver chips to facilitate Thunderbolt’s blazing speed.

Our telecom source noted that Intel made an unusual choice in also using active cabling for future optical-based iterations of Thunderbolt. Passive cabling is more common, but active cabling could offer some advantages. For one, active cables could combine fiber optics with electrical cabling for power transmission. Another good reason to use active optical cables, according to our source, “is that your current electrical ports can be forward compatible with future optical cables.”

So far, though, Apple is the only supplier for Thunderbolt cables. Though Gennum is already highlighting its Thunderbolt transceiver chips, Intel would not say when official specs would be released to other manufacturers, or when other suppliers might be able to offer compatible cabling.

FireWire II: Thunderbolt Boogaloo?

The unfortunate side affect of all this is that if you are interested in using Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals—including RAIDs, hard drives, and video I/O devices coming soon—you’ll have to buy a $50 cable from Apple for each device. Without additional suppliers, that could lead to trouble in gaining wider adoption for the standard in the industry.

The situation is not unlike the one that plagued FireWire in its early days. Designed by Apple and featured on its own computers, the original FireWire 400 standard offered significant speed improvements over USB 1.1, could supply more power to peripherals, and used an architecture that allowed any FireWire device to communicate with another, making it possible to forgo the need to connect both devices to a host computer.

Despite these benefits, FireWire cost more to implement on a device because it required a separate controller chip in each device. And though Apple turned over the FireWire standard to standards body IEEE, the company originally required additional licensing fees to use the FireWire trademark and logo. This made USB a more attractive, less expensive alternative for device makers.

Apple later relaxed the licensing fees, but an alternate 4-pin, non-powered version of FireWire—dubbed “IEEE 1394″ and branded as “i.Link” by Sony—had already begun to gain wide adoption. USB 2.0 improved speeds to be more competitive with FireWire 400, while retaining its cost advantage. A faster FireWire 800 standard emerged, but used an entirely new 9-pin connector that required adapters to use with 6-pin FireWire 400 devices or 4-pin IEEE 1394 devices.

The combination of non-compatible plugs and added cost meant that FireWire ended up being largely confined to high-speed storage and the burgeoning digital video and digital audio industries.

As mentioned previously, the devices featuring Thunderbolt that have been announced so far include a variety of high-performance storage and mobile video I/O devices. Thunderbolt’s high bandwidth and low latency are perfect for these applications. But Thunderbolt’s high cost in terms of the necessary controllers and relatively expensive active cabling could limit its expansion to the broader market.

Furthermore, Intel only mentioned two vendors aside from Apple who were considering adopting Thunderbolt when it announced the technology earlier this year: HP and Sony. HP ultimately decided it wouldn’t be adopting Thunderbolt in its computers any time soon. Sony has announced a new Vaio Z laptop that incorporates Thunderbolt controllers from Intel, but uses a proprietary optical connection via a specially modified USB3 port. That port can connect to a special discrete GPU-equipped docking station that won’t be compatible with standard Thunderbolt peripherals.

Thunderbolt may be capable of some impressive speeds, but Apple and Intel run the risk of the technology quickly becoming a dead end if Apple remains the only vendor for Thunderbolt-equipped computers as well as Thunderbolt cables. Greater third-party support will be the key to the broad market adoption needed to support Thunderbolt in the years to come.