Hasta La Gadget!

Thimble is a Bluetooth finger-glove that hooks up to your smartphone and works as a Braille display. By pulsing Braille shapes onto the fingertip via an “electro-tactile grid array”, all kinds of messages can be conveyed to the user.

But that’s not all. The concept design, by Erik Hedberg and Zack Bennet, also has a camera inside to scan words in the real world and transcribe them into Braille, along with a microphone for voice control. Thus the user can ask where they are, the phone will provide the location via GPS and the Thimble will read out the answer. Here’s a slow-moving video showing how it would work.

The phone, in this case, is an iPhone, as iOS already has great accessibility features for the sight-impaired, and already works just fine with existing Braille displays. Hedberg and Bennet are “working on a patent”, and as the product is actually fairly straightforward, we’re hoping to see real, working versions in the future.

Thimble – There’s a Thing for That [Vimeo via DVICE]

See Also:

• Braille
• Hydraulics Could Enable Fullscreen Braille Display
• Award-Winning Braille Bracelet Looks Good, Feels Even Better …
• Video: iPhone 4 Native Support for Braille Displays
• Braille Cellphone Could Allow SMS For The Blind

Sleep. It’s where some get to relax, some get to be comfortable, and some get to be a Viking. But, for others, that overnight period can be a stressful time, full of tossing and turning and mornings highlighted only by ground beans and hot showers. For those unhappy souls there are ever more dreamtime gadgets working to help the situation and turn morning monsters into drowsy-eyed angels, devices like the FitBit, and latest among them is WakeMate, a $60 accelerometer-having wristband that charts your nocturnal sleep patterns. Sadly, we’ve found it can also be responsible for some early morning spikes to our blood pressure.

Continue reading WakeMate review

WakeMate review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Believe it or not, the crew at Engadget HQ will be packing up and headed to CES 2011 a fortnight from today, and it looks as if quite a few undercover products from NEC will be making the same trip. The company has just revealed that its single-screen Cloud Communicator tablet will be on display, but moreover, a dual-screen version will be making it awfully tough for the former to get any attention whatsoever. Now, dual-screen devices aren’t exactly new, but an Android tablet with a pair of 7-inch LCDs is definitely more inciting than Kno’s education-minded megabook and the two-faced e-readers that swarmed CES 2010. Details on the hardware are few and far betwixt, with NEC only revealing that both panels will be touch-enabled, WiFi, 3G and Bluetooth modules will be baked in and that a stylus will be included for good measure. Also, it’ll fully support the use of different programs on each LCD, which — if executed properly — could melt our faces into the desert sand below. Sadly, our prying for images got us nowhere, but we’re assured to see more at next month’s extravaganza. Hang tight.

Continue reading NEC teases dual-screen Cloud Communicator Android tablet, promises more at CES

NEC teases dual-screen Cloud Communicator Android tablet, promises more at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know that killer new app you just got for your iPhone? Could you beam us a copy to try? Of course you can’t — it doesn’t work that way — but someday soon it might. The fine folks at Patently Apple recently unearthed an Apple patent app that describes a way to transfer apps over peer-to-peer Bluetooth or shiny, star-filled WiFi. The idea goes that if a company wants to spread a program by word of mouth, it might as well make it shareable too, and so the owner of an app could transfer an “application seed” to friends and associates with a similar device. You’d pick from a menu of apps to beam over, where only those greenlit by their developer would be available to send, and your recipient would receive a trial version — or somewhat less excitingly, a link to the App Store — over the air. The patent app suggests that recipients could even share the demo in turn, generating generation after generation of word-of-mouth sales, and that companies might even reward particularly influential sharers in some way. What’s that rumbling we hear? Just the gears turning in the minds of men plotting the next great pyramid scheme.

Apple looking to patent sharable apps, considers calling them ‘seeds’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iGrill meat thermometer for iPhone is the expensive, unholy marriage of the meat thermometer and iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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