Hasta La Gadget!

There is a sleek new Wi-Fi tablet on the market that is only 0.9 inches thick, gets months of battery life from four AAA batteries and is so durable that its manufacturer encourages users to regularly step on it. After all, it’s a scale — the Withings WiFi Body Scale.

The market for Internet-connected fitness gadgets has come a long way since 2000, when SportBrain introduced a pedometer that used a modem-equipped docking base to upload physical activity records. The past few years have seen products for fitness enthusiasts such as the Garmin’s ForeRunner watches and the Nike+ system for iPod, but they are now migrating to more casual personal data nerds. Recent tech products like the Fitbit (a modern-day reworking of the SportBrain) can measure your activity throughout the day and night and the Neo Personal Sleep Coach can provide detailed reports on your sleep patterns. But all these products digitally measure efforts at healthier living — few have digitally measured results.

Continue reading Switched On: Where the Withings are

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Switched On: Where the Withings are originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Switched On: The next step toward the IP tuner

Five years ago, the first Switched On talked about the growing coziness between the iPod photo and video. Today, of course, the iPod and many other portable media players have embraced digitally-distributed video, yet the TV itself remains on the cusp of IP content distribution. But TV manufacturers that still shudder when they think of the WebTV experience of 1996 need to get their heads out of their modem ports. For the sake of video choice, it’s time to support the broadband web of 2009 on TVs.

As we inch closer to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January, we come upon the first anniversary of the wedding between television sets and the internet. While there were internet-enabled televisions before last year from HP and others, the online-enabled sets from Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Vizio marked the real embrace of IP. And it wasn’t just about the hardware — the software included Yahoo’s widget architecture and Netflix streaming movies.

Continue reading Switched On: Next steps toward the IP tuner

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Switched On: Next steps toward the IP tuner originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re proud to congratulate Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) on five years of Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Check out the first-ever Switched On right here — we’re looking forward to five more years!

Good morning, students. My name is Dr. John Fleming and I welcome you all to MKTG 503: Fictional Technology Product Development. Hopefully, you’ve all fulfilled the prerequisites to this class, MTG 324: New Product Development and any accredited undergraduate Government class in plausible deniability. As your professor this semester, I’d like to provide a brief overview of the material we will be covering in the emerging field of developing and marketing products that generate incredible amounts of media attention and consumer interest but do not actually exist.

Phase 1: Customer Requirements. Disciplined product development requires acute attention to addressing both stated and unstated customer needs and creating products that fulfill the promise of expectations while maximizing profitability for the organization. In our class, we will learn how to ignore these goals and create figments that have incredible gee-whiz factors that safely ignore considerations such as marketplace pricing and target demographics. Students will generate buzz for a three-paneled OLED ereader that is powered by solar energy while acting as a tanning bed for the burgeoning tween market.

Continue reading Switched On: Developing a sense of rumor

Switched On: Developing a sense of rumor originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ePUB standard, developed by Adobe, allows consumers to purchase books at a variety of digital stores and use them on a wide range of compatible devices without the manufacturer having to explicitly support them. That may sound a bit like the PlaysForSure initiative that Microsoft tried mounting to challenge the iPod but ultimately shifted away from (at least for MP3 players) in favor of the Zune, but ePUB has a better shot than PlaysForSure did.

First, unlike PlaysForSure, which was playing catch-up to the already dominant iPod, ePUB is appearing relatively early in the market; it need not break anyone’s “stranglehold.” Second, after attracting the support of Sony, the format achieved a significant coup with the support of Barnes & Noble, which noted last week that it was “excited” to be supporting the format in its forthcoming Nook e-reader.

Continue reading Switched On: Making book with ePUB

Filed under: Software

Switched On: Making book with ePUB originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been the story of the week. T-Mobile Sidekick customers were told that all of their data might be lost and warned not to turn off their devices to prevent losing what’s already on them. It’s about the worst case nightmare scenario for any vendor and it underscored the weakness and vulnerability of cloud-based computing with no other means of backup and storage.

The Sidekick story is complicated, and there’s much rumor and speculation as to what went wrong and how. To be clear, Sidekick is a T-Mobile branded-and-sold device and service, but the Sidekick technology comes from Danger, a former startup now owned by Microsoft, which T-Mobile pays to keep Sidekick going. Trust me, there’s going to be lots of finger pointing and perhaps a few class-action lawsuits before this all comes to an end. While finger pointing is fun, it’s not the issue. (And, as grandpa used to say, when you point your finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you.) Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it’s the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger’s been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.

Continue reading Entelligence: Cloud’s illusions I recall

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets

Entelligence: Cloud’s illusions I recall originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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