Hasta La Gadget!

The world of Bluetooth watches is getting immensely crowded. After years of trying, it seems as if Bluetooth watch makers finally have a captive audience. The Pebble smartwatch seems to be leading the charge in the here and now, but for those looking for something a bit less Jetsons and a bit more Dick Tracy, there’s the Martian Passport. At a glance, the unit itself looks very much like a classic wristwatch, replete with analog hand dials, a knob to change the time, and a metallic casing. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll spot a 96 x 16 pixel OLED display, capable of displaying contact names for incoming calls and scrolling new text messages. It’s a bit thick (0.52 inches), but it houses a battery that can survive a full two hours of yapping, or seven days in standby. Those needing to juice it back up can do so in a couple of hours via the side-mounted micro-USB port.

Internally, there’s a Bluetooth 4.0 chip (which supports classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth low energy), a vibrating motor for notifications, a three-axis accelerometer, magnetometer, noise-cancellation microphone, and a couple of menu / select buttons on the left. The whole thing is shockingly well built, oozing quality from every possible pore. It’ll play nice with iOS and Android devices, and there’s an incoming iOS app that’ll add even more functionality in the near future. In our testing here at CES 2013, we found the watch to pick up calls and notifications from an iPhone 4S immediately, and the OLED panel was remarkably easy to see even from a few feet away. Chatting into the watch was predictably awkward, but undercover agents should feel right at home. In all seriousness, audio quality was crisp, and folks on the other end had no issues hearing us.

Is it worth the $299 asking price? That’s hard to say. The famed Pebble will begin shipping in just over a week for a measly $149, so you’d have to really prefer the look of this guy to pay double. If that’s you, you can get your order in through the source link below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wearables, Mobile

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Source: Martian Watches

As NASA promised, Curiosity has stopped at the quarter pole toward its first scientific destination to test its robotic arm and attached scientific instruments. After 100 yards of driving, the rover extended its 7-foot limb, and will now spend six to ten days checking its predetermined positions and range of motion. That will ensure the appendage is ready after surviving the chilly vaccuum of space and subsequent setdown, and will let its minders see how it functions in the unfamiliar Martian gravity and temperatures. The JPL scientists in charge of the six-wheeler will also peep the Mars Hand Lens Imager and made-in-Canada Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer to warrant that they’re up for all the geology to come. If all goes well, the rover will start scooping, drilling and analyzing in earnest when it hits Glenelg, then Mount Sharp — so, we’d limber up first before tackling all that, too.

Filed under: Misc, Science

Curiosity rover starts light robotic arm workout in preparation for scientific main event originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Martian hills are alive with the sound of music. Well, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s voice at least, as the agency reveals that the first recorded human voice has traveled from Earth, to another planet, and back. The words might not have literally echoed in the surrounding hills, but by having been beamed to Curiosity and back again, have made a small step towards interplanetary communication. Along with the motivational words of Bolden, the rover returned some telephoto images from the onboard 100mm and 34mm lenses. The pictures show the hills toward which Curiosity is bound, and tease the scientists with their rich-looking — and hopefully revealing — layers of geology. Want to know what interplanetary voicemail sounds like? No need to go to Mars and back, just click on the more coverage link below.

Continue reading Voice signals sent to Mars and back, while telephoto images tease rich geology

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Voice signals sent to Mars and back, while telephoto images tease rich geology originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With products like the Pebble and the MetaWatch Strata easily blowing past their funding goals on Kickstarter, it seems like we’re knee-deep in a smartwatch renaissance. The space is already seeing some strong competitors emerge, and now another player is looking to carve out its own niche in the hype-filled smartwatch market.

Irvine, California-based Martian Watches has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring its eponymous wrist devices to the market. The kicker? These are watches you can actually talk to.

Once the Martian watch is connected to an iPhone or Android handset via Bluetooth, users can use the watch’s integrated noise-cancelling microphone to issue voice commands to the tethered smartphone. And, yes, you can live out your Dick Tracy fantasies by listening and speaking to callers directly from the watch, thanks to the inclusion of a directional speaker. It’s a very nifty feature, and one that hasn’t really been touched on by some of the bigger players, but my first question was one of compatibility.

“If the [Android] phone came with an integrated Voice Command app and it works with a Bluetooth headset, it will work with Martian,” said Martian Watches president Stan Kinsey. “If the phone doesn’t have integrated Voice Command, most Androids will work with Martian via the “Vlingo InCar” app.” Meanwhile, the Martian watches already seem to play nice with Siri, and the stock voice commands in the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

At first glance, the Martian watches don’t look much like the other smartwatches that have garned so much attention in recent months. They still have mechanical, analog faces for one, which means call information, text messages and emails are instead displayed on a one-line OLED display nestled in the bottom half of the watch’s face.

Meanwhile, a vibration motor and a notification LED help to provide all-important context when different events happen — green flashes mean that someone’s calling you, while blue flashes signal the arrival of a text message. Android users can actually squeeze more functionality out of the watch through an as-yet unreleased app that lets them set up notifications from other services. That approach makes for a smartwatch that isn’t quite as technologically striking as say, a Pebble, but Martian Watches president Stan Kinsey tells me that’s not really the point.

“We didn’t want to just miniaturize and replicate the phone’s screen and features on your wrist,” Kinsey said. “We wanted to complement the phone and make it easier to do a lot of phone-centric tasks.”

The Martian Watches team is shooting to score $200,000 in Kickstarter funds, and plans to make the watches in three distinct styles: the Passport, G2G, and Victory (seen in order above). Right now, prices for the different trim levels range from $95 to $125, and with any luck these things should be out the door and on your wrists by this January.