Hasta La Gadget!

The latest Garmin watch takes GPS to the next level thanks to its features and connectivity. You can use it in the wilderness or the urban jungle since it includes a variety of advanced GPS functions, including navigation and tracking of your journeys. It’s perfect for you if you’re a hiker, mountaineer, mountain biker, or backcountry skier.

The Garmin Fenix GPS Watch allows you to plan trips, create routes, record waypoints and record GPS bread crumb trails while keeping them on track. It also has ANT and Bluetooth capabilities, allowing it to connect to a variety of external sensors and share data easily. It comes with an altimeter, barometer, compass, LCD display with an LED backlight.

The wristband is made out of polyurethane and it’s waterproof up to 50 meters. Battery life is rated at 50 hours in GPS mode or 6 weeks in watch mode. The Garmin Fenix arrives this fall and will retail for $400 (USD).

[via Uncrate]

Passive smartphone amplifiers have continued to gain popularity over the years, and I have to say that I’m somewhat intrigued by this amp that’s completely made out of paper.

The eco-amp was created by Eco Made and is die-cut from a piece of 100% post consumer chipboard, which folds together into a fully functional passive amplifier for your iPhone.

Keep in mind that when it arrives, it comes completely flat, and you’ll have to assemble it as shown in the video below. It’s clear that once you assemble it, you won’t be able to flatten it again.

You can get the eco-amp for for $7.99(USD) directly from Eco Made.

[via Make:]

The iPhone’s on-screen keyboard is forgiving enough as it is, but sometimes, my fatter-than-normal fingers make me type out messages that are garbled, wrongly-spelled, and downright confusing.

I’ve never been interested in getting a separate physical keyboard for the iPhone, since I never found one that was right for what I needed in the market. Until I spied the Spike Case on Kickstarter, that is.

It might look like a typical case without the keyboard, but snap it on and it’ll instantly transform your iPhone into one with a Blackberry-style physical keyboard!

And when you’re done typing, just swivel it out back and use your iPhone like your normally would with your fingers. Spike protects your phone while offering you the flexibility and convenience of an actual, physical keypad. I mean, really, I think it’s the answer to most iPhone users’ needs, especially those who have trouble with the virtual keyboard sometimes.

You can find out more about the Spike Case by checking out its project page on Kickstarter. Making a pledge of at least $50(USD) will get you a Spike 2, which is the premium version of the case, while oddly enough a pledge of $49 will get you a Spike 1 case, plus a Spike 1 for the iPhone 5 when it ultimately arrives.

[via Oh Gizmo!]

It’s not uncommon for the ACLU to defend people against the police in court when the ACLU feels the police have stepped over the line. There’ve been a few instances around the country where police arrested citizens who were recording them on mobile phones or video cameras. Despite the fact that Americans have a constitutional right to record the police, many people who have done this have ended up in jail and at times in a courtroom.

The New Jersey ACLU has offered up a new app called the Police Tape App that is designed to secretly allow people to record the police during traffic stops or other law enforcement confrontations. The app on the Android smartphones can record audio and video and minimizes itself while leaving the screen blank to make the phone look like it’s not on. An iPhone version of the app will be coming in a few months that will offer audio only.

The app is also designed to make deleting video and audio content a multistep process to prevent the content from being deleted by officers or the user without effort. The ACLU says the app is an essential tool for police accountability. Check out the video above for more details about the app.

The software behind Google’s augmented reality future may not be here yet, but if this wearable display from Olympus is any indication, the hardware part of the Project Glass equation may be easier to solve. The MEG4.0 connects to smartphones via Bluetooth to serve as a secondary display, among other functions.

Note that the MEG4.0 is separate from the glasses, so you don’t have to worry about it not being cool enough for you. The display itself is just QVGA (320×240) resolution, though. Aside from functioning as a display, MEG4.0 also has a direction sensor and may be used in conjunction with GPS software. According to Olympus, the idea is to enable users to check their phone in short bursts. If it’s turned on for only 15 seconds every 3 minutes, then its battery will last about 8 hours. I think the short battery life is a good thing, unless you want to be run over because you’re busy tweeting while walking down the street. And because the person who ran you over was also tweeting while driving.

It’s significantly less useful than the concept device for Project Glass, but then again, everything’s worse than a concept. Olympus hasn’t mentioned if they’re going to release it as a consumer device, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just a prototype either. Perhaps MEG9000 will be good enough for daily use.

[Olympus via Akihabara News]