Hasta La Gadget!

A new Apple patent filing describes a variety of methods to protect a dropped iPhone during a fall, lessening damage through a number of clever systems. The USPTO filing, spotted by AppleInsider, includes a rotational mechanism to change the orientation of a falling iPhone, for instance, as well as on-device thrusters, and a way to clamp down on inserted cables when a fall is detected.

The patent describes a number of ways Apple might be able to make a device that can change direction mid-flight, which would allow it to put its most impact-resistant surface forward to meet the ground. These include an internal gadget for shifting mass to one end of the iPhone, an actual “thrust mechanism” that could even include a “gas canister,” an air foil that activates in free fall, a way to contract external bits like switches within the case for protection, and a gripping system that can clamp down on charing and headphone cables to ensure those catch the falling phone.

Another aspect of the patent is a sort of on-board black box that would gather and store data about the fall and the impact, which Apple says in the patent would be used by the device manufacturer to help gather info about how devices fall, so that they can use that info in future designs. But of course such an on-board tool could also be used by technicians determining warranty repair status.

This patent contains pretty intense, innovation-heavy tech, a lot of which doesn’t have any real precedence out there on the market yet, so I wouldn’t expect to see it in any shipping devices soon. But it is a good look at how Apple is thinking about common issues such as damage to mobile device from accidental drops. And who knows? One day, this stuff could become actually practical – even positional thrusters built into your iPhone.

Word travels fast on the Internet. Especially when you don’t want it to.

Early this morning, DigitalRev (a hybrid blog/photography store/photo sharing social network) replaced a review of GoPro’s Hero 3 with the text of a DMCA takedown they’d received. “@GoPro is bullying us with DMCA. We’ll have to remove this article soon”, they tweeted.

According to DigitalRev, GoPro was claiming foul on the site’s use of the “GoPro” and “Hero” trademarks. (That’s ignoring that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act only applies to copyright infringement. Hence, uh, the name.)

Within a few minutes, the sharpening of pitchforks could be heard from all around. Tweets started pouring in pledging to never buy another GoPro product. Word of the notice shot to the top of r/photography, r/gopro, and a few other relevant sub-Reddits. People were angry.

I reached out to GoPro’s head of communications for confirmation and comment, who responded “Hey Greg, We are posting to Reddit.”

Er, weird. But okay. A few minutes later, this went up:

Hey all- I’m out at X Games Tignes right now with the Director of PR for GoPro. I showed this to him as soon as I saw it (it had 3 comments). He dropped everything to address this issue, and it’s an unfortunate miscommunication. Below is the blurb he just wrote out for my favorite GoPro community.

Thanks for the heads up on this issue. The letter that was posted next to the review on DigitalRev was not sent in response to the review. Obviously, we welcome editorial reviews of our products. This letter was sent because DigitalRev is not an authorized reseller of GoPro products and they were using images and had incorrect branding and representation of our product in their online commerce store. As part of our program – we ask merchants who are selling our product to use authorized images. That is why DigitalRev was contacted. But – our letter did not clearly communicate this and that is something we will correct.

tl;dr: Whoops — we weren’t trying to have the review taken down. We just didn’t want them using the images they were using when selling GoPro cameras.

GoPro quickly went into damage control mode, firing off links to their reddit comment to just about anyone who’d mentioned the matter. Expanding on their comment further, GoPro later tweeted that they only meant for them to take down the images being used in the sidebar:

@difficultnerd it's actually a positive review. The notice wasn't about the review: bit.ly/YrzFHN—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

@ceejayoz Not the review, the product on the sidebar. Please read this, there's a lot of confusion out there: bit.ly/YrzFHN—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

“But wait!” yelled the crowd. If GoPro only wanted a few images to be taken down, why did they seemingly target just the review? According to GoPro, they didn’t:

@ceejayoz We also included 5 other urls, which they scrubbed from the email they posted. We are pro free speech and fair use.—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

What a mess.

If someone chopped up the DMCA in a way that changes the implications, that person screwed up.

Whatever GoPro’s actual initial intent was, however, someone seriously screwed up there too. Wanting to protect your brand is great, but DMCA notices aren’t meant to be thrown around like friggin’ parade candy. If you’re tossing them out to the point that it’s not even clear why they’re being sent, you might want to tighten the lawyer leash a bit.

How easily could this have been avoided by just calling the guy?

Pebble has just updated its smart watch, complete with a much-improved interface and new watchfaces. But the exciting thing here is the addition of a game you likely remember from the days when your cell phone’s screen wasn’t much different from the Pebble’s itself – Snake.

The interface changes include a menu that now puts your selected watchface at the end of a sequence of pushes of the back button no matter where you are, and the up and down buttons on the right-hand side now switch between watch faces, so you don’t have to dig through a menu to find them. Pebble also revealed in a Kickstarter update last week that it has made improvements behind the scenes to improve the text rendering engine with this firmware, laying the groundwork for its upcoming SDK.

Pebble has also improved ambient light detection on the smart watch, which is good news since the auto-backlighting feature has been one of the device’s major flaws since launch. Hard to tell so far just how much of an improvement firmware 1.9 provides in that area, but it would be hard not to improve at this point.

The Snake game is the highlight of the show, since it’s our first hint of how apps other than watches might work on the Pebble. Controls are fiddly as you might expect, but it is most definitely Snake, running on your wrist, and it’s meant more as a tech demo of what kind of limited capabilities will be available to developers in the first version of the SDK. I’m not likely to sink great hunks of time into playing it, but I’m glad it’s there. The Snake game sits in the Pebble’s main menu, and installs from the Watchfaces section of the iOS/Android app, so it’s clear the company will have to do yet more interface optimization when it’s ready to ship a proper app library.

One of the criticisms Android fans like to level at the iPhone is its non-get-at-able battery — meaning you can’t carry a spare (or rip the battery out to hard reset the phone). So here’s a bit of kit that proposes to help iPhone owners who have run out of juice. Gridcase’s Reactor case for the iPhone 5 will include a crank for manually charging the battery to eke a little more juice out of your device when there’s no wall sockets in sight.

Reactor doesn’t exist yet — Gridcase is kicking off a crowdfunding campaign to ”provide the funds for the final industrial design and transition of the prototype into production” — with its target goal being a rather hefty $350,000. But it has knocked up the following 3D renders of the Reactor:
Details of exactly how the Reactor works are pretty thin on the ground at this point because unfortunately for the company the new crowdfunding site it intends to use for the campaign, Crowd Supply, hasn’t launched yet (instead you get a ‘launching soon’ holding page). Update: The Reactor crowdfunding page (and Crowd Supply site) has now launched.

Here’s how Gridcase describes the Reactor in its release:

The Reactor utilizes a patent-pending, ultra-thin generator to enable users to manually charge the battery of their iPhone 5 when wall outlets are unavailable. The Reactor is designed to provide an all-important power boost when critical data must be retrieved or essential communication becomes necessary.

Since the Reactor is embedded into the phone’s case, there’s never a circumstance where the phone is without power. A small built-in battery provides enough of a boost to revive a dead phone, while manually cranking the generator can extend the battery life of the iPhone indefinitely.

The product specifications on the Reactor crowdfunding page are as follows:

• iPhone 5 Two-Piece Case with Built-in Patented Micro-Generator
• 400mAh Boost Battery
• 500mA Manual Generator
• 8.5mm Thickness
• 4.5 oz Weight

Hand-crank-powered charging is unlikely to generate a huge amount of charge, without a huge amount of effort so manage your expectations accordingly of exactly how practically useful a hand-cranked battery charger will be.

Gridcase’s wording talks of “an all-important power boost when critical data must be retrieved or essential communication becomes necessary”. So think sending a few text messages, rather than being able to finish watching that movie on Netflix. Notably the project page does not include any concrete details on how much charge an hour of cranking will earn you.

While Gridcase is starting with the iPhone 5, it says it plans to expand the range to other smartphones in future. Assuming, of course, it managed to crank up enough interest to get its project funded.

The Reactor for iPhone 5 case is expected to retail for $149, although the first 10,000 Reactors are being offered at an early-bird pledge level of $99. Deliveries are slated to begin in October 2013. As well as hosting the crowdfunding campaign, Crowd Supply will stock the Reactor once/if it’s available — acting as Gridcase’s ecommerce reseller.

Withings has built quite a name for itself since launching its first Wi-Fi Body Scale in 2009, and the new Withings Smart Body Scale is perhaps the biggest update yet released for its original connected scale tech. The new hardware monitors and tracks not only weight, but also body fat percentage, blood pressure and environmental air quality. I tested the Smart Body Analyzer over the course of the past week, so if you’re looking to invest in one of the newly available scales, here’s how it performs.

The Withings Smart Body Analyser (or WS-50, as it’s known more technically) is a very attractive piece of hardware as far as scales go, which is good because Withings wants you to keep it in the bedroom for maximum effectiveness. That’s because of the new air quality monitor, which works best when it’s placed somewhere where you actually spend a lot of time. The air quality meter, combined with the body fat and heart rate measurement are the big selling points here, since they provide the reasons to spend $50 more vs. the standard WS-30 Withings wireless scale.

As mentioned, it’s a good looking scale. It’s glass-topped, which is also necessary for the sensors to connect with your bare feet to deliver accurate readings. But it also feels very solidly constructed, and the readout is legible and bright, opting for low-res output that’s probably easier on battery life (the scale should get a full year on just four AAA alkalines) and on the eyes from the distance you’ll be viewing it at when standing. The bottom line is that the Withings Smart Body Analyzer inspires confidence with its construction, and looks like the type of scale Apple might make were it to produce such a gadget.

The Smart Analyzer is pretty simple to set up. There’s a button on the back (actually more like a pressure sensitive groove) and you hold that down to pair it with your smart phone. A second button controls what units your weight is displayed in on the scale itself (settings within an app control readouts there). The pairing process went smoothly for me on an iPhone 5, and I was then able to transfer Wi-Fi network settings for my home network from the phone, meaning I didn’t have to reenter (or even remember) my complicated password.

The pairing process will also prompt you to install the Withings Health Mate app on your device. It’s here that you’ll create a profile to track your statistics from the scale (and any other Withings devices associated with your account). You can very quickly get up and running with the app, after entering your initial height, weight and age, and you can also set up multiple people to track under a single account if you’re sharing the scale in the household.

The Withings Analyzer does a great job measuring weight, and communicates with the app seamlessly via Wi-Fi (the Bluetooth connection isn’t required after your initial setup). And air quality tracking appears to be fairly accurate, in so far as it definitely saw marked increases in CO2 levels when the room was occupied versus when it wasn’t, and a lot less when no one was home versus when they were.

With body fat percentage and heart rate tracking, I saw some variances since I was lucky enough to be able to test against outside measures. The Withings Smart Analyzer reported both as high compared to tests done on professional measurement tools owned by my local gym. The higher numbers were, however, consistently higher, which means that although they might not have been as accurate as expensive pro-grade hardware, they’re still very useful as a relative measure over time, which is really the important thing from a home health monitoring device like this anyways. And the convenience of having it right there in your own home for daily measurement outweighs the downsides of it delivering slightly inflated readings.

The Smart Body Analyzer is an impressive piece of hardware, and builds on the already useful Withings line. Its data can be used by an increasing pool of apps (now at over 80, according to Withings) in addition to the company’s own, and at $150, you’re not paying too much of a premium for the added metrics of body fat percentage, resting heart rate and air quality. Data reported may not be 100 percent accurate, but I feel it’s plenty accurate enough to meet the needs of the vast majority of consumers.