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]

Tokyoflash has outed its latest difficult-to-decipher watch, the Kisai Online, based on a fan design and using accelerometers to automatically make the screen a little easier to decode. The new timepiece follows the Japanese company’s usual chunky design language, with a cryptic stream of lines and curves running across the fascia; tilt the watch toward you, however, and the excess lines fall away to show the time.

The idea was originally from Sam Jerichow and submitted to Tokyoflash’s design studio, and it’s a good balance of the aesthetic the watch company has become known for, and the sort of usability that people demand from, well, a regular watch. You can see how well it works in the video below:

Three display colors are on offer – red, blue or natural – and two casings, black or silver. Both are made of stainless steel and water resistant to 3ATM. A demo mode runs every few seconds, animating the display.

Tokyoflash Kisai Online is available to order now, priced at ¢149 until the weekend and then jumping up twenty bucks.

Tokyoflash Kisai Online: Tilt for time is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

There may be a few more years remaining before a forced retirement, but there’s no question that dedicated automotive GPS units are on the way out. Integrated products, apps and the aviation sector will keep companies like Garmin afloat, but now’s as good a time as any to focus on other markets — and where better to slap that global positioning goodness than on our wrists. Watches seems to be a growing focus for the guidance giant, following last month’s GPS-less Garmin Swim introduction. That device has a relatively narrow target (namely, swimmers willing to invest $150 in the sport), but the company is back with a more versatile wearable, complete with an altimeter, barometer, compass, an optional external ANT temperature sensor and Bluetooth connectivity. There’s also a GPS receiver, which can be used not only to calibrate the time and sensors, but also to track a route, direct you towards waypoints and guide you back to your starting point with TracBack.

The Fenix, as the full-featured watch is being called, is expected to retail for $400 when it hits stores at the end of August. Four bills hardly qualifies it for the luxury wristwatch category, but as digital wearables go, that’s certainly approaching the top end. We had an opportunity to try out the device in an office setting (not exactly an ideal environment for a rugged GPS watch, but that’s the best we could do in the middle of NYC), and the Fenix had quite a bit of heft to it — it’ll surely look out of place on smaller wrists, and probably won’t score you any points among fashion-conscious friends. Inner geeks should be appeased, however — the enclosure definitely seems an adequate size for housing all of those instruments. It also functions quite nicely as a watch — in default mode, it displays the time and date in large characters on the backlit LCD, with a nifty ring around the digits to indicate seconds. The Garmin Fenix is on track for a late-August ship date, but you can scroll through the gallery below or dive into the PR after the break to get your fix in the meantime.

Continue reading Garmin unveils Fenix, its first GPS watch for deep-pocketed outdoorsy types (hands-on)

Garmin unveils Fenix, its first GPS watch for deep-pocketed outdoorsy types (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Touch Skin is a new concept watch designed by Niels Astrup that fits in with your existing plethora of gadgets. It’s a minimal watch with a touch-sensitive screen which allows you to customize the overall look thanks to its flat OLED display.

The Touch Skin watch would connect to your computer or smartphone via Bluetooth, and let you download new skins or designs for the display. You would also be able to design your own using the Touch Skin App.

Like other watches that light up using LED or OLEDs, the Touch Skin needs to be activated by a touch to display the time – presumably to save on battery.

The watch would adjusts its time automatically, via radio, and the design calls for it to be charged wirelessly via the gift box it comes packaged in.

The Touch Skin watch is just a concept right now but it will hopefully enter production at some point in the future. For now, you’ll just have to settle for your iPod nano.

[via NOTCOT]

We all know that everyone’ favorite astromech, R2-D2, has come in all sorts of shapes and sizes to date in terms of Star Wars merchandise, lining up George Lucas’ pockets with more than enough dough to last him several generations down the line. Well, the latest iteration of R2-D2 comes in a pocket-sized form factor, that is, the $42 Star Wars Remote Control R2-D2 Whizz Watch.

It is time for some R2-D2 o’clock goodness, where the blue and white digital watch will be able to tell you the current time, but it also secretly doubles up as a remote control. Each watch will feature its very own R2-D2 unit that can be detached, allowing you to use the watch to control him around. R2-D2 will whizz with gusto forwards and backwards, although he does seem to lack a pair of boosters here, so forget about letting him cross chasms from one desk to another via a short flight. Good thing it comes with batteries right out of the box to get you started immediately.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Home Star R2-D2 available now, R2-D2 lunch kit can light up and make sounds,