Hasta La Gadget!

Scott Amron’s Carabiner Key may be the final stage in key perfection

There’s no stopping serial inventor Scott Amron. After a list of innovations including the water-fountain toothbrush, the Endo fridge magnet and the painful-sounding Split Ring, he has finally solved the annoying problem of quickly putting keys onto a ring.

Behold, the Carabiner Key, a key with a carabiner built into its top loop. Now, instead of buying an extra carabiner to use as a keyring, or splitting your nails trying to thread a key onto a regular ring, you can just press and snap the Carabiner Key onto any loop you like. For those in love with confusing recursions, you could even snap it onto a normal carabiner.

Heck, you probably don’t even need a keyring. Hipster cyclists, for example, could skip the belt-mounted keychain altogether and clip the key to their parents’ basement direct to the belt-loops of their skinny jeans.

Scott is currently “taking orders” for Carabiner Key blanks, where by “taking orders” he means “taking e-mail addresses.” Given his record of bringing his neat inventions to market, you should be pretty optimistic about one day owning a Carabiner Key of your own.

Carabiner Key product page [Amron Experimental via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Coffee-Cup Collar Expands Like B-Movie Special Effect
• Split-rings
• Clever Low-Tech Toothbrush for the Lazy Scrubber
• Water Fountain Toothbrush No Longer Costs $1750
• Endo: Finally, A Useful Fridge Magnet

The Ear Force Delta headset is designed for the most serious COD fans. It even comes with game themed presets and voice prompts.

If you’ve been counting down the days to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, here’s something that will help tide you over: these limited edition Ear Force gaming headsets.

That’s right: you can lay some claymores, hunker down, and listen to the sweet sounds of your enemies retreating with a comfy set of custom cans clamped on your ears.

Turtle Beach and Activision teamed up to create four pairs of Modern Warfare-themed headsets: DELTA, BRAVO, CHARLIE and FOXTROT (and just in case you’re wondering, my Caps Lock key did not get stuck as I was writing that).

The headsets range from the $100 FOXTROT to the $300 DELTA. FOXTROT is a wired universal gaming headset; CHARLIE, an eight speaker surround sound PC gaming headset; BRAVO, a programmable wireless pair; and DELTA is the set’s top-of-the-line Dolby 7.1 surround sound programmable wireless model.

All four headsets are compatible across Xbox 360, PC, and Playstation 3 platforms.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is set to release November 8.

Accessory maker Jawbone on Wednesday unveiled "Up," a lifestyle gadget designed to encourage health and wellness. (Photo courtesy Jawbone)

For about a month, Hosain Rahman has worn the same wristband 24 hours a day, even while he sleeps, exercises and showers. The wristband isn’t his favorite watch; it’s the lifestyle gadget his company has been developing for years.

Accessory company Jawbone on Wednesday revealed Up, a hardware and software system that tracks your eating, sleeping and movements to give you a reading on your general health. The wristband, which is about the same size as a Livestrong strap, contains sensors to track your activities, and a complementary smartphone app collects the data.

“[Up] is a total system that encompasses hardware and software to help attack this bigger problem that we see around health and wellness and utilizing all the things we’re good at and making really really good technology smaller … combining that with fashionable, wearable design and integrating that into a social, connected experience,” said Rahman, Jawbone’s CEO, in an interview with Wired.com

Jawbone’s Up joins the fray of smartphone accessories and software designed to help customers monitor their health. A smartphone’s wireless communications can enable accessories to deliver up-to-date, personalized data on a regular basis to track patterns and get feedback on improving workouts, eating habits and sleep patterns.

Silicon Valley startup Lark, for example, sells a similar wristband that you wear to sleep. The sensors inside the strap detect when you fall asleep and wake up, and Lark’s iPhone app collects all this data when the alarm goes off.

Looking forward, researchers also foresee that real-time health monitoring can potentially help prevent disease. University of Washington researchers have been developing a digital contact lens that collects data about blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels from the surface of the eye, to provide real-time feedback on your vital signs. This type of application could potentially inform people when they’re getting sick, so they can treat themselves before the illness settles in and avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor.

Rahman noted that Jawbone’s Up is not a sickness-prevention tool, but a lifestyle gadget designed to encourage wellness. The device’s sensors monitor your activities, then transmits the data to a smartphone app, which “nudges” you to improve your health with some helpful tips.

Jawbone’s goal was to make the device fashionable and comfortable so a customer can slip it on and forget it’s even there, Rahman said.

“I’ve been wearing it 24/7,” he said. “That’s a big proposition. The more you wear it, the richer and more accurate everything becomes.”

Jawbone has been developing the Up accessory for about two years. The product will ship later this year for iOS and Android devices. The price has yet to be determined.

See Also:

• Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs
• Touch-Sensitive Jawbone Era Headset Has Serious Face Appeal …
• CES 2011: Jawbone Jambox Wireless Speaker – Video – Wired

The Crayola iMarker looks just like a real marker, minus the healthy solvent smell

Kids love the iPad. They love to jab their sticky little fingers at its screen, they love to drool over its elegant glass and aluminum curves and they love to drop it onto floors, hard tiles and soft carpet alike. Clearly, they should be kept away from my iPad.

But if you have kids, and you’re willing to let them use your $500+ tablet for such dubious reasons as “education” and “development,” then you might like to spend yet more money on the Crayola iMarker (made by Griffin). It’s a $30 stylus for kids which differentiates itself from other chunky styluses by looking like an actual Crayola marker, and by costing double the price.

Thus equipped, your offspring can attack your iPad and record their scrawlings. A free companion app, called the Crayola Color Studio HD, allows them to do all the usual things kids do with crayons: coloring messily over the lines, drawing pictures of mommy so poor that they’d be a fight-worthy insult if done by an adult, and making machine-gun noises with their mouths while they draw trails of bullets raining down on “mommy’s” head.

Or they could, were the app not so crashy. The App Store reviews say that the Color Studio HD crashes on launch, and when it does work, it lacks “sensitivity”, which causes the user to press harder on the screen than they should, even though doing so makes no difference.

Luckily, there are all kinds of excellent drawing and painting apps for the iPad which can be bought separately.

So why buy the Crayola iMarker in pace of something like the Alupen? Because it’s plastic, so when your progeny drops the thing onto the glass screen of the iPad, it won’t crack it. Available now, online or from Best Buy.

Crayola ColorStudio HD [Griffin. Thanks, Jennifer!]

See Also:

• Crayola Keyboard Teaches Kids to Comply
• PixelPad, the Ultimate iPad Accessory
• Scribbly: A Fat Marker-Pen Stylus for Tablets
• Wacom Stylus for iPad Is Not What You're Hoping For

The odd-looking Sportive replaces a GPS, a camera, a watch and a cellphone

Despite somewhat polarizing looks (I kind of like them, and some of you probably hate them), the Sportive “watch” from French company VEA looks like the idea runner’s companion. Not only does it pack in the tracking, altitude and speed-recording features of a wrist-mounted GPS device, it also replaces your cellphone, camera and — yes — your watch.

As a phone, it’s certainly not smart, with EDGE connectivity, MMS and Bluetooth, but it is pre-loaded with the “apps” you might need. It’ll measure your speed, distance, calories burned and — as it’s sat right on your wrist — your pulse. You can play music and grab video from and to the internal 8GB memory, and hook it up to a a heart-rate monitor via Bluetooth (although why this is any better than taking your pulse I’m not sure).

If you’re used to juggling a GPS, a phone and an iPod while you train, this wrist mounted super-watch is just the ticket. Unfortunately, it costs the same as all of those other gadgets put together: €500, or around $720. Available November.

VEA Sportive press release [VEA via Engadget]

See Also:

• $200 Watch-Phone Is a Fun, Affordable Accessory
• Garmin Reveals Touchscreen GPS Watch, the Forerunner 610
• Review: Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS Watch
• GPS Watch for Leisure Athletes
• Wired Video: Sony OLED, a GPS Watch and a Tiny HD Camcorder …