Reading is fun and now that you don’t have to carry a bulky dead tree block around, you can do it in more places than ever. If your eReader of choice happens to be a Kindle, then a company called SolarMio has a solar-powered Kindle case with an 800 lux LED light. Pop the light out and it turns on, pop it back in and it’s off. This way you can keep reading in your bed with no nightlight after you’ve spent a day outside, in the park or whatever, reading. It’s a concept similar to the Kapsule light-stand I wrote about a while back, but this particular cover doesn’t use the Kindle’s power source at all…. and there’s no stand. Instead, there’s a 1,250mAh battery that can provide up to 50 hours of illumination when fully charged, and better yet, can also be used as backup power for your Kindle. It’s not clear how long charging takes but the company states that one hour of sunlight can give you three days of reading. You can of course still charge your Kindle the normal way.
It’s made from pleather and costs $80. Shipping will start January 14th.
The company likes to call it an energy management system, but that’s a lot like calling a secretary a communications routing specialist. That’s not to say the EverSSense thermostat from Allure Energy doesn’t do a couple of nifty things, the main one of which is to keep track of your whereabouts and to turn the heat (or cold) on when you get to a certain distance of your home. This of course does save quite a bit in energy bills.
This is not all it does, otherwise why the large-ish box? Turns out that it’s also a media player that can playback music from your iPhone through small speakers on either side of it.
I’m not sure that I ever expected or even wanted my thermostat to be playing music so I find it hard to justify the $349 asking price for what is basically the strange marriage of relatively banal features. If this is your cup of tea however, expect to see it in Q2 of this year.
Weighing yourself doesn’t have to be boring and Withings knows this. They already make a really cool scale that connects to the internet and uploads your weight and bodyfat percentage to the cloud. And this year they’re releasing a new connected scale meant to specifically weigh babies. Most parents are understandably obssessed with their shiny new babies, so tracking their child’s growth with geeky abandon is a pasttime Withings is hoping to cash in on. The Smart Baby Scale has a basket, which you can remove once the baby reaches toddler size. It is accurate to 10 grams, and will weigh your offspring up to 55 lbs. The real fun however starts with the related application. Along with the growth curve chart, parents can attach notes and photos and build a detailed timeline.
There is no price for this at the moment, though it should be available in Q2 of this year.
We last wrote about Zomm two years ago when they were launching their wireless leash product. At CES this year, the company is releasing a new device called Lifestyle Connect. The idea behind it is to make it easier to stay safe, especially for those of fragile health. The small keychain-like device connects to your Bluetooth enabled phone and gives you one-touch access to a Personal Safety Concierge. This concierge will then assist you with what you need, be it to call your friends, an ambulance or the police. This functionality is also available on the Wireless Leash from two years ago, so the real innovation comes more from the fact that the Lifestyle Connect can also monitor your connected health sensors, like glucose meters, heart-rate sensors and fall detectors, and upload the data to the cloud. It is then available to your trusted friends, health practitioners or first responders in the case of emergency, any of which can be summoned, again, with just one touch.
The Lifestyle Connect is $199 and will ship in April. If you pre-order now, you also get 3 months of concierge service thrown in.
I guess that G-Form, makers of the super tough Extreme Edge iPad case (among other things), are trying to recreate some of the marketing magic that Blendtec had going with its Will It Blend series. They’ve produced a series of videos putting the iPad through seemingly increasingly horrifying torture tests, from dropping a bowling ball onto it to tossing it out of a moving car. The latest such video has them tie the iPad with case to a weather balloon and letting it rise to the edge of space. 100,000 feet or so. Then the balloon pops and everything comes back down. Of course, since they’re releasing the video, the iPad survives.
I’m not sure this particular video is that compelling a case for the Extreme Edge’s toughness; the entire freefalling setup would hit terminal velocity way before the 100,000 had been exhausted. Also, the trailing shreds of balloon made it so that it landed screen facing up; the other way around would have produced very different results. Still, it’s entertaining to watch. The case itself is $45.
Induction ranges are nothing new. These are the stoves where nothing gets hot until the pot is placed on it, and then supposedly only the pot heats up. It works by running a copper element under the surface and passing an alternating current, which creates an oscillating magnetic field, which in turn creates a current in the pot, whose electric resistance causes it to heat up. That’s the science behind it. In regular inductive stoves, you have to place your pots in designated areas. The Freedom range from Thermador does away with this and offers you a “full-surface induction appliance with the flexibility of a natural-mapping user interface that intelligently recognizes cookware size, shape and position to deliver heat without boundaries.” This lets you do some serious space management, choosing the most efficient way of placing your pots and hopefully making your cooking a little more efficient. And a little geekier.
In practice however, induction ranges suffer somewhat from the fact that once hot, the pots themselves transfer heat right back onto the stove through conduction. So you can’t really place your hands on the range right after you’re done cooking. Still, having the entire surface available for cooking is pretty nifty though I’m not sure it’s $4,949 worth of cool.
I’d love to know what they were ingesting at the meeting where company iLuv decided they were going to call their new Bluetooth speakers “Mo’Beats”. Funky name aside, these speakers stand out somewhat from the rest for a couple reasons. First their design, very fitting with the overall Apple aesthetic, although we assume they’d work just as fine with any Bluetooth streaming product. That said, the second feature compels you even more to use an iDevice, since that lip is made specifically to dock a Cupertino gadget. Again, you can put anything there, but if you do that, you’ll look as silly as me: I’m rocking Apple keyboards and a barely usable trackpad on a few PCs here in the “office”. I say barely usable because that little bugger’s drivers were made for a Mac and it just acts all kinds of strange on a PC.
Anyway, the Mo’Beats come with a Li-I rechargeable battery and should set you back $100, available soon.
If you’ve got a nagging urge to get your Android action on that big fat HDTV you just purchased, a company called Always Innovating might have something for you. It’s an HDMI dongle that is essentially a little PC all on its own. It’s got its own TI Dual Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 (1 to 1.8GHz) processor, 256MB to 1Gb of RAM, WiFi and is capable of 1080p video decoding. Oh, and it’s running Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich. The idea is that you take any ole TV, plug this into the HDMI port and off you go, running Android as if that TV was a mobile device. You can run apps, browse the Internet, watch movies and do whatever else you’d do on an Android device.
Always Innovating isn’t selling these directly to the consumer, instead opting to license them to third party vendors. They expect to see them in shelves come summer 2012, for a price somewhere between $49 and $99.
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