1 post filed under android
The $600 SR-SX2 smartphone-controlled rice cooker from Panasonic allows you to use your FeliCa NFC enabled Android smartphone to set the device’s timer, rice type, and cooking variations. The rice cooker is also connected to Panasonic’s cloud servers, allowing the user to access a number of special recipes.
1 post filed under android
The FXI Cotton Candy is a prototype USB stick-sized portable computer, powered by a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU. It has 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out (1080p) and a microSD card slot for memory. It can turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into an Android terminal.
No pricing yet, but FXI say the Cotton Candy should cost less than $200.
1 post filed under android
The WIMM Platform is a networked wearable microtab with inbuilt accelerometer, magnetometer and based around the Android open operating system.
www.wimm.com (via @thomasbjork)
1 post filed under android
This is the imWatch. It’s an Android based “smart watch”. A wrist mounted, connectable little computer with a proper OS. I’ve been thinking about these things quite a bit recently - and now one exists.
The reason I’ve been thinking about smart watches is that I’ve been wearing a TikTok since Christmas.
Having a little computer on my wrist has been great in some ways. I’ve been thinking about what I could do if it would connect to my iPhone and display push messages, allow me to access the media stored on my phone or stream stuff that my phone is fetching from the internet. I’ve been thinking about personal and private devices collaborating and working alongside each other as an ensemble. Networked software with distributed interfaces that flow across devices of various scales. Proper Ubicomp.
Having a little computer on my wrist has been hugely frustrating. It doesn’t actually do any of these things at all. It’s running a flavour of iOS, it has multitouch and it so obviously has the capacity to run third party apps if Apple allowed it to but it really seems there’s been a decision not to do these things.
There was a camera sized gap in the first iPad’s shell. I reckon it was removed at the last minute because it risked opening the doors for a load of lacklustre video chat or camera based apps which would distort people’s understanding of what the iPad was at the time of launch. There’s a camera in iPad2 but people are starting to get what an iPad actually is now and there’s a set of established apps that help to define it. Maybe Steve Jobs thinks people aren’t ready for a connected microtab - yet. When the iPod Nano was launched he did say that it would make a good watch. That’s not going to be a flippant remark.
Regardless of whether people are ready for it or not the imWatch is out soon. It’s running an open platform, it’s (fairly) cheap and it’s available to preorder now. I’m not saying having another glowing rectangle (especially on your wrist) is necessarily a good thing but I’m really interested in the challenges we might face when designing for microtabs. It’ll be really interesting to see where Apple takes the Nano next and how devices of this scale develop over the next few years.
1 post filed under android
Chris Ball (Lead Software Engineer for One Laptop Per Child) has made an email counting teeshirt.
Hopefully you can see past the nerdiness of this video and see that there’s something very interesting going on here. It’s clothing that can talk to The Cloud.
You can get the source code on Github.
