Kuri, the smart home robot from Bosch internal startup Mayfield Robotics, won a lot of hearts when it debuted at CES in January. Now, the little domestic bot has gained some new abilities, which should help it win minds, too, when it launches officially to pre-order customers later this year. One of Kuri’s new powers is facial detection, which allows it to tailor its reactions and… Read More
Geography is cool, whatever middle-schoolers say. In fact, the only thing cooler is augmented reality. So what if I told you there was a gadget that combined these two cool things into one?! It’s called the Orboot, and it actually looks like it would be a lot of fun, provided your classroom is nice enough to have an iPad or two lying around. Read More
Connected homes aren’t yet sparking interest beyond the early adopter crowd, according to survey of nearly 10,000 consumers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia conducted by analyst Gartner. Read More
Roboticists at Disney Research are investigating how to improve the quality of human-robot interactions by studying how speech patterns affect engagement with a creepy anthropomorphic bot that imitates its playmates’ speech. Read More
With retro phone brands Nokia and Blackberry remerging at Mobile World Congress this year you’d be forgiven for thinking Mistress Fortune was up to her old wheel-spinning tricks again. And as old tech becomes tech news again, it’s a sign — say some — that smartphone innovation is on the scrap heap. But a commoditized smartphone market offers fresh opportunities if you… Read More
Google’s Pixel smartphone this year was a significant reset for the company’s mobile hardware strategy – and one that earned a lot of praise from customers and critics. Good news for those who liked it: Pixel’s successor will arrive sometime in 2017, as confirmed by Google SVP of Hardware Rick Osterloh to Android Pit at MWC this year.
It sounds like the Pixel 2 will… Read More
Do you really need a screen? That’s the question Fossil is asking with their clever and handsome Fossil Q Hybrid smartwatch, an analog watch that hides all of its smarts behind an understated face. This type of watch has become more common with watchmakers like Skagen and Michael Kors jumping on the bandwagon. Many of the manufactures use movements from MMT and others and most of them… Read More
A new startup called unGlue wants to help kids better manage their time on connected devices. Just don’t call it parental control software, says co-founder and CEO Alon Shwartz. The idea, he explains, is to offer families a simpler solution for setting limits on screen time across devices, whether inside the home or away. Shwartz, a serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for… Read More
In the hype period for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game’s creators compared it to the original NES classic. I chalked this up to the usual pre-release silliness; how could a brand-new game be anything like something released in 1986? It turns out I’d underestimated both Nintendo’s candor (understandable) and the timelessness of the first Zelda’s design. Read More
The latest rumors put Apple and Samsung on a direct collision course. If they pan out, the next iPhone and Galaxy will look very similar with curved screens and thin bezels. But then there’s the price. One option is going up market, while the other will probably stay mainstream. Once upon a time Samsung blatantly copied Apple to the point the courts agreed and forced Samsung to pay… Read More
