A Piece of Steve Jobs, Robo Legs, Talking Dogs: Tech Is Getting Weird
Motorola, Meet Swarovski
Motorola has gone from luxury to straight up jewellery with their latest collaboration with Swarovski, who have bedazzled their devices with crystals. The Motorola Razr has been wrapped in a luxe 3D quilted texture and finished with 35 hand-placed Swarovski crystals functioning as a design where precision meets pure brilliance. Even the hinge has been crowned with a large Swarovski crystal, precision-cut with 26 radiant facets.
The Razr has been paired with a matching set of Moto Buds Loop, with the aforementioned loop being completely covered in crystals. I’m not even entirely sure what sort of occasion you’d wear such glitzy earbuds, perhaps at a very boring millionaire wedding where you can pretend you’re wearing nice ears but are in fact blasting Spotify.
Both are styled in the luminous PANTONE Ice Melt or PANTONE Meteorite.
Protect your knees, Chief
The world of exoskeletons hasn’t shaken out quite the way we thought it would 20 years ago. But the simple form factors they have turned into for the consumer market at least make sense, and stay out of the way as much as possible. Hypershell has just introduced its latest model, the Hypershell Halo. After mastering the upper leg, they’re now extending their new model a bit further down. Although they assure us it’s more than that.
“We didn’t simply add powered knees to an existing hip exoskeleton,” said Kelvin Sun, CEO of Hypershell. “We redesigned the architecture, power system, and intelligence around the entire lower body, so four powered joints can move as one with the user. The result is a new platform built to expand not just how far people can go, but the range of terrains and movements they can take on.”
The innovative Fish-Spine Adaptive Joint connects the hip motor to the leg lever, allowing the structure to follow the hip’s natural movement instead of locking to a fixed mechanical axis. Offering up to 198° of lateral range and 167° of front-to-back movement, it enables fluid, multidirectional motion across changing postures.
HyperIntuition 2.0 can anticipate your movement intent approximately 200 milliseconds in advance and adjust assistance up to 2,500 times per second. Halo can therefore follow the wearer’s motion with effectively zero latency. So you aren’t fighting the tech while fighting the mountain.
It can reduce knee-muscle fatigue by up to 40% during squats and has a 20km range via its hot-swappable Hypershell PocketVolt Battery.
Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his exoskeleton.
Finally a Slim SSD for Mobile
The other night I was capturing game footage on my phone and within eight minutes I had a 1GB file clogging it up. Solution: not figuring out how to do more conservative recordings. No, instead what I need is this Lexar Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD. At its thinnest point it’s just 1mm. Crazy, right? My fingernails are thicker than that. It’s so thin you couldn’t stab a USB-C cable into it, so instead it has a magnetic PogoPin-to-USB-C connector flush on its back. It can move files at speeds of up to 1,050 MB/s. With the right iPhone you can do external Apple ProRes recording at up to 4K 120fps. You don’t want it dangling around though so they’re including a MagSafe sleeve that sticks to the back of your phone and holds onto the Muse. No word on pricing yet but you’ll be able to get either 512GB or 1TB models.
Call Your Dog?
I love my pets as much as every other non-psychopath, but if my dog could call me on a whim I’d probably need to get a restraining order or something. “Yes officer, he’s a good boy but he calls me three times an hour.”
PetPhone bills itself as the world’s first two-way communicator for pets. They can call you and say “meow” and you can respond “I’ve told you never to call me at work.”
The actual benefits mean you could potentially soothe your pet if they’re going berserk at home alone. To train it to call you the pet has to jump three times, so fortunately my cat is never calling me ever. It also has all the usual accoutrements you’d expect in a smart device (GPS, AGPS, LBS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Active Radar), making it easy for both you and the government to pinpoint their exact location on a whim. It also works as an activity tracker, so you can see if the dog is getting its steps in to burn off the dog roll. It weighs 37g and is appropriate for any pet over 3.5kg, so no mice.
Buy a Piece of Steve Jobs
Ahead of the launch of the iPhone Duo, Caviar has announced a special limited run of custom versions simply titled “Jobs”. Why? Because the Apple logo on the back has a square of one of his legendary black turtlenecks embedded in it. Underneath, his signature is engraved into the titanium surface as a final flourish. Prices start at $15,990 with only nine being produced in total. This one is for the true Apple diehards that need a piece of their messiah close at hand at all times.