CES Live

There's a suspicion among many that wearable tech is simply today's digital navel-gazing; a self-indulgent and meaningless set of metrics bordering on narcissistic over-obsession. The quantified self could soon become a whole lot more meaningful, however, if startup GERO has its way. Building on groundbreaking research by the Human Locomotome project, the Russian company says it can use the data from wearables like Fitbit's Force and Jawbone's UP to identify chronic conditions such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, depression, and even type 2 diabetes, simply from the way we move. SlashGear caught up with GERO's co-founders at CES as they shift things out of stealth mode.

Continue Reading

Fitbit's much-anticipated Caller ID upgrade for the Force is finally due to hit the fitness tracker in February, the company confirmed to SlashGear today. Post-update, the wrist-worn wearable's single line display will show a scrolling update of who is calling, with a name if that person is in your contacts.

Continue Reading

Electric scooters are too much fun to be left to the elderly, or so Acton found when it flew past its Kickstarter goal for the M Scooter last October. Now shipping, the folding "urban mobility" device promises to work with, not necessarily replace, other methods of transport, being compact enough to fit into the trunk of your car while also providing sufficient range to do local trips. We threw caution to the wind and climbed aboard to see if we'd found the future of CES transportation.

Continue Reading

T-Mobile has announced 4.4m customer additions to its network in 2013, turning around its dire slide of previous years, and seeing record numbers of subscribers jumping onboard with its "Un-carrier" approach. The carrier is now America's fastest growing, CEO John Legere said, with more than 1.6m new customers added in Q4 2013 alone.

Continue Reading

T-Mobile USA has launched its "Un-carrier 4.0" phase, with outspoken CEO John Legere taking to the stage at CES 2014 to announce a "Get Out of Jail Free Card" to allow subscribers on rival networks to escape the early-termination fee and join his network. The carrier will pay off the ETF for AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint customers, as well as take their old phone as a trade-in, for what T-Mobile says is worth up to $650 per line. Meanwhile, there's a new set of smartphones too.

Continue Reading

If "wearable" is the big buzzword of CES this year then "flexible" can't be far behind. Cambrios Technologies isn't a company you might associate with it - LG's G Flex and Samsung's transforming curved TV are certainly more eye-catching - but the company's ClearOhm silver nanowires are likely to enable the next generation of flexibly flexible touch panels, including turning your whole car dashboard into one vast finger-responsive surface.

Continue Reading

Voice, data, and a battery backup for those times when ice storms take out your landline: that's the promise Novatel Wireless' MiFi Home is making, also known as the Verizon 4G LTE Broadband Router with Voice. Unwieldy name but the hardware does a fair amount: like a traditional MiFi it'll share a mobile data connection, but plug a regular wired phone in and you can also make voice calls as if it were a landline, too.

Continue Reading

WowWee is back, and it has a tiny robot pal to pitch here at CES, a Bluetooth-controlled balancing two-wheeler. The 'bot can either be moved around by using an iOS app as a controller, or put into one of a number of game or entertainment modes, such as dancing to music stored on the iPhone, or even following your hand around.

Continue Reading

Lumus has brought its DK-40 wearable to CES 2014, showing off the new developer unit in public for the first time. The monocular headset is, like Google's Glass, an Android-powered wearable computer, but whereas Glass floats a small window for notifications and such in the upper corner of your eye, the DK-40 actually overlays a full VGA digital image over the right eye instead. We grabbed some hands-on time to see whether it lived up to our expectations from the original prototype we tried all the way back in early 2012.

Continue Reading

Intel isn't leaving its wearables push to chance, looking to the world of fashion in order to do what its executives claim nothing else in the segment has managed: build an emotional relationship without compromise with the wearer. "Today the smart wearables we see on the market are very much led by technology companies," Ayse Ildeniz, VP for business development and strategy in Intel's New Devices Group said today during a CES 2014 roundtable. "Whereas, the things we wear are very personally-led: we somehow get very attached to them." To try to build that emotional stickiness, Intel is being very clear on its limits: unlike the do-everything approaches of Samsung, Pebble, and others, it's going to focus on the chips and leave the rest to the fashionistas.

Continue Reading

Solo videographers and extreme sports junkies wanting to record their adventures could have some robot assistance later in the year, in the shape of the Jigabot robotic auto-framing system. Resembling a Beatles-style yellow submarine, the rotating, swiveling mount takes your GoPro, point-and-shoot camera, or compact camcorder and - thanks to a compact dongle that clips onto your jacket - tracks you as you move around the frame.

Continue Reading

Remote control lights like Philips hue may allow you to change the color of your environment, but LightingScience claims its bulbs actually improve the quality of it. A Bluetooth-enabled downlighter, the Rhythm Downlight cuts out the frequency of blue light that tells the body to "wake up" and runs the user through a smartphone questionnaire to learn their living routines and automatically adjust what frequencies are emitted.

Continue Reading