smartwatches

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- 60,000 Redditors want to know what's in this safe.

- NYC looks to Facebook for the future of payphones.

- UD Replicas makes a replica of the most underrated accessory from "The Dark Knight."

- Samsung Galaxy Watch "definitely" coming, Samsung confirms.

- The Pebble smartwatch finally arrives on doorsteps to a chorus of approval.

- Pebble breakdown shows waterproofing makes repairs impossible.… Read more

April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot said, unless you've been jonesing to hack the massively popular Pebble smartwatch.

Founder Eric Migicovsky has announced that a watch-face SDK (software development kit) for the Pebble will be released in the second week of next month (and that 40,000 Pebbles have been assembled so far).

He showed off some early developer work in the Kickstarter video update below, including watch faces with an animated dragon, Mario running around the screen, and even the first game written for Pebble, featuring a Nokia-style Snake done in very simple graphics.

It's all very 1980s, but lots of fun. … Read more

Taking apart the Pebble smartwatch proved a challenge for the folks at iFixit, so it's definitely not something you'd want to try at home.

Beyond just telling you the time, the Pebble smartwatch can sync with iPhones and Android phones to alert you to incoming calls, e-mail, instant messages, and appointments. In its quest to see what makes the watch tick, iFixit employed its usual tools and tricks to go behind the scenes.

Prying the watch apart, iFixit found a lot of adhesive designed to keep out water. Opening the watch cracked its face, though, so Pebble owners … Read more

Running Android 2.1, the $349 I'm Watch from Italian company I'm promises to be a perfect smartphone companion. Its small screen showcases useful info like appointments, e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter updates in real time. The watch also boasts big, bold styling you'll likely either love or hate. But like many gizmos in this emerging space unfortunately, the I'm Watch has plenty of flaws ranging from a tricky setup to glitch-prone performance. All of which render this pricey gadget more a curiosity than truly compelling consumer product. Other watches such as the Motorola Motoactv and Pebble … Read more

When product designers at Martian Watches began development of their Martian Passport smartwatch, they made a risky decision to give the watch a traditional, stylish, and very analog look.

It's a design decision that, not surprisingly, has led the consumer-electronics crowd to ding Martian Watches and prompted the fashion-focused crowd to applaud the Irvine, Calif.-based company. It also captures the inherent challenge facing the "next big thing" some believe is coming to your wrist: Unlike a laptop computer or even a phone, a watch is a fashion statement. And for the tech crowd, a smartwatch -- … Read more

I've lived with a smartwatch, in one form or another, for several periods over the past few years. Recently, with the Martian Passport. Further back, with the iPod Nano and a Hex wristband. Before that, a SPOT watch.

I love the idea of a smartwatch. Certainly, so does the media as of late. Bloomberg reports and iWatch rumors galore, plus various wearable watch-type items at January's CES, have started to give this territory the sense of a category.

Between the Martian and the Nano watch, I loved aspects of each -- and also found them both lacking. There'… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--At MWC 2013, much of the buzz was predictably about new smartphones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. Behind the scenes though, another movement stirred. Gear that places humans and sophisticated technologies in extremely tight proximity, almost approaching the cybernetic, was everywhere.

The trend of people integrating computing technology into their daily lives has been with us for decades, but it's only within the last few years that we've really seen a groundswell of these cybertech products. A flood of smartwatches that link to smartphones via wireless Bluetooth connection, many born on Kickstarter, have begun to finally ship. … Read more

An Apple smartwatch seems to be on the drawing board after all, according to a patent application published today.

The application -- filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in August 2011 but just published -- is titled "Bi-Stable Spring With Flexible Display." It describes a flexible touch-screen device that can display information. The device can be worn in any location, according to the patent, though one of the drawings shows it being worn around the wrist.

The patent doesn't specifically refer to the device as a smartwatch and instead envisions it as an electronic … Read more