You know those times when you pick up your phone and you realise you have it upside down? There is a phone from the tech giant Alcatel that will help you solve that. You would remember Alcatel from the glory days of “normal” mobile phones. Even then, they have not ceased to be pioneers in anything mobile or technology.
Meet the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3! With this smart phone, you can pick your calls with the phone upside down, yes, upside down! No the guy in the picture is not crazy!
Another idea that will make life easier for the phone enthusiasts that we at Computer Potato think may sound useless but prove useful in many mobile devices! Okay that is not the only feature of the phone, it is like most smartphones and the insides is as good. See below
Meet the Yotaphone. A phone designed to meet both your reading and smart phone needs at both ends.
Yotaphone has a normal smartphone screen you see in many new phones in front of it and an e-ink screen at the back, the kind you see in mobile devices designed just for reading.
You can use the screen at the back for both reading your favourite book and viewing your notifications without unlocking your phone. You could even personalise the back screen to show your favourite picture all the time, so you basically have your own digital case. Yes the back screen is always on.
You must be thinking battery matters now. Well the e-ink screen doesn’t use the phone’s fairly large battery as much as the normal screen giving your 5 days of using the back screen alone. The phone even lets you use the back screen for all functions which means you could use your phone for 5 days without need for a charge.
Is this useful in anyway I hear you say, here at Computer Potato we believe this is one innovation that has got a place in the current market and beyond. With time we will see this design used in many mobile devices giving you more functions. So we say kudos to the brains at Yota for their idea! See it yourself below.
We all know that moment when you eat too much and your belt feels too tight, or when you sit down and you suddenly feel the cold metal belt buckle press too tightly on your skin.
Now you can avoid the uncomfortable moment, automatically. Yes automatically! We introduce you to Belty, the smart belt that will solve this issue for you and tell you a lot more about your waist line and day to day activities.
The official website boasts “Belty helps you enhance your overall wellness as well as your comfort throughout the day.” It achieves this by many sensors it has inside of it that monitors and tell you how many steps you have taken daily and your expanding or reducing waistline. As always, like all the smart devices, it correlates the information it gathers and displays it on your phone for your analysis.
The Belty App
We at Computer Potato do no think smart belts are the direct future, however, one thing is for sure this innovation will set the trend for more smart wearable items that will give more information about our daily lives.
We have recently spoke about the smart chopsticks (click here) that tell you of toxic ingredients in your food and how much of a good idea it is. Computer potato is proud to present to you the Hapifork by an inventor Jacques Lépine
The fork tells you when you are binging your food and alerts you to eat slow which can help you with staying in shape, prevent gastric reflux, digestive problems and postoperative operations according to the product’s website..
The Hapifork recently got coupled up with a companion knife and the pair got a new name this year; 10SFork.
We at Computer Potato think this is another innovation that has potential in the realisation of the Internet Of Things (click here) and stay tuned as we bring you more of the future in the simplest form of news!
Like recent years, this year promises even more devices wanting to make our lives a bit easier. Here at The Computer Potato, we aim to bring you the best innovations in their simplest form.
We are pleased to bring you Strone, a device that lets you divert your calls over the internet to a laptop, phone or tablet when you are travelling to avoid roaming charges.
You simply put your SIM card in this device, and all your calls and texts are routed to an the strone app which can be installed on a laptop or mobile device. All you would need is an internet connection in the country you are, whether via a local SIM card or WiFi.
Say bye to those extraordinarily expensive bills you get when you are on holiday or on a business trip and never miss a call again. The computer potato believes this fancy little device has definitely got places to go, not just with you on holiday!
Computer Potatoe thrives in bringing you the latest innovation and technology and again we have got one that caught our eyes. A group of researchers -obviously- have managed to develop a Lithium battery that takes 2 minutes to charge and could last up to 20 years.
This is an exciting and great achievement as the current Lithium batteries can be charged and drained about 500 times and usually last about 2 years of continual use. This is the reason why after 2 years, your battery operated devices seem to last a little less after a full charge. The newly developed generation of batteries by scientists in Nanyang Technology University in Singapore could go 10,000 times and last 20 years.
As always, Computer Potato brings you the latest technology in its simplest form so we won’t be discussing the technical details. However, the materials inside the newly developed batteries are different and cheaper compared to the current generation of batteries. This could mean we will be seeing these batteries in the market soon.
Don’t get your hopes up too soon though, as this research is much more for batteries in electric vehicles than your smart phones. If history is to repeat itself – like it always does- mobile devices will be getting it a shortly after!
Robots might soon be delivering your mail in minutes in the future. DHL is trialling a service where drones deliver mail in Juist, a German island in the North Sea.
The trial is the first of its kind in Europe. Partnered with the German government, the flight plan for this robot vehicles have been drawn just for a few weeks. They are set to fly 12km from a harbor in Norddeich to the island at a height of about 50m (164 feet) and up to 18 m/s (about 40mph). These drones will fly to deliver drugs and other urgent medical supplies to a pharmacy on a remote island off the North coast.
The “parcel-copter” will automatically fly from source to destination while being monitored and not controlled. DHL isn’t the only one eyeing this type of service. Google and Amazon are also working on their drone delivery systems.
Not to get too excited however, before any of these services can knock at your door, it will still be a while. But I find it a very useful delivery service so much that it made our list of good innovation.
I never believed one day I would pick up my pen, or my computer to write an article like this. But here we are in 2014, and the world is changing faster than we all imagined. Some say it is for the better, some say it is for the worse. Whatever your opinion you have to agree with me that chopsticks that can actually save your life by testing your food is definitely new.
I previously wrote about some unusual things that have been given the smart prefix (click here to read). A Chinese company (obviously) Baidu have designed what is now known as smart chopsticks. These chopsticks check the food for anything toxic when it touches it. As the world is trying to save money, restaurants reuse cooking oils and add cheap, badly made or sometimes artificial food condiments to food to make it as cheap and as delicious as possible. This has led to seeing more dangerous and toxic ingredients in our eat out food. These chopsticks will also check for things like the salinity and acidity. It can do this because it has indicators on it that will tell you if the food is bad (red) or good enough to eat (blue). It can also connect to your smart mobile phone and give you a detailed information about the results of the test.
Conclusion: This is a very using and lifesaving tool that can gain ground if more companies get hold of the technology and research into it. It is said in the future there will be more devices that will be able to instantly test food for calories and even more. I for one am looking forward to the common use of these devices, as I have been sick from eating out a too many times.
Everywhere you look now you see a smart phone. The chances are you are using one to read this post right now. You must have wondered what it means for lifeless devices to be smart. Well when devices take on the smart prefix, it means they are networked (mostly to the internet).
As humans we are insatiable, we want more all the time. Hence, we keep thinking of new ways to make our everyday lives easier. With years or hard work, research and experiments of thousands of people, we came up with the computer and then networked it which made it smarter because they shared even more information. Since then, computers have been made smaller and smaller and now they can even fit on a bracelet like the smart watches(Click to read).
Again being humans we are still experimenting and advancing and we have made more things smarter. I have put together a list of uncommon things that will soon be “smarter”!
Smart Clothes: Many companies have been working on these. There are numerous uses for them. Some shirts now store charge while you walk from your motions and then in turn charges your phone. Some are even being designed to monitor your body and share information with your devices.
Shirt With Body Sensors
Smart Shoes: Yes, Adidas made a running shoe that constantly adapts its shock-absorbing characteristics to customize its value to the individual runner, depending on running style, pace, body weight, and running surface. Apple also is said to have patented a shoe that measures how much you walked or ran and other information. These will be able to connect to your devices and give you real time information in the future!
Adidas Smart Shoes
Smart Kitchen Appliances: Many devices are being connected now to make cooking more interesting and easier! You got smart cookers, smart microwaves, smart fridges and even smart washing machines. Yes, you read that right!
All these devices we never thought will get smarter but today more research is being put in and companies vying to be the first. This is really getting us ready for the “Internet Of Things”(Click to read). This really makes you wonder what next will be getting “smarter”. Spoons? You might not be far from the truth!
You have heard of many ways to pay for what you buy without using cash. From debit and credit cards, to paypal to contactless cards. Now there is another way we might be paying in the future. Sometime soon, you might walk into the supermarket and pay by waving your hands at a scanner. You don’t need to have a computer chip under your skin either. Swedish engineer Fredrik Leifland invented a system that scans your vein patterns and recognises it as a payment method. This unique system called Quixter uses sensors that are used to read the configuration of blood vessels and correspond with the linked bank account.
The Quixter Box
Conclusion: This is a very unique system that has been tried by many students in Sweden and has become popular. As a security enthusiast, I consider this to be a very secure payment system that can and will become very popular in the future.
