wearable technology

It’s the NFC Shoe! Utterly Brilliant or Totally Stupid?

/ Mark Brill / Leave a comment

I really can’t make up my mind whether this is the best or the worst idea ever. It’s the NFC shoe. Fashion house WeAretheSuperlativeConspiracy (there’s a catchy name if I ever heard one), have embeded an RFID chip into a shoe. It allows the wearer to walk over pads to trigger a number of actions: take a photo and send it to Flickr, add a friend to Facebook. I’ve never been one for wearable technology – most of them make people look stupid, but this has the advantage of being invisible. Given that the next couple of years will be big for contactless, maybe, just maybe the contactless shoe will catch on.

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Orange to sell the LG Watch Phone

/ Mark Brill / Leave a comment

Orange have announced that they will be selling LGs Watch Phone from this August. It is aimed firmly at the must-have gadget geek and sold on a sim only or pay as you go tariff.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/33657/Orange-launching-LGs-watch-phone-in-August

The phone itself looks quite neat, and uses touch screen and text-to-voice technology. It does mean that you’ll be talking into your wrist and voices will be coming out of your watch. So who is actually going to buy this?

Sci-fi will tell us that we’ll all have wearable communications in the future, but the fact remains that people do not adopt technology that makes them look silly. You only have to look at Sinclair’s C5, or the Segway to see that. With the exception of some Californians, who would want to ride around on a Segway?

Similarly, Bluetooth headsets worn outside of the car look stupid. Apart form taxi drivers and night club bouncers few people wear them.

Whilst smart phones and touch screens were this year’s bandwagon in mobile, the point is, I don’t expect to see a rush of watch phones appearing on the market anytime soon.