This animated edition of GadgetReport.TV is imagined as Archer’s favorite podcast. It’s all about smart watches that range from truly useful to really clever.

I read somewhere, the less we actually need watches, the more watches turn into fashion accessories. There’s a new tech trend turning watches into accessories to the very devices that lead many of us to stop wearing watches all together … our mobile phones.

Pebble is a Kickstarter project that just might be my favorite crowdfunded gadget yet.

The guys who developed the inPulse smartwatch for Blackberry have created a new watch that works with iOS and Android. The screen is ePaper. A Bluetooth connection feeds data to your wrist so you’ll know if pulling the phone out of your pocket or purse is worth all the hassle. You can see who’s calling, emailing, tweeting or Facebooking you. You can also control music, monitor your workout ,or just see what time it is. The Kickstarter project is super-funded, but it’s also the way to order your own Pebble.

http://getpebble.com/

Once cool companies working really hard to be cool again are bringing smart watches to market too. That’s exactly what Sony calls it’s watch. The Sony SmartWatch has a 1.3 OLED touch screen, Bluetooth 3.0 and four-days of battery life. The Sony SmartWatch does mostly the same things as the Pebble, but it’s more expensive and only works with Android.

http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/accessories/smartwatch/

The QLOCKTWO W is an entirely different type of smart watch. It doesn’t interface with anything other than your fingers and eyeballs, but it’s smart in a cerebral way. In a stainless steel square with a black face, designers have arranged a grid of 110 letters. A Steve Jobsian single button lights up just the right letters to tell you the time in words. Press the button again and you’ll see the calendar day.

That’s GadgetReport.TV/10. Hope you liked this special animated edition. If so, thumbs up at youtube.GadgetReport.TV, and write happy, nice words at iTunes.GadgetReport.TV. Sharing is caring and I appreciate all you do to spred the word, more than you can ever imagine. Even in cartoon form, I’m @NealCampbell on Twitter. Follow me!

http://qlocktwo.com/info_w.php?lang=en

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I love … LOVE … do you understand the word I’m using here? I HEART, I love, I less than three … Woody Allen would tell Diane Keaton, “Love isn’t strong enough a word. I lurve!” … home automation. Bet you thought I was going to say, “bacon.” That too, but I really am passionate about the subject of home automation because I believe this thing that was initially a toy of the very wealthy is being democratized so that more and more things in our homes can be controlled from an interface on a smartphone or tablet.

We know Apple is working on a TV. Steve Jobs told biographer, Walter Isaacson he cracked it. He figured out a drop dead simple interface for controlling a TV. A lot of people think that is Siri. I don’t. I don’t think it makes sense to control a device that talks with talking. Think about it. If a voice command turns up the volume, I’m going to write that into a show to get your attention. Siri, turn up the volume.

Siri: I’m turning up the volume.

Those of us who follow Apple know they’re not going to release whatever Steve Jobs was so excited about until it’s market changing perfect. That could be later this year or it might turn out to be a unicorn we never see.

One thing is for certain … hardware universal remote controls are not a wonderful thing. Soon all new devices will have wi-fi and associated apps, but that doesn’t help with the TV, DVD player, A/V receiver and gaming console you already own. Logitech created something to automate your entertainment system right now, right out of the box.

It’s called the Logitech Harmony Link. It’s a little round disk that attaches to your Wi-Fi network. The Logitech Harmony Link App is available for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices and it gives you the ability to control up to eight devices from over 5000 brands.

It starts by selecting an Activity. If you want to watch TV, select that as your activity and Harmony Link will turn on the display, the DVR or cable box, and the AV audio gear you use for sound. If you want change from TV to music, it will turn off your TV and switch to whatever kind of music system you use.

Now I’ve gotta tell you, this isn’t as good as it’s going to get, but if you want universal control right now this is one of the simplest systems I’ve seen for incorporating automation into the gear you already own. One of the smartest things Logitech did is price the Harmony Link at $99. Just a couple years ago, people were paying thousands of dollars for the same kind of control. My favorite thing about this kind of control is that it means no single person in your family is king or queen of the remote. Everyone with a phone or tablet can control the gear as long as they have the App.

That’s a gadget Report! I’m @Neal Campbell. Help me spread the word. Tell your gadget loving friends about GadgetReport.TV/9.

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Quite frankly, I think this episode sucks, but it’s complete, and I talk about products I like. The Handpresso Auto E.S.E. is a D.C. powered espresso maker that fits in the glovebox of your car. Even when reading the word espresso, apparently, I still think it’s pronounced EXpresso. I know better, but I mispronounce it anyway. The SBU V3 is a powered, self-balancing unicycle and I want one! The Looxcie LX2 is a wearable video camera that clips to your ear like a Bluetooth headset and uses your smartphone’s Internet connection to live stream your POV to the Web.

GadgetReport.TV/8 Transcript

You know the problem with espresso machines is how you can’t really set one up in a car. You know what I mean? You set it in the passenger’s seat and it’s lopsided. Water gets all over the upholstery. It’s just a nightmare … at least a first world nightmare, but now there is a solution that fits in your glove box which is fine because you know you’re not keeping gloves in there.

Pull the Handpresso Auto E.S.E. out of the glove box, secure it in the cup holder, plug it into a D.C. outlet, fill it with water, add an espresso coffee pod, screw on the lid, press the power button and after 3 beeps you’ve got yourself a little cup of espresso! 8 easy steps. Problem solved.

Handpresso Auto E.S.E.

Dean Kamen is one of the most awesome men on planet earth. He invented the Segway. It was supposed to change the way we get about. But unless your name is Noel Lee that hasn’t exactly happened. Still, we’re starting to see Segway-like tech incorporated into new transportation toys like the SBU V3.

The SBU V3 is a powered, self-balancing unicycle. It’ll scoot you along at up to 15 miles per hour as long as you weigh 325 pounds or less. Its creators say it takes about 30-minutes to learn to ride. As you – learn – it, its motion learning algorithm learns you – by detecting your intent and providing stability assistance as you control direction and speed with natural leaning motions. Lean forward to go. Lean back to stop. You can travel between 7 and a half to 10 miles on a charge all for $1,795.

SBU V3 from Focus Designs

iJustine and Justin from Justin.TV earned places in Internet history by straping cameras to themselves and livestreaming their lives online. I got to meet Justine back when she was doing that. Her setup was portable, but portable kind of like those early cell phones that were attached to a briefcase.

The Looxcie LX2 Wearable Video Camera for iPhone and Android makes the hopes and dreams of any future lifecaster so much easier. The camera clips to year ear and streams to the Web through an iPhone or Android’s Internet connection. It looks kind of like a Bluetooth headset. The Looxcie LX2 constantly records up to 5 hours. If something cool happens, you can back up and send a clip to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or iCloud.

Buy a Looxcie LX2 from Amazon

That’s a gadget report. If you like what I’m doing please help by spreading the word. I need you to Tweet the link GadgetReport.TV/8 or share the video on facebook because without your help, this is just going to have to be an occassional hobby. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll be back in a bit with more Gadget news plus something else I’ve been work on!

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The new iPad isn’t iPad HD or iPad 3. It’s just iPad and it’s possibly the most desirable gadget ever made. To pack in Apple’s latest innovation, it’s a little thicker than iPad 2. It’s 9.4 mm. iPad 2 is 8.6. It’s also slightly heavier at 1.5 pounds.

A new iSight 5-megapixel camera has a 2.4 aperture, five-element lens with technology you typically only get with a digital SLR camera. It shoots 1080p video. I love the way Apples sells it. Imagine you’re reading a book in a park and see a street performer, or you’re curled up on your sofa when your dog comes in the room dressed up by your daughter in a tutu. A great camera is there ready to capture the moment to be shared with friends on Facebook or the world on YouTube.

I was surprised that Apple isn’t including Siri. It could be because iPads don’t always have Internet connections or it could be that Apple’s Siri servers aren’t able to serve all the users yet. Still Apple brings Nuance voice recognition technology to the new iPad by including Dictation. A microphone button on the keyboard lets you say it rather than type it.

If you live in an area that has access, the new iPad includes 4G LTE so you can connect to the Internet with speeds up to 42 Megabits per second. If your carrier allows it iPad can be used as a mobile hotspot. At the time I’m recording this, Verizon is supporting it and we haven’t heard about AT&T.

iPhone introduced us to Apple’s Retina display. iPad will now have one of the best, highest resolution displays you can buy, especially starting at $500. The resolution is 2048 x 1536. It’s exactly twice the resolution of previous iPads which is important because it means Apps designed for the lower resolution will look great upscaled for the Retina display. The display has 44% greater color saturation with 3.1 million pixels.

All the numbers are important to geeks, but the thing that matters most about the new display, is it compares to the quality you’d see in a printed art book. When you hold the display 15-inches from your eyes, you can’t see the individual pixels. The new iPad will be an excellent way to read, enjoy photos, watch movies, and play games. We’ve wondered when we’d start to see the end of paper.

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There are two types of drivers (yeah, right!): Those who trust technology enough that they’d be perfectly comfortable trusting a self-driving car and those who would be scared to death to even ride in such a car. I know life is always more complicated than that. There are shades of gray. That’s what the comments are for (HINT!).

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Eric Schmidt from Google said, “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers. Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.” Why the world’s greatest search company is working on self-driving cars is probably as simple as they’re doing it because they want to do it and they have engineers smart enough to work on doing it. They’re doing it because they can. Google’s automated cars work by taking advantage of cameras, radar sensors, and lasers to detect what’s around the car. What’s more precise? Your vision, your hearing or a laser? So far Google’s technology has driven over a million miles with very limited human intervention. There’s been a single accident. It involved one of the cars being rear-ended by a human-driven car.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html

Google’s not alone. BMW is working on autonomous drive technology, too. The new technology brings a level of passenger safety that could never be matched by even the best professional driver. The tech can sense and analyze everything happening 360 degrees around the car. There are no blind spots and the computer is never distracted.

A car capable of full autonomous operation can contain as much as $200,000 worth of gear, so most of us won’t be enjoying passive rides for awhile. People working on the technology tell us we’ll see an incremental introduction of driver assistance options that will roll out in the next 15-years. You can already get a car that parallel parks itself. There are luxury cars that will sense activity in a blind spot and move the car out of danger. Other cars alread brake in cruise control when they sense a slowdown in traffic up ahead. Automation will make driving safer and travel more enjoyable.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39410/?p1=BI

A company called Lit Motors is bringing a completely different kind of technology to a completely new kind of vehicle. It’s like a motor cycle in that it only had two wheels. It’s like a car because it’s fully enclosed. It has a seat rather than a saddle and a steering wheel rather than handle bars.

The Lit C-1 is being developed as a fully electric vehicle with two gyroscopes that keep the C-1 up-right, even if it’s hit by a car. The target price of the Lit C-1 is $16,000 and the visionary behind it, Daniel Kim, hopes to have them available within four years.

Thank those of you who go to itunes.gadgetreport.tv to subscribe and write a brief recommendation for the show. I hope everyone who loved GeekBrief.TV gets a chance to see what I’m doing with Gadget Report and I need your help to spread the word! Your recommendations in iTunes are needed to get the attention of the podcast team at Apple so they can feature the show. Thanks also to those of you who’ve gone to produce.gadgetreport.tv to donate!

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I don’t have many cuff-link wearing occasions, but I would love to know more about whoever had this idea. It’s a set of cuff-links that do oh so much more than hold your fancy french cuffs together. Each link opens to reveal a USB plug. On one side, you get 2GBs of storage. On the other you get a Wi-Fi hotspot. This would almost be awesome … like something from a spy movie … except that you have to take time to first install software on an Internet connected computer before the wireless functionality kicks in. If you’re still interested, the place to get a pair is Brookstone and the price is $250.

http://www.brookstone.com/polished-silver-oval-wifi-and-2gb-usb-cufflinks

Ever wonder if film still has life after digital? Not for most of us, but for creating new kinds of art … it probably always will. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the camera, Eye of America is an ambitious art project that involves the construction of a large, large, LARGE format camera. The camera is 35-feet-long and creates 6X4-feet negatives.

This world’s largest film camera will roll in and out of the back of a simitruck as it travels 20,000 miles around the United States to capture images culturally significant people. I’d love for them to photograph my grandmother who grew up as a sharecropper in northern Louisiana in the 1930s.

Photos created for exhibition will be 24-feet high. Detail in a human eye captured by this camera will be 1000 times greater than what’s possible with existing film or digital technology. The photographer behind the project is Dennis Manarchy. You can learn more what he’s doing at
theamericanportraitproject.com.

What would it take for you to buy a dumbphone as an emergency backup? SpareOne has a unique selling proposition that got my attention. It’s powered by a single AA battery. The SpareOne peeps say it will hold a charge for 15-years and is good for up to 10-hours of talk time. The idea is … buy one or several of these at $50 a pop. Keep them in the glove box of your car or your flashlight drawer. If you’re smartphone is dead, pull out your Sim card, put it in the SpareOne and you’ve got access to phone a friend.

Some progress is bittersweet. Kodak filed for bankruptcy, but it doesn’t mean they’re giving up. After Flip cameras became a smashing brief hit a while back, Kodak starting making small, affordable camcorders in that style, but Kodak’s always done something smart. They incorporate some feature that you can’t get with other comparably priced cameras. The Kodak zi8 offered a mic input making it immensely more desirable than a Flip HD at the time.

The Kodak zi12 PlayFull Dual is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It shoots 1080p video and 12 megapixal stills. Nothing unique there. The feature that makes the zi12 uniquely desirable is that it’s capable of capturing 240 frames per second slow motion. Last year, I shot a dance show for a friend and captured this amazing flip that’s even more amazing in slow motion. If you’ve got a kid in sports or dance, the zi12 gives you a tool to help your kid analyze a technique for under $200. It’d be useful for golfers too, I bet. Pretty cool, but it’s not available until the end of March.

Kodak zi12

Thanks to those of you who have gone to itunes.gadgetreport.tv to subscribe and write reviews or to youtube.gadgetreport.tv to give a thumbs up! If you need a domain name go to name.gadgetreport.tv where I can get you a .tv domain name for $11. Thanks for watching and helping spread the word. I’m @nealcampbell on Twitter.

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At CES Microvision announced it’s making magic by bringing multi-touch to miniature projectors. PicoMagic applications can be used for business presentations, entertainment, education and gaming. The technology will let users interact with an image projected on any surface using muti-touch gestures. In addition to multi-touch, MicroVision is also bringing 3D to tiny projectors. If this sounds as tempting to you as it does to me, patience will be the virtue we have to nurture as we wait for this tech to make it’s way into products released in 2013.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=114723&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1646045&highlight=

The Geek Intelligence Agency (G.I.A.) may be down, but we’re certainly not out! Rocstor unveiled the Amphibious ruggedized portable hard drive with real-time hardware encryption designed for sensitive data storage and protection whether you’re in the C.I.A. or the G.I.A.

The Amphibious enables two levels of authentication for unlocking protected files. Data is unlocked with the combination of a smart card and keypad code. It uses NITS and FIPS 140-2 validated crypto real-time hardware encryption. No external software is required. The box does all you need. It will accommodate either a SATA hard drive up to 1 TB or a Solid State DDS. It connects using either USB or FireWire 800 and is compatible with both Mac and PC.

http://www.rocstor.com/Products/amphibious-7x.html

As more and more people create Web TV, camera makers have an opportunity to solve some new media challenges. Something that should be built into every camera moving forward is the ability to control the camera and monitor what it’s seeing from a smart phone. Four JVC Everio camcorders announced at CES do exactly that. They shoot 1080p encoded as AVCHD with a 24 Mbps sampling rate. Built-in Wi-Fi enables wireless video transfer and a novelty feature lets users email a 15-second, 640 x 360 video clip to up to eight email addresses. That’s probably a cool feature for people with kids, but the feature that gets me all moist and faint is the cameras are accompanied by Apps for Android and iDevices. The App provides live monitoring and control from a smart phone, or if you’d like to control from a computer, there’s software for that too.

JVC announced seven new camcorders ranging in price from $230 to $900.

http://everio.jvc.com/

The Samsung Transparent Smart Window looks like the coolest thing being shown at CES this year. It’s a high resolution display

GadgetReport.TV is now a podcast in iTunes. It’s easy to subscribe and free. Just go to itunes.gadgetreport.tv. Thank you for subscribing and I hope you’ll rate the podcast in iTunes and take a second to write a review. I need tons to get the show featured.

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@NealCampbell

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Show notes and high resolution images for gadgets from episode 3 are at GadgetReport.TV/3

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Show notes and high resolution images for gadgets from episode 2 are at GadgetReport.TV/2

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Show notes and high resolution images for gadgets from episode 1 are at GadgetReport.TV/1