Samsung’s Gear Sport is currently the best alternative to Android Wear

This is the smartwatch I’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been a smartwatch evangelist ever since I first strapped on the original Pebble back in 2013, and since then, I haven’t looked back. I get that smartwatches aren’t for everyone, but for me, having a tiny gadget strapped to my wrist that I can glance at for notifications and data on my physical activity throughout the day is essential.

Because of that, I’ve been sorely disappointed with the smartwatch selection we’ve seen over the past year. As a fan of the Gear Live, Moto 360, and Huawei Watch, the recent Android Wear hardware choices have left me feeling very underwhelmed. If you’re in the market for an Android Wear watch, your only two options are something huge and overly bulky or a watch that’s from a fashion brand and costs upwards of $600.

A full-featured Android Wear watch that’s not overly large or expensive doesn’t really exist right now, but that’s okay. Samsung recently launched its new Gear Sport, and while it may not have every single bell or whistle, it’s currently the best alternative to any Android Wear watch on the market. These are my top three reasons why.

It looks appropriate on smaller wrists

Watches like the LG Watch Sport and Huawei Watch 2 are packed to the gills with just about every single feature you could ask for, and while this does make them extremely functional, it does so at the cost of them also looking like huge, offensively large meatballs.

These gadgets might be your jam if you’re into the look of bigger watches, but for someone like me that has smaller wrists, they’re impossible to use.

The Gear Sport measures in at 43mm in diameter, and while that might not be the smallest smartwatch we’ve ever seen, it’s noticeably more compact than any other smartwatch that offers a similar feature set. The circular display sitting on top of the squircle body does take some getting used to, but this is still a very good-looking watch. It’s sturdy, the rotating bezel makes navigating through Tizen a joy, the side buttons are clicky, and – best of all – it looks like it belongs on my wrist.

The Gear Sport doesn’t skimp out on features

“But, Joe – what about the LG Watch Style? That’s a relatively new Android Wear watch that’s super slim!”

LG’s Watch Style gets size right, but fails to offer enough features.

That it is, but as good as the Watch Style might look, its feature set is considerably lacking. There’s no heart rate sensor, GPS, or NFC for Android Pay – one of the highlight features for Android Wear 2.0. I can understand omitting something like a GPS chip to make a smartwatch more affordable, but at this point in time, a heart rate sensor and support for mobile payments is a must.

With the Gear Sport, you’ve got a heart rate sensor that can do continuous monitoring, built-in GPS, and access to Samsung Pay for NFC payments – all in a body that manages to look and feel good on a smaller wrist.

This is something that Android Wear doesn’t currently offer. There are smartwatches out there that have these features, but they only exist in big watches. The Gear Sport is the first Android-compatible smartwatch we’ve seen in a while that offers so many goodies in such a small body, and that’s why this device is so appealing.

A focus on fitness that doesn’t overshadow other tasks

As the name of the Gear Sport suggests, this is a smartwatch with a heavy focus on fitness. Samsung Health is a big part of the Sport, and it allows you to use the watch for tracking your steps, calories burned, changes in your heart rate, calories you’ve consumed throughout the day, water and caffeine intake, and so much more. The fitness feature set that’s present here is fantastic and makes the Gear Sport a wonderful companion for hitting the gym or going on a run with.

However, when you’re not setting new personal bests, the Gear Sport also manages to be a really good smartwatch for other daily activities. You can easily take action with notifications that you receive on your phone, there’s support for downloading Spotify playlists directly onto the watch, and Samsung’s Tizen interface is incredibly snappy and fun to use. You don’t have access to nearly as many applications as you’ll find with Android Wear, but to be perfectly honest, the Gear Sport does everything I need it to do right out the box.

This is a really, really good smartwatch

I’ve only had the Gear Sport for a little over a week at the time of publishing this article, but that’s been more than enough time for me to realize that Samsung knocked it out of the park with this gadget. I’m still eager to see where Google takes Android Wear in 2018 and what it decides to do with the platform, but until then, the Gear Sport is a small, functional, reliable, and downright awesome device that I’ll be recommending to all of my friends and family members this holiday season.

For even more info on the Gear Sport, but sure to check out Andrew’s full review!

Everything we know so far about Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire

Search your feelings. You know this hype to be real.

Disney and The VOID have been cooking up something epic for Star Wars fans. A new VR adventure that blows away any other VR experience you have ever had. A claim like that comes with a lot of questions, so we’ve put together this quick FAQ in order to better explain what it is you’re getting excited about.

You ready? Here we go!

Read more at VRHeads!

Amazon made a budget Fire TV Stick for the rest of the world

Amazon has unveiled the Fire TV Stick Basic Edition in over 100 countries including Canada, France, Italy and Spain. It costs €60 in Europe, but has been temporarily marked down to €40 for Prime customers. Amazon recently launched Prime Video around the world (both with and without the regular Prime service), so the device is a way to get folks on it without the need for a computer or smartphone. “This makes streaming content from apps like Prime Video fast and easy,” said Fire TV VP Marc Whitten.

The Fire TV Stick Basic Edition comes with quad-core processor, 1GB of memory and 8GB of storage, so despite the name, it appears to be the same as the $40 Fire TV Stick currently sold in the US. The main difference is that the US version comes with an Alexa remote that can take voice commands, while the Basic Edition has, well, a basic remote.

Amazon is investing billions to create content for Prime Video, one of the few services that is available without the main Prime subscription. That includes movies and its own original shows like Man in the High Castle (above). Folks looking for a streaming service without fast deliveries and other Prime perks can get it for $3/€3 per month in 200 countries around the world.

The problem is that streaming Amazon Prime to your big-screen TV is a pain for many in Europe, unless you own a Chromecast, set-top box, or TV that supports it. By offering a stripped-down Fire TV Stick for €40 — the same price as a Chromecast dongle — Amazon is no doubt hoping more folks will be motivated to subscribe to Prime or at least Prime Video.

While Amazon has managed to roll Prime Video out around the world, the same can’t be said for its Echo products using the Alexa service. They’re available in the US and UK, and the retail giant recently released the Echo in India (in English only). The only other language supported is German (in Austria and Germany), but Alexa still isn’t available Latin language-based countries like France, Spain and Italy.

You can order the Fire TV Stick Basic Edition now in 100 nations, with local availability in Canada, France, Italy and Spain. Bear in mind that it doesn’t work in 4K, however — for that, you’ll need the $70 Fire TV dongle. Unfortunately, since that product is tied at the hip with Alexa, it’s not available in European nations other than, yep, the UK and Germany.

Source: Amazon

The surprising Islamic beauty of ‘Engare’

The first question I ask Mahdi Bahrami is, “How do you say the name of your game?” He laughs and responds smoothly, “Yes, it’s called En-gar-ay.”

Engare is an eye-catching game. In Steam’s sea of gritty multiplayer shooters, pixelated platformers and cartoonish RPGs, it immediately stands out. Engare is sparse yet richly detailed at the same time, filled with looping lines and delicate curves. It’s a game about geometry, art and architecture. Put simply, it’s a game about beauty.

“When I see these mathematical shapes in a mosque or some other places, I feel like I can see the rules behind it, I can see the mathematics of it,” Bahrami says.

Engare’s beauty is specific: It showcases Islamic art, featuring sloping arches and densely packed, repeating patterns generated by a geometric approach to design. This is the art of Bahrami’s hometown, just outside of Tehran, Iran.

Art in Iran and other largely Islamic countries differs from the Western world’s paintings, statues and buildings in a few key ways. The most obvious disparity is a dearth of human portrayals in Islamic art, a phenomenon borne of centuries of religious restrictions.

“In Islam, for so many years, they had this idea that you are not allowed to draw humans,” Bahrami says. “It’s a sin against God if you draw humans or if you draw living creatures. So all the artists tried to draw everything based on abstract ideas, based on mathematical rules instead of drawing humans. And I’m not saying — of course everyone should be allowed to draw anything. I don’t think that’s a good idea to force everyone to draw just abstract ideas. Still, it had some interesting results.”

Bahrami studied and worked in Amsterdam for a few years, where he found himself surrounded by Western art and architecture: Gleaming statues of men, women and conquerors lined the streets, and the museums were packed with portraits. It was impossible to miss Western art’s focus on the human form.

When I see these mathematical shapes in a mosque or some other places, I feel like I can see the rules behind it.

Mahdi Bahrami

“Of course the human body is so interesting, there are so many systems in our body, all of these are working and it’s fascinating,” Bahrami says. “But I don’t see all these systems when I see a statue. No, I just see the surface. You don’t see what is happening in the head or what is happening in the body, it’s all on the surface. On the other hand, when you see something based on mathematical or geometrical ideas, it’s more generous. They show you the system of how this was made. That was something interesting for me.”

Bahrami is 24, and he’s been fascinated with mathematics and drawing since high school, at least. That’s where the idea for Engare took root. He was 17, sitting in geometry class, when his teacher proposed a thought experiment: Imagine there’s a ball on the ground. Pick one spot on that ball and keep your mind on it as the sphere starts rolling across the floor. “What is the shape that one of the points on this ball would draw while it’s moving?” Bahrami asks, remembering his teacher’s proposal.

“That question was amazing, and I thought I wanted to make more complicated situations based on this idea,” he says.

Engare was born. The game brings Bahrami’s mathematical question into the digital world, asking players to envision the designs that would be created by following a single point on a series of rolling, twisting and sliding objects. There’s a target image and players attempt to match it by picking a point on a moving object, and seeing what patterns spill forth.

Bahrami built a prototype of his idea that same year and submitted it to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Organizers loved it. Bahrami was in.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual space that aims to showcase novel ideas in the gaming industry — past participants include Katamari Damacy, Portal, Braid, flOw, Mushroom 11 and Thumper. This was 2010, the workshop’s ninth appearance at GDC. It was also the only year the Experimental Gameplay Workshop has ever been canceled. There simply weren’t enough high-quality submissions, so organizers shut it down and took the year off.

“Later, they told me my project was the only thing that they could show and that was the reason they canceled, they didn’t want to show just one game,” Bahrami says.

Bahrami kept programming and sending his prototype to the wider gaming world. A few months after GDC fell through, he submitted Engare to Sense of Wonder Night, Tokyo Game Show’s version of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Curators liked it and invited him out, and Bahrami found himself demonstrating a game in Tokyo before his 18th birthday.

Engare and Bahrami’s subsequent projects picked up accolades over the years, including at the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade and even GDC, eventually. It was after one of these conventions that Bahrami read an article about Engare that completely changed the way he thought about his own game.

The story noted Engare’s art was distinctly Islamic. Bahrami hadn’t actually considered this aspect of his game before, instead focusing on the mathematical allure of its designs.

“And I thought, ‘Oh, actually, he’s right. It is kind of related to all this art that I have in my city,’” Bahrami says. “And when I was in the Netherlands, I felt more like I really missed those geometrical shapes.”

Bahrami embraced the Islamic art style. It’s now a central theme in Engare, tying together the worlds of art and mathematics, Middle East and West. It’s remarkable that Engare doesn’t shy away from its cultural inspiration — as Bahrami notes, most developers in Iran and across the Middle East attempt to emulate Western games, rather than infusing them with Persian script, towering mosques and other local reference points. The games coming out of these regions are generally white-washed.

The first image on the Engare Steam page is a blue-lined mosque-like building, complete with a pointed dome, a series of archways and delicate details. Engare even includes Persian numbers.

“Everyone’s afraid of putting Persian text — I know developers in Iran who, they make the game in Iran, but they never say it anywhere,” Bahrami says. “Nothing. You don’t see anything about Iran in the game. Because they are afraid. But, for me, I put Persian text in because the style of the game is kind of like, if I put the numbers in English numbers, it doesn’t fit with the game.”

Engare wasn’t created as a vessel to introduce Islamic art to the Western gaming market, but the thought has absolutely crossed Bahrami’s mind. Maybe his game can help translate the beauty of his world to players who generally receive one message about life in the Middle East.

Most of the time, if there’s any game about the Middle East, there is someone for sure killing somebody.

Mahdi Bahrami

“That was, I think, something that I had in my mind,” Bahrami says. “To show these ideas to gamers in Europe, in the US, to show them that the Middle East is not all about killing people. There are interesting ideas, there are interesting types of art here. Because, most of the time, if there’s any game about the Middle East, there is someone for sure killing somebody. I don’t know good or bad, but it’s always about killing.”

Locally, the response to Engare has been fantastic. It’s been written up by a handful of Iranian outlets and, Bahrami says, people seem to be proud of the game’s celebration of Islamic culture. Engare is doing well across the globe, too — apparently there’s a rabid contingent of players in China and the game is selling well enough that Bahrami should be able to pay off investors (Indie Fund helped finance it) and live off subsequent sales for a while.

“It’s a lot better than what I was expecting,” Bahrami says. “You know, recently, it’s really difficult to sell indie games because every day there are a lot of games out there, so it’s really difficult to be seen. But at the moment I think it’s a lot better than what I was expecting. It got a lot of attention on Twitter and on Steam all the reviews are positive. I think it’s going well.”

Someone even told Bahrami that they cried while playing Engare.

“The whole game is based on circles and rectangles, there’s no story or anything,” Bahrami explains. “So, if someone cries — I didn’t expect to make anyone cry with just some rectangles or circles moving on the screen.”

Facebook Messenger plugin enables cross-platform customer service

While most of the billion-plus users on Facebook Messenger are individuals, the company has refined its messaging platform to be more business-friendly. Back in April, it introduced a Discover tab to better connect individuals with companies they’d enjoy, as well as improved chatbot functionality. All of these have focused on improving the business-customer relationship, and the newest addition is no exception. Today’s update adds Customer Chat, a plugin that lets businesses carry on Facebook Messenger conversations right on their own website.

This enables companies to have a continuous chat session, regardless of whether a user is on Facebook Messenger or the company’s home page. It’ll also work across devices — something key since so many customers do everything on mobile these days. These persistent conversations are a boon for the business as well; it means businesses can keep a record of the entire interaction, making sure they don’t lose track of the original request or complaint. Companies can set Customer Chat up for sales, service or whatever they’d need live chat for. While the feature is currently in closed beta, interested businesses can register on a waitlist to integrate Customer Chat on their own site.

‘Your Hands Are Feet’ puts you inside a psychedelic egg yolk

Sarah Rothberg is obsessed with the bright-red silicone sponge she bought at Sur La Table. As a sponge, it’s worthless — it’s too flimsy to be abrasive, and you can forget about it absorbing liquid — but when you rub its tiny bristles together the sound is strangely familiar. It’s the sound of shaving a giant’s leg.

Your Hands Are Feet was made possible through funding from the Engadget Alternate Realities grant program, established in May 2017. It will debut, along with four other prize-winning immersive-media projects, at the Engadget Experience on November 14th, 2017. For more information about the Engadget Experience, the grant program and the grantees, visit our events page, and click here to buy your ticket to the event before they run out.

That particular auditory cue isn’t exactly universal, but it is central to Your Hands Are Feet, a new interactive virtual-reality experience from Rothberg, a lecturer at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, the director of IDEA New Rochelle, a nonprofit immersive-technology incubator in New York. The project, which engages users in a set of oddball scenarios, enlists psychedelic environments, generative music and interaction design to create new ways of talking about complex feelings. Those scenarios range from controlling your mind as if it were a Rube Goldberg machine, picking up your eyes when they’ve literally popped out of your head and, of course, shaving a giant’s leg.

When I first met the pair in their Bushwick, Brooklyn, apartment late last month, Rothberg struggled to find the words to describe a feeling that is now burned into my memory.

“So shaving a giant’s leg, it’s the same as sort of like a sisisiphy- sisy- sisiphy? Sisyphin? Sisyphean … ? Sisisyphean? That sounds crazy. That can’t be right,” she said.

“It’s a syphilis task,” she surrendered, laughing. “Shaving a giant’s leg sort of encapsulates this feeling of this thing that you just have to do all the time and it sucks but it’s a means to an end. You know, the feeling of like, ‘I want to get this thing done. I want to have this smooth, nice shaved leg. But you always have to constantly be doing it.”

In Your Hands Are Feet, users get stuck in a Sisyphean loop when they, perched on a giant’s foot, attempt to shave its leg with an outsize razor only for the hair to sprout up again (sound effects courtesy of Rothberg’s silicone sponge). Their work is so surreal and seemingly complex that I repeatedly found myself asking, “How the hell do they come up with this stuff?” But after two days immersed in their world, it all began to make sense. When you talk to them, the mundane is magical, language is fluid and Greek mythology is just one verbal stumble from an STD. Life with them is just one big trippy play on words.

When you slide on the Rift and slip your hands into a pair of Oculus controllers to experience Your Hands Are Feet, you’re immediately transported to a world that falls somewhere between the playfulness of Gumby and something far more sinister. The colors are bright and vibrant, the figures are at once familiar and entirely unknown. In the opening sequence, you’re presented with a half-carton of eggs, which, using your controllers, you’re encouraged to throw against a wall. The yolk of each egg acts as a portal, transporting you to a unique alternate universe where your actions control the narrative and the soundtrack. The vision is so unique, so singular, that it’s hard to believe it came from the minds of two people who barely knew each other until just a few months ago.

From their platform sneakers to the way they talk about virtual reality, Rothberg and Winger-Bearskin complement each other so thoroughly you’d think they’d been working together for years. They met as grad students in the equipment room at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2015. They ran in the same circles and attended the same parties, but it was the actress Alysia Reiner (Orange Is the New Black) who ultimately brought them together.

Reiner’s latest film project, Egg, which costars Christina Hendricks and Anna Camp, tells the story of a conceptual artist looking to conceive a child through unconventional means. In a pivotal scene, Reiner attempts to walk Hendricks (also an artist) through a VR experience she’s been working on.

Instead of just alluding to her character’s work, Reiner wanted to create something that would complement the film that audiences could also experience. She reached out to Winger-Bearskin, who immediately thought of Rothberg. The collaboration, which began in earnest this summer, has been anything but conventional. With the kernel of the scene from Egg, the pair started brainstorming about “moments when you virtually give someone a piece of your life,” as Winger-Bearskin puts it.

“Very frequently we prototype those kinds of experiences with sayings or with metaphors,” she said. “So I can say, ‘I walked into that room and my stomach just dropped,’ or ‘It was so loud that I felt like my ears were bleeding’ or ‘I looked at him and my eyes almost popped outta my head I was so surprised.’ We have these things, like, she knows my eyes didn’t really pop outta my head, or my stomach wasn’t tied in actual knots, but she can get a sense of what that feels like in her body, and she can prototype that experience in her in an empathetic response.”

With the idea of recreating complex emotional experiences in place, they did what creative collaborators do in 2017: They started dumping links in a Google Doc. What they collected is an odd assortment of references that only make sense once you step inside their world. There are the works of conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, clips from the film The Holy Mountain, a fuzzy My Little Pony, pictures of marshmallows and paintings by Judy Chicago. There are slides dedicated to physics and movements, environments and metaphors. And then there are the dildos.

“I’m pretty sure Amelia was the person who started the vibrator folder, but it was not a taboo subject at all for us,” Sarah said. “We had come up with this scene, ‘Everything Has Vibes.’ And then we were like, ‘Oh, the controllers can vibrate like a vibrator! We have to use vibrator imagery.’ It was obvious. It was just obvious what we needed to do.”

Vibrators aside, the ease of their collaboration is clear in their work. The final product, illustrated by Sarah’s friend Niv Bavarsky, with sound design and music by their boyfriends, Eamon O’Connor and Yotam Mann, translates feelings of anxiety, confusion and frustration into playful, unestablished metaphors that just make sense.

AR navigation app promises better accuracy than GPS alone

You may have seen augmented reality navigation before, but the arrival of AR-native frameworks is making it considerable slicker and more accessible. Case in point: Blippar. Its just-launched AR City app for iOS uses Apple’s ARKit to clearly outline where you have to walk, and highlights nearby points of interest based on what you can actually see. And more importantly, it promises to be more accurate than GPS alone. The app uses visual inertial odometry (that is, interpreting movement seen through the camera) to minimize distance errors and prevent you from turning on to a side street by mistake.

The app is available now in a public beta. There’s just one catch, apart from the absence of an ARCore-based Android equivalent: you’ll need to live in the right city to get the full experience. Basic AR navigation works in any city that Apple Maps covers, but the visual positioning is only available in central London, Mountain View and San Francisco. Right now, this won’t help much if you’re lost on the streets of New York or Mumbai.

It’s early days, though, and this at least shows the potential of AR navigation. So long as you’re comfortable holding your phone in front of your face (you’re going to look like a tourist every time you use this), you’re getting the kind of precision and contextual info that a map can’t offer by itself. It’s not exactly the same as having a local guide you around, but it’s close enough that you may get a feel for a city more quickly than you would before.

Source: Blippar, App Store

AT&T Confirms iPhone X Demand ‘Has Been Strong’ Following ‘Highly-Anticipated’ Launch

AT&T chief John Donovan has confirmed that demand for the iPhone X has been “strong” following the device’s “highly-anticipated” launch in the United States and over 50 other countries just four days ago.

“All the signs are that customers love it. It’s probably the most highly-anticipated version… and demand has been strong. So we’re pleased,” Donovan said at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, per CNBC.

Apple no longer provides first weekend sales numbers for iPhone launches, and it doesn’t reveal iPhone sales on a model-by-model basis in its quarterly earnings results, but it did say pre-order demand was “off the charts.”

We are thrilled to be taking orders for iPhone X, the future of the smartphone. We can see from the initial response, customer demand is off the charts. We’re working hard to get this revolutionary new product into the hands of every customer who wants one, as quickly as possible.

Apple’s guidance for the current quarter is between $84 billion and $87 billion, which would easily be an all-time record even at the lower end of that range, suggesting that iPhone X sales are and will remain very strong.

Localytics, a mobile engagement platform used by more than 37,000 apps, said iPhone X adoption outpaced iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus adoption over the first three days of availability following each device’s respective launches.

iPhone X online orders placed today are estimated to ship in 3-4 weeks around the world. The device is also available to purchase in stores, but inventory is extremely limited right now, especially outside of the United States.

Related Roundup: iPhone XTag: AT&TBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Google shows the waiting times at your favorite restaurants

If weird food trends (cronut, anyone?) have taught us anything it’s that people are prepared to wait a long time for a seat at a restaurant, so whether you’re visiting a popular local eatery or Time Out’s latest gastro-pick, you’re faced with two choices. Attempt to beat the crowds by having dinner at 4pm, or rock up whenever and hope the people in the line ahead give up before you do. Now though, in a development we can’t believe didn’t happen sooner, Google will show you the wait times of nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world.

Just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing and scroll down to the Popular Times section where you’ll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. You can also plan ahead by tapping on any of the hour bars to see an estimated wait for that time period, and can scroll left and right to see a summary of the day’s total waiting times. Earlier this year Yelp and Nowait partnered to bring us remote queuing, but with Google’s new function you’ll now be able to skip the queue altogether.

Vodafone branches out into internet of things things

The UK’s major carriers have mobile all sewn up, and after a bit of broadband here and TV there, they’re turning to other things to get their kicks, grow their brands and pad their bank accounts. For O2, that meant moving into smart home gear, and for Vodafone, that means launching a range of internet of things (IoT) devices under the banner “V by Vodafone.” Available to Vodafone customers in the UK and a handful of other European countries from today is a car telematics dongle, pet tracker, bag tracker and connected camera, with more products due to join this launch lineup next year.

V-Auto is a little dongle that plugs into the OBD-II port of your car, provided your vehicle was manufactured in 2002 or later, since the port itself wasn’t a common feature until then. Like many similar products of its type, the dongle allows you to track your car remotely, and it can also give you a driver safety rating for each journey based on the data it collects. If you happen to get into an accident, the dongle will know and the “Auto SOS” feature will kick in, first giving you a call to check everything’s fine before notifying the emergency services if you don’t pick up. The V-Auto device itself is £80, and requires a £4 per month subscription to keep it connected to Vodafone’s network. Incidentally, O2 has an OBD-II dongle of its own that assesses how safely you drive as part of its car insurance scheme, O2 Drive.

V-Camera is basically an Arlo Go camera with a Vodafone SIM in it, meaning it doesn’t need a WiFi connection to function. It’s weatherproof, records at 720p, has a rechargeable battery supposedly good for one month of cordless operation, as well as motion and sound detection features. It’s available for £339 upfront and £4 per month thereafter.

V-Pet is an activity and location tracker, from brand Kippy, you clip onto your dog or cat’s collar. The main draw of this is you can be alerted when your hairy beast wanders outside of defined zones, and see where they’ve run off to should they go for a wander. The device is £50 and demands a £4 per month subscription. V-Bag, aka the Alcatel MOVETRACK, has the same feature-set as V-Pet, just without the activity tracking element. Not that you need that functionality when you’re simply sticking it a bag to keep tabs on its location. V-Bag is £59 upfront and £3 per month thereafter.

These are all the products available through V by Vodafone right now, but if you already have an IoT device that supports a cellular connection, you can also pick up just a SIM. This costs £5 outright, and will set you back £3 or £4 per month depending on the device you’re sticking it into. This standalone SIM will also be offered to third-party retailers next year so they have the option of bundling them with new and existing products. The benefit of being on the V by Vodafone platform, though, is users can manage all their connected devices through the one, Vodafone-branded app.

Vodafone has actually been playing around with IoT devices for several years, but primarily behind the closed doors of its “xone” program. The carrier clearly thinks some ideas are ready for primetime, though. Toying around with hardware is one thing, but now Vodafone is ready to sell it to the masses.

Via: Pocket-lint

Source: Vodafone (1), (2)