If you find smartphone notifications annoying enough already thanks to their skill at exploiting the full range of distraction options available, whether dropping a banner from above or sprinkling pox-like red balls over your homescreen icons so as to lodge like grit in the eye, you should prepare yourself for even less subtle demands bubbling into your eye-line in the future if novel research into flat panel haptics ends up being commercialized by mobile device makers.

Think notifications that create a physical bulge in the screen of your smartphone — making the update icon stick out or even pulse lightly like the proverbial sore thumb until you press with your own digit to remove the unsightly wrinkle.

On the less dystopian side, touchscreens with the ability to be dynamically tactile could have accessibility benefits by enabling form and texture to co-exist with the utility of flat panel computing — for instance by providing people with visual impairment with physical signals to help identify key on-screen content (paired with the necessary software to power such a use-case in existing apps and interfaces of course).

The ever inventive Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University is behind the research into what they describe as “embedded electroosmotic pumps for scalable shape displays”. The main break-through they’re claiming here is squeezing the hydraulics-based haptics into a thin enough panel that it can be sequestered behind an OLED screen — such as those found on modern smartphones.

Their work is detailed in this research paper (PDF) — and demoed in the below video:

While bulging notifications might not be the average smartphone users’ idea of futuristic mobile computing heaven, the researchers suggest the prototype tech could allow for dynamic interfaces on other types of devices so that buttons and signals appear at the point of necessity — say power, play and track progress on a music player — rather than having to fit in lots of physical knobs and dials.

They also trail the idea of the flat panel haptics tech enabling the return of keyboard physicality to touchscreen smartphones.

Long time mobile industry watchers may recall that BlackBerry-maker RIM, a company which dominated the mobile arena in the pre-iPhone touchscreen era with its designed-for-email physical keyboard handsets, actually tried something like this all the way back in 2008.

The ill fated BlackBerry Storm, as the ‘turducken’ handset was named, combined a touchscreen with embedded physical haptics — the screen literally clicked as you pressed — in a bit to recreate the sensation of pressing real keys on a physical-Qwerty-free touchscreen handset.

The problem was, er, the experience basically sucked. It was neither fish nor foul, as the saying goes. So whether lots of mobile makers will be rushing to embed electroosmotic pumps into their handsets just to have another bite at keyboard physicality in the era of touchscreen computing seems debatable.

Although tablets seem a much more interesting use-case. (And, beyond that, the general idea of squeezing more attention-grabbing bells and whistles into roughly the same physical space will surely have takers.)

Add to that, RIM’s attempt to implement a touchscreen keyboard with physicality some fifteen years ago was clearly lacking the fine-grained tactility needed for the tech to perform usefully in a typing context, since the company apparently just stuck a single button under the screen’s backplate.

Whereas the researchers point out their electroosmotic pumps can be as small as 2mm in diameter (and up to 10mm), with each pump being individually controllable (akin to pixels) and supporting fast update rates. This suggests that a flexible touchscreen combined with an array of their miniaturized hydraulics could be a lot more dynamic and versatile (and thereby potentially useful) than was possible with the sorts of mechanical mechanisms available for pairing back in the day.

So there is still a chance that RIM’s BlackBerry Storm was simply ahead of its time.

Researchers develop tiny hydraulic haptics for touchscreen notifications you can physically feel by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Have you ever wanted an iPhone case that looks like a pair of Crocs? You know, the ugly-but-comfy slip-on shoes covered in holes that you can optionally decorate with colorful push-pins? You haven’t? Well, apparently some designer at smartphone case maker Casetify saw a pair of Crocs and thought to themselves, wow, that would make for a great iPhone case!!

No, we’re not kidding.

Casetify this month launched a new series of iPhone cases that look exactly like Crocs shoes, complete with their trypophobia-inducing holes and sets of pushpin decorations that allow you to personalize your phone case with things like flowers, rainbows, smiley faces, and…uhhh…a stick of butter. A piece of toast. A snail. A motel keychain??

I’m sorry, but what the actual **** is going on here?

These cases are selling for $52!

While TechCrunch doesn’t typically cover smartphone cases or accessories, when we saw this new product line we knew we had to make an exception because of its truly oddball nature. Is this press release a prank? Is this an early April Fool’s? Vaporware? Have we time-traveled to the 1980s for new product ideas?

We regret/are happy to inform you that these cases are real. We have them in hand and have put them through their paces.

Here’s what we can report. The cases themselves come in black, lavender, cream, and pink. They’re soft and flexible with their silicone finishings, as described. They also have bumpers on the corners and the promised raised bezel to help protect the screen. Casetify says they provide up to 4 ft of drop protection.

But of course, no one is buying these cases for their protection capabilities. They’re buying them for the “aesthetic” if they’re buying them at all.

Available only for iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, the cases have either 13 to 14 holes designed to hold the pushpins. These are sold in sets of 5 pins that sell for $22 — this is not a cheap joke to participate in!

Image Credits: Casetify

At launch, there are four main sets available: a “cottage core” set with a mushroom, snail, strawberry, flower, and duck; a “retro west” set with a dalmatian-spotted cowboy hat, matchbox, cowboy boot, motel keychain and 70’s looking happy-faced flower (no, I don’t know how the flower is western either); a “diner breakfast” set with the aforementioned butter and toast, a smiley face, checkered heart, and the text “thank you!” as you’d find on your diner check; and the “peace love earth” set with a teddy bear, heart-shaped world, happy-faced daisy; yin yang symbol; and happy rainbow.

Image Credits: Casetify

There is also a Limited Edition “Barbie” set with pink barbie pushpins like Barbie’s face, brand, jacket, heart-shaped glasses and the year “1959.”

That one sells for $82! Eighty…two…dollars. 

I don’t even…why…

We asked Casetify how it came up with this um, “unique,” idea.

The company told us that it’s designed many innovative products over the past few years, like its mirror cases, pillow cases, and bounce cases, and it thought these new pushpin cases would simply offer its customers “new ways to express themselves with their everyday tech.”

“The first pin sets we’ve produced were developed with our best-selling prints in mind, and also taking into account trending products among Gen Z and Millennials,” a spokesperson said.

When we asked what was the deal with the butter, they noted, “might be shocking to know that food-related items sell really well haha!”

Image Credits: Casetify

Okay, but butter? Really? Is that because of that viral butter bench? Have phone cases now tied themselves to niche TikTok trends?

Plus, there’s the cottage core set that’s also seemingly inspired by the internet trend that romanticizes country life and living in harmony with nature — an aesthetic that grew in popularity thanks to TikTok’s subcommunities driven by its personalized algorithms. Now it’s jumped from the screen into your pocket.

In any event, despite having giant pins sticking out of the back of the case, it wasn’t too hard to shove the decorated case into your pocket or pull it out. The cases and the pins are fairly smooth, so while they tug a little on your clothes, it ends up not really getting any more stuck than, say, your Popsockets grip, for example.

Meanwhile, actually decorating the case with pins wasn’t too difficult either. Pushing the pins in did require a little effort, particularly on the bottom row for some reason, but once in they felt fairly secure.

The pins can be mixed and matched based on your mood, Casetify says, but the debut selections were fairly limited. Of course, we had to try jamming some Crocs Jibbitz (aka Crocs pins) into the holes of the case just to see. After all, if the cases supported Jibbitz, that would have opened up a wide array of customization options! But sadly, the rounded-backed Jibbitz we had on hand — these sparkly Hello Kitty charms — were just too large. Bummer.

Casetify says it’s planning to release more pin sets and cases in the future, including through upcoming brand collaborations, like the one it did a few months ago with Barbie, which precipitated the Push-In case line. We don’t know which aesthetic community will be next to get the pushpin treatment, but there are plenty of “-cores” to choose from.

Casetify launches iPhone cases that look like Crocs with Jibbtiz. Yes, for real. by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Sonos has two new speakers going on sale Tuesday, March 28, and they’re both significant new models that occupy a couple of key spots in the overall Sonos line-up: The Era 100 is essentially the replacement for the Sonos One, arguably the ‘default’ starter speaker for anyone looking to build out a Sonos system. The Era 300, its larger sibling, is the first Sonos speaker to support spatial audio, and occupies a place somewhere between the now-defunct Play:3 and the Sonos Five. We took both for a test drive, and found plenty of reasons to get excited about Sonos’ Era era.

The basics

The Sonos Era 100 basically drops in as a replacement for the Sonos One in the existing product lineup, and it’s got a design to match. Unlike the Sonos One, the Era 100 is a true rounded cylinder (instead of a 3D rounded rectangle like the One) and is slightly taller than the One, but with a more svelte appearance overall thanks to being more narrow side-to-side.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

The Era 100 connects via wifi to your Sonos system, and includes Apple AirPlay 2 like its predecessor. It also has a mic and supports Sonos’ own voice control as well as Amazon Alexa (unlike on older devices, Google Assistant is no longer an option). It has a physical switch for disabling the mic, on top of the touch control mute from prior models, and the redesigned top touch surface a dedicated volume slider, play/pause and skip controls.

New to the Era 100, and the Era 300, are two additional connection options: Bluetooth, and physical line-in. These are both welcome, but it’s important to note the USB-C port used for line-in on both requires the addition of the Sonos Line-In Adapter for connecting to 3.5 mm sources. I thought that since it was USB-C, it would be easy to just connect a source like a MacBook Pro directly and have it recognized as an external audio device, but that doesn’t work – nor does using existing USB-C-to-3.5 mm audio adapters that I had on hand.

The Era 100 also gains two separate tweeters for the first time in a speaker this size from Sonos, as well as a larger subwoofer. The result should be more clarity and natural sound vs the Sonos One. More on how that delivers later one.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

The Sonos Era 300 is a much more net-new speaker for the company, though it roughly occupies the place in the lineup left behind by the discontinuation of the Play:3, which was not immediately replaced with another model at or near its price point. The Era 300 is quite different, however, both in terms of its design – which looks like an hourglass laid on its side – and in terms of its feature set, since it includes support for spatial audio for the first time.

Sonos designed the internals of the Era 300, which packs four tweeters facing in all directions but down, as well as a pair of woofers, to be able to fill a room with sound from a single point. It can reproduce both stereo and spatial mixes, and doesn’t artificially manipulate stereo to sound spatialized, thankfully. Sonos also provided the Era 300 with the ability to act as rears for a Sonos surround setup, which means if you have a basically unlimited budget you can get two plus an arc, and a Sonos Sub to create a virtual 7.1.4 sound system.

Of course, both the Era 100 and Era 300 can join an existing Sonos setup and gain access to all the synced multi-room playback features that Sonos is know for. Both also feature auto-TruePlay tuning that uses the built-in mic to adjust sound to best fit your room. Also, if you have the input adapters, you can play back audio from your line-in source across your various Sonos speakers.

Design

Both these Sonos speakers achieve new highs for the brand in terms of design, in my opinion. The Era 100 is a straight across the plate, fundamental bookshelf speaker with just a hint of edge thanks to the oblong shape. It seems more innocuous in situ across a range of domestic settings, including in the kitchen or set up as rears, thanks to some subtle tweaks, like the fact that the speaker grill goes almost all the way to the top of the speaker, unlike on the Sonos One which had a band of solid surface nearer the upper edge.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

The new volume rocker indentation is a welcome change and adds some tactile benefit to distinguishing it from the forward/back buttons, and the subtle vertical logo on the front grill is a nice bit of branding that doesn’t mar an otherwise very covert look.

For the Era 300, Sonos obviously went a bit more adventurous, coming up with this shape that tapers to the middle and then re-expands out towards the back. This is likely at least in part functional as well as aesthetic, to provide the Era 300 with its spatial audio and height channel surround capabilities. It makes for a much more striking design vs. the Era 100, but it’s one that I think works quite well in a range of settings. It’s definitely a bit more attention-grabbing, but since it ends up looking like a modern architectural mini sculpture, that’s not at all a bad thing. In fact, I would say the Era 300 is maybe the best-looking speaker Sonos has ever made.

Features & Performance

Let’s get the basics out of the way first: Sonos’ new speakers are just as reliable in terms of the core Sonos magic as any that have come before. They provide rock-solid multi-room synced audio playback, and will integrate instantly with your existing setup should you have one.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about what these speakers uniquely provide that Sonos’ existing lineup hasn’t offered.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

The Era 100 has internal hardware changes that the company claims provides better sound vs. the Sonos One. Based on testing, that does indeed seem to be the case – with a couple caveats. The first is that I would say if you’re looking to use an Era 100 on its own, you definitely get a lot better audio quality vs. a Sonos One acting solo. The added tweeter and bigger woofer do deliver more accurate sound with less muddied mixes, especially at lower volumes.

If you’re debating whether or not to upgrade an existing Sonos One pair to Era 100s, I think things get a lot more murky. The fact is that in most settings, for most setups, you likely won’t get enough of a difference in overall experienced audio quality to justify the price of upgrading. But if you’re coming to it new, or upgrading from a much older pair of Play:1s, it’s definitely a great-sounding speaker – alone or together.

As for the Era 300, it’s far easier to recommend this more broadly, in part because there’s nothing really equivalent in Sonos’ recent history to compare it against. It genuinely provides terrific, room-filling sound with surprising clarity and sophistication given its footprint and size. The Era 300 is a great sole speaker for any room where you want to on audio (vs. having a soundbar or home theatre system for a TV) and I found it was even comparable to the more expensive and excellent Sonos Five that the company still sells in terms of overall quality.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

Of course, the Sonos Era 300’s big fancy new feature is support for spatial audio, which it provides if you use Amazon Music Unlimited as a source, or Apple Music via a forthcoming update, for tracks mastered with Dolby Atmos Audio. I tested this with compatible tracks from Amazon Music Unlimited, and found that it does indeed make a difference and sounds great – I just couldn’t really say for certain that it sounds better than the same song rendered in stereo only. To be fair, that’s generally been the case for me and spatial audio – with Apple’s AirPod lineup and Apple Music I can definitely tell the difference, but can’t usually say definitively that I prefer one vs. the other. I wouldn’t make spatial audio support the deciding factor in a purchase, but your mileage may vary there depending on how you personally feel about the technology.

Bottom line

Sonos has rarely had a real miss with its product lineup, and both the Era 100 and the Era 300 stand as clear hits. The Era 100 is a smart and subtle evolution of the company’s ‘default’ starter offering, and the Era 300 is a unique and outperforming product in a sea of options that includes Apple’s just-updated HomePod. While each sounds great in its own right, the differentiator for Sonos will always be the flexibility of its multi-room audio technology, and that remains a huge highlight of both of these products that you can’t really get anywhere else. I wish that Sonos had either just made the aux inputs on the back 3.5mm (the argument against being that with USB-C, they also support Ethernet adapters for wired network connections), or that they’d included their proprietary adapters in the box, but the fact that they have these options, as well as Bluetooth, is a major nice-to-have upgrade that has been lacking in most of Sonos’ lineup for years.

You won’t be disappointed with either of these speakers, and as always with Sonos products, if you’ve got the money they perform even more spectacularly in stereo pairs. The Era 300 in particular is a super strong offering with few real competitors out there.

Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 review: The next generation of great, reliable multi-room sound by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

The European Commission has laid out another piece of its Circular Economy Action Plan today — adopting a proposal to set common EU rules which are intended to make it easier for consumers to get faulty products repaired.

The “right to repair” measures are aimed at reducing e-waste by preventing repairable products from being prematurely junked.

A Commission proposal last year set out to expand the bloc’s ecodesign rules. The right to repair rules are designed to build on that. The EU wants the full sweep of policies to promote longer tech product lifespans to boost sustainability and work toward its headline goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. (Aka the European Green Deal.)

Goods for which EU reparability requirements currently exist include household washing machines and washer-dryers, dishwashers, refrigerating appliances, electronic displays, vacuum cleaners, and servers and data storage. But mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets are slated to soon be added to the list — once respective ecodesign reparability requirements are adopted by the bloc’s lawmakers. So the consumer electronics industry is certainly in the frame.

A right to repair for consumer kit including mobiles and tablets was floated by the Commission back in 2020 — when the EU’s executive said electronics and ICT would be a priority for the expansion of the Ecodesign Directive to help tackle the growing scourge of e-waste.

Today’s package of measures propose a supportive framework to wrap around specific reparability requirements and encourage the development of the necessary services.

“Over the last decades, replacement has often been prioritised over repair whenever products become defective and insufficient incentives have been given to consumers to repair their goods when the legal guarantee expires. The proposal will make it easier and more cost-effective for consumers to repair as opposed to replace goods,” the Commission wrote in a press release. “Additionally, more demand will translate into a boost to the repair sector while incentivising producers and sellers to develop more sustainable business models.”

The proposed measures include a new consumer right to repair both for products that are under guarantee and those no longer covered by a legal guarantee.

“Today’s proposal will ensure that more products are repaired within the legal guarantee, and that consumers have easier and cheaper options to repair products that are technically repairable (such as vacuum cleaners, or soon, tablets and smartphones) when the legal guarantee has expired or when the good is not functional anymore as a result of wear and tear,” the Commission suggested.

For covered tech products still under warranty, sellers will be required to offer repair except when it is more expensive than replacement. While, beyond the legal guarantee, the Commission said EU consumers will get a new set of rights and tools to “make ‘repair’ an easy and accessible option”.

Here’s a summary of the main measures in the Commission proposal:

• A right for consumers to claim repair to producers, for products that are technically repairable under EU law, like a washing machine or a TV. This will ensure that consumers always have someone to turn to when they opt to repair their products, as well as encourage producers to develop more sustainable business models
• A producers’ obligation to inform consumers about the products that they are obliged to repair themselves
• An online matchmaking repair platform to connect consumers with repairers and sellers of refurbished goods in their area. The platform will enable searches by location and quality standards, helping consumers find attractive offers, and boosting visibility for repairers. It will also enable consumers to sell used products to refurbishers
• A European Repair Information Form which consumers will be able to request from any repairer, bringing transparency to repair conditions and price, and make it easier for consumers to compare repair offers
• A European quality standard for repair services will be developed to help consumers identify repairers who commit to a higher quality. This ‘easy repair’ standard will be open to all repairers across the EU willing to commit to minimum quality standards, for example based on duration, or availability of products

Additionally today, the Commission announced measures targeting ‘greenwashing’ — via a Green Claims Directive — proposing common criteria for environmental claims by product manufacturers in a bid to combat the flood of misleading marketing that’s sprung up to feed off consumer concerns about climate change.

The bloc is already on the way to making USB-C a common charger standard after lawmakers backed a proposal to further shrink mobile e-waste last year.

Making ‘right to repair’ a reality

Speaking during a press conference to announce the dual proposals — both of which will need the backing of the European Parliament and Council before they can be adopted as EU law — the bloc’s justice and environmental commissioners, Didier Reynders and Virginijus Sinkevičius, said the measures are intended to work together to drive sustainability.

“This proposal is the latest in a series of measures to make the ‘right to repair’ a reality,” said Reynders. “First, we needed to ensure that there were more and more repairable products on the market. This is what we did with the proposal for a Regulation on eco-design, or eco-design of sustainable products… Secondly, it was also important to enable consumers to make sustainable choices based on reliable information.

“This is what we wanted to improve with the proposal “Empowering consumers for the green transition”, also adopted in March 2022. And finally, with the proposal for a Green Claims Directive… Our proposal is the last piece of the puzzle to ensure access to repair in the after-sales phase. To make repair easier, more accessible, and more attractive.”

The repair proposal aims to empower EU consumers to ask for a free repair of a faulty product when it’s under warranty (so up to two years after purchase) — which must be provided by the manufacturer if it’s less or the same cost as a full replacement.

In the case of goods that break down out of warranty, Reynders said the goal is to make it cheaper and easier for consumers to obtain a repair. A Commission Q&A on the plan suggests there will be an obligation on manufacturers to repair a product for 5-10 years after purchase (depending on the type of product) — unless a repair is technically impossible.

“The rule will be clear: The producer will no longer be able to refuse to repair your washing machine, unless repairing it is technically impossible. In other words, the producers will be obliged to look into the repair options,” he suggested. “This obligation will apply to goods that are repairable by design in the EU. Such as a washing machine, dishwasher or TV and soon also smartphones or tablets.

“This obligation will apply to the goods that are directly covered by any repairability requirements under EU law, such as the rules on Ecodesign. And we will continue to add more product groups to this list in the future, as we want Ecodesign products to become the norm. You can therefore notice the strong interconnection between today’s proposal and the Ecodesign proposal.”

“Producers will also have to inform consumers about this obligation and availability of their repair services so that consumers know about their rights,” Reynders added. “The producers will therefore be obliged to repair a product, even if the consumers caused the damage themselves. For this reason, producers can charge a price for repair.”

Per Reynders, the only scenario where a manufacturer will be exempt from the obligation to repair is when repair is impossible — such as when the goods are damaged in a way that makes repair technically unfeasible.

He said the proposal aims to open the door to the development of the repair sector — since consumers will not be obliged to go only to the manufacturer for a repair.

“They will also be able to turn to independent repairers and find other repair services that better meet their needs or offer more attractive options,” he added. “We are therefore removing the obstacles that still deter too many consumers from having repairs done. The obligations and solutions we are presenting with this text will help to reverse this trend.”

A Q&A at the end of the briefing raised questions about the cost of repair — with a member of the press pointing out that cost frequently puts consumers off from trying to repair an item vs buying a new one. On this, Reynders said last year’s Eco Design proposal will be key — suggesting that, over time, it will drive down the cost of repairs by requiring manufacturers to bake repairability and sustainability into product design.

“It means that it’s possible to really cut significantly the cost of repair,” he said. “If a product is designed to be repairable, if there’s access to different parts, components, if you can open up a device. Because often — in the sound sector for example, audio equipment, it is not possible to actually open up a device — you can’t actually get inside it yourself. So the Eco Design approach should simplify things there.”

Bye-bye greenwashing?

On greenwashing, the EU’s proposal aims to introduce “minimum requirements” for businesses that make voluntary environmental claims — in the areas of substantiation, communication, and verification.

“Companies will have to ensure the reliability of their voluntary environmental claims, and communicate their claims in a transparent way. Their claims will need to be checked by an independent verifier against the requirements of the Directive. The verifier will then issue a certificate of compliance recognised across the EU,” the Commission said in a Q&A on the Directive.

“By putting in place this common set of rules within the EU internal market, the proposal will give a competitive advantage to companies who make a genuine effort to develop environment-friendly products, services and organisational practices, and lessen their impact on the environment,” it also suggested, adding that it expects the directive to reduce the risk of legal fragmentation of the single market and save costs for businesses that have their claims certified by an accredited verifier — as well as boosting the credibility of European industries abroad.

“If you make a claim as a company, you will need to be able to prove that claim,” said Sinkevičius, speaking during today’s press conference. “So you will have to show that it’s based on science. And that it is reliable. You will have to be specific and you will need to submit your claim for checks by accredited verifiers to ensure it complies with the new directive — and of course you will need to communicate this information in a manner that’s clear and transparent.

“Taken together, these actions should prevent misleading claims from reaching consumers. They will also make life easier for consumers protection authorities once the claim appears on the market.”

Additional measures in the Commission proposal aim to rein in the proliferation of eco labels that have sprung up touting eye-catching green claims to reel in environmentally conscious consumers. “There are around 230 environmental labels on the EU market and no wonder that consumers are confused,” added Sinkevičius. “This proliferation also hinders sustainable business operating across borders and fragments our single market.

“Under new rules we will only allow new public schemes that work at the EU level. We have to mobilise the resources. We have to work together on reliable EU labels — such as the EU Eco label — and if companies want to bring in new private scheme it will need to be better than the ones that are already in place. So there should be a place for labels that show exceptional performance on environmental sustainability but only in well justified cases.”

The proposal comes armed with “teeth”, per the commissioner — who said Member State agencies will be empowered to set “dissuasive” penalties for dyed-in-the-wool greenwashers.

During the Q&A, he was asked whether carbon offsets would be banned under the Green Claims Directive given many such schemes have been found to be worthless, at best. (And given offsetting does not actually reduce carbon emissions — whereas massive reductions in CO2 are absolutely required if humanity is to avoid climate disaster.)

Sinkevičius said the proposal would not ban carbon offsetting claims altogether. But he said “full” information would have to be provided to consumers to stand up the claims being made and also provided to an independent verifier to check such projects are delivering as claimed. 

Europe tools up for the repairable future by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could be working on a new HomePod device that would feature a built-in display for 2024. The rumor seems to be based on third-party supply chain companies, such as Tianma, a Chinese display manufacturer.

This new product in the HomePod lineup would look completely different from existing HomePods as it would feature a 7-inch display. In other words, it would look like a speaker with a small tablet (or a small tablet with a speaker) like the Amazon Echo Show or Google’s Nest Hub.

Kuo believes that Apple is in the middle of revamping its smart home strategy with new devices and features. In addition to the HomePod Mini, Apple recently released a new premium HomePod with a familiar look. It looks like the model that debuted in 2018 but with brand new internal components.

There’s a reason why Apple is focusing more on the smart home. Matter, a new smart home standard, is supposed to unify smart home devices — and Apple is one of the launch partners. The new HomePod supports Thread, the Matter-backed wireless protocol specifically designed for IoT devices.

“The new Matter smart home connectivity standard gives users more choice and interoperability to connect a wide variety of smart home accessories across different ecosystems,” Apple’s vice president, Hardware Engineering and Operations Matthew Costello told TechCrunch’s Brian Heater last month. “With support for Thread, the new HomePod can serve as a border router and securely enable communications to Thread-based accessories located throughout the home.”

Apple is also the company behind the iPad. Adding a touchscreen display to a smart speaker would make sense for the company as many people already use and like their iPad. It would be a familiar interface and could also potentially run some popular iPad apps out of the box.

In January, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that Apple has also been working on a smart display that could be used to control your smart home. Essentially, it would be a low-end iPad that you could mount on a wall to control your lights, thermostat and more.

It’s unclear whether Ming-Chi Kuo are talking about the same device or not. This smart home tablet could carry the HomePod brand, or Apple could be working on two separate devices — a wall-mounted tablet and a countertop HomePod with a tablet.

Apple could reportedly release a HomePod with a display by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

When Microsoft, after a decade-long hiatus, relaunched its now 40-year-old Flight Simulator series in 2020, it reignited interest in a genre that had long been a mainstay of PC gaming. It’s one thing to marvel at the graphics of the new Flight Simulator, though, and another to try to play the game with mouse and keyboard — or the Xbox controller. Few games benefit from custom hardware as much as flight simulators and while you don’t have to go all out, at a minimum, you’ll want a basic HOTAS-style joystick. The next step up from there is a set of dedicated flight controls, throttles and rudders. The best-known names here are Logitech, with its affordable Flight Yoke System, CH’s Eclipse and Flight Sim yokes and throttles, Turtle Beach’s all-in-one VelocityOne, and Honeycomb’s Alpha Flight Controls XPC and Bravo throttle quadrant.

In the past, I only used an old joystick to play Flight Simulator, so when Honeycomb asked me to try their system (which, in the XPC version, now also supports the Xbox), I had a hard time turning it down. At over $550 for the yoke and throttle, we’re talking about a serious investment here — and once you get started, you’ll be tempted to get a set of rudder pedals, too. But in return, you get some very solid hardware that will let you take your flight sim experience to the next level.

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Frederic Lardinois

I’ve tested these controls with both Flight Simulator and the recently released X-Plane 12 — both of which support it out of the box. I should add that I mostly fly single-ending piston planes, so that’s also what I mostly stuck with in my testing, though the Brave throttle quadrant comes with all of the levers and options for two-engine planes as well.

Indeed, it’s maybe the throttle quadrant that most changed my flight sim experience. It features a total of six levers and you can set it up for general aviation flying or for managing commercial jets with up to four engines and thrust reversers. The levers are easy enough to change if you tend to switch between those different modes. One nice feature here is that you can also change the level tension (using a knob on the side of the quadrant) to your liking.

Obviously, that’s what you would expect from a throttle quadrant, but to me, the game changers in day-to-day use were actually the dedicated trim wheel, flap levers and autopilot controls. I’ve always had the hardest time trimming planes in Flight Simulator using the buttons on my joystick, but the combination of the yoke — which takes some strength to pull and push — and the trim wheel make for a far more natural experience. The dedicated flap switch also helps here, and being able to control the autopilot makes all the difference. I don’t know about you, but using my mouse to try to set headings and altitudes in the 3D cockpit never worked well for me. Now, with its dedicated (and backlit) buttons and knobs, I use it far more.

Do I wish that the layout was more akin to the Garmin GFC 500 that I’m used to in the planes I typically fly? Sure — but it’s easy enough to get used to this layout, and the functionality is essentially the same — and using it doesn’t take me out of the sim experience. And that’s really what all of this is really about: being able to focus on the sim in front of you and not having to mess around with your mouse and/or keyboard shortcuts.

The throttle quadrant also features an annunciator panel with 14 warning lights for some of the most typical failures and seven programmable switches. By default, these are set up to control your airplane’s lights, but since the yoke also has those switches, I used one for the parking brake and mostly ignored the rest (though I’ve seen people use it to control some of the more advanced functions of their models).

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Frederic Lardinois

The yoke is as sturdy as the throttle quadrant and features plenty of buttons to manage your flight sim experience. On the left handle, you’ll find an eight-way hat switch that defaults to controlling your views, a push-to-talk button and two vertical two-way rockers (which by default are set to controlling your trim). On the right handle, there are two horizontal rocker switches and two buttons. There are also five switches to control your lights and four to control your electrical system. And to round it all out, there is a five-position ignition switch so you can properly simulate starting up your engine (and testing your magnetos during your run-up, of course).

As I noted before, it takes a bit of strength to pull the self-centering yoke back (or push it) all the way to its stop. If you’ve ever flown a Cessna and tried to keep that nose wheel off the runway during a soft-field landing, it’s a bit like that. But that also means that you end up trimming the plane just like during a real flight simply because you’ll tire of working the yoke. It’s all about that immersion, after all.

There is a red LED backlight that makes the honeycomb-themed panel light up red. If that’s not your thing, you can tone the light down a bit or turn it off completely.

Image Credits: Honeycomb

One thing to note, Honeycomb offers two mounting options: clamps or a 3M micro-suction pad. That pad will lose its strength after a while (though you can buy replacements) but they work quite well. I think most people will opt for the clamps, though. They are easy enough to work with and while using the pads is probably a little bit faster, setting everything up with the clamps is also a one-minute job — and then everything is guaranteed to stay in place. The whole setup does take up a lot of space, though.

To use these controls on the Xbox, you’ll need Honeycomb’s $40 Xbox Hub. There isn’t really much to say here about those. It works as advertised and it does turn the Xbox version of Microsoft’s Flight Sim into quite a bit more of a fully fledged simulation than cruising around with your wireless controller.

In using the yoke and throttle, I kept missing my rudder pedals (I did eventually grab my old Logitech ones and set those up). You can set up the flight sim to handle the rudder for you, but where is the fun in that? (It won’t help you during taxi, takeoff or crosswind landings anyway.) Honeycomb has its Charlie Rudder Pedals in the works and they are currently available for preorder — but they also cost $350. I dusted off my old Thrustmaster T-Flight pedals to use in combination with the Honeycomb setup. That worked like a charm.

Given the price, you better know if you are really into flight simulators or not before you buy this. If you are, then it’s a worthwhile expense if you can afford it. If flight sims aren’t your thing, then you probably didn’t read this far anyway.

There’s a third class of potential buyers here: students working on their pilot’s license. I think the jury is still out on whether a sim is going to help you with that. There is a high chance that without your flight instructor around, you’ll learn some bad habits that you’ll have to then unlearn the expensive way — while paying for your real-world lessons. Plus, so much about flying is about feeling what the plane does and how the engine sounds — something you won’t get from a sim. But as always, talk to your friendly neighborhood CFI and discuss your needs with them.

Honeycomb’s yoke and throttle let you take your flight sim experience to the next level by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

At a session on the future of 6G during Mobile World Congress, expert speakers from companies such as Samsung, the European Space Agency and Telefonica came together to give their views about how 6G will play out.

The first thing to note is that it’s not arriving any time soon. The projections are that the likes of you and I will only get 6G into our hot little hands from around 2030 onwards, so it would be best to quell your ire for now. That said, the prospect of having a device streaming at least a terabyte of data into your eyeballs is enough to set our geeky hearts racing. We are talking about 100 times the capacity of 5G, with sub-millisecond latencies.

Present on the panel was Kimberley Trommler (Head of Thinknet 6G, Bayern Innovativ GmbH), Yue Wang (Head of 6G Research, Samsung Research UK), Xavier Lobao (Head of Future Telecom Projects Division, European Space Agency), and Nicolas Kourtellis (Principal Research Scientist, Co-Director, Telefónica Research).

Asked if they had to pick just one of the most exciting aspects of 6G, the panel gave various views.

Although perhaps not an issue in the minds of most consumers, one aspect the panel got excited about was the significant reduction in energy consumption over a 6G network. Obviously this would mean 6G could be deployable in a vastly wider array of scenarios than 5G, such with IoT devices. Another was real ‘edge computing’ applications and far greater cyber security.

A word that appeared several times in the conversation was “convergence”. This was conjured not, as I expected, in engineering terms, but in the sense of the convergence of the terrestrial and the non-terrestrial (as in, space) networks to provide seamless connectivity.

6G also promises greater resilience across networks. Because of 6G’s astounding bandwidth, virtual education via XR headsets is likely to boom. This could, of course, mean a genuine boost to the UN Sustainable Goals (especially important in emerging economies).

The panel also highlighted how much more robust 6G networks will be from a consumer point of view. You know that thing where your signal cuts out when you get into an elevator? The hope is that 6G, with its ability to move from “2D to 3D” and far greater localization of devices will fix that niggling issue.

Smart labeling in the 6G environment will mean any kind of product will be trackable. Yes, goodbye privacy, but hello to a lot of utility, especially in terms of things like supply change logistics.

Smart cities, holographic meetings, and 3D mapping were all mentioned during the session.

But which one will be the ‘killer app’ for 6G? Mentioned several times during the discussion was the Metaverse, but arriving in 6G “in a more holistic way” said one.

Applications will also include precision manufacturing with robotics, communications of autonomous vehicles, and even brain computer interfaces. “Kinetic content” and “AI generated content” will be vastly more accessible on 6G networks, as well as ‘digital replicas’. So, for instance, Medical students could be trained by using holographic patients where they can safely make mistakes as many times as they need.

6G also promises the concept of “Privacy-preserving federated learning” (ppFL), where multiple parties can train a single model without sharing their raw training data. For example, the potential for cyber attacks over neural networks could be mitigated by ppFL, where the system learns quickly to repel an attack. Another example is where personal information about a hospital patient needs to be sent, but even de-anonymized data can present a privacy risk. A Federated Learning system makes this possible.

But how can we make this happen?

It seems like the jump from 5G to 6G will be a lot easier than the switch from 3G to 4G. Much of the hard work has already been done, and the networks appear – at least – to be prepped and ready for this brave new world…

The brave new terabyte broadband world of 6G is coming, but not just yet by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Drones are quickly becoming more than a flying selfie cameras. Amid growing geopolitical tensions, drone makers are seeing increased demand and acceptance as drones move farther from consumers’ hands.

Skydio today announced a $230 million series E fundraising round and the construction of a new manufacturing facility in America. The company says it’s seen a 30x growth over the last three years and is now the largest drone manufacturer in the United States. The Series E round was led by Linse Capital, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Next47, IVP, DoCoMo, NVIDIA, the Walton Family Foundation, and UP.Partners. Hercules Capital, and Axon, the company behind the Taser and police body cameras, also invested in Skydio.

Skydio says its drones are used in every branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, by over half of all U.S. State Departments of Transportation, and by over 200 public safety agencies in 47 states. But, of course, it helps that government agencies cannot purchase or use drones from the market leader DJI because of security concerns.

In a released statement, Skydio co-founder and CEO Adam Bry says the company sees “extraordinary demand globally from organizations addressing needs important to every citizen.” This includes, in his view, core industries such as transportation, public safety, energy, construction, communications, defense, and more.

Skydio sets itself apart from the competition on its autonomous capabilities. The company had viral success with its original drone that featured a market-leading collision avoidance detection. The company still offers such capabilities but has pushed the industry forward with additional features and capabilities. Last December, Skydio announced a docking station and a new platform that allows drone operators to be flown without an on-site operator. Current regulations around visual piloting limit this product, but Skydio has a solution for that, too, and now works with companies to expand their drone programs.

The new Skydio manufacturing facility is based in Hayward, CA. The facility is 36,000 square feet, a 10x increase in capacity over current levels. In addition, the company expects to hire 150 manufacturing employees to staff the new facility.

Skydio soars to a $2.2 billion valuation after raising $230m Series E by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Indian startup Ultrahuman has made a name for itself since 2019 by building out a subscription fitness platform which offers a range of workout and wellness-related content, integrating with third party wearables like the Apple Watch. In 2021 it expanded into offering medical grade sensing hardware which monitors real-time blood glucose — spinning up a program focused on encouraging users to track their metabolic health as a fitness intervention. This was followed, last summer, by a teaser of more hardware incoming: A smart ring of its own design — to complement the existing CGM (continuous glucose monitoring) sensor program but which it also offers as a standalone health-tracking wearable to compete with the likes of Oura’s smart ring.

TechCrunch tried a beta version of Ultrahuman’s Ring (or R1), as its plainly called — testing it in combination with its CGM-based metabolic tracking program (M1) over a month’s use and for several weeks on its own when it did not also have access to real-time glucose data. So there are actually two review scenarios here: The Ring + CGM; and just the Ring. (We’ve previously tested Ultrahuman’s CGM-based program on its own — click here to read our report on the M1 from last year.)

For those not already familiar with CGMs, these are partially invasive sensors which are worn directly on the body — containing a filament that’s inserted under the skin to allow the hardware to sense changes in blood glucose via the wearer’s interstitial fluid.

It’s a different story with the Ultrahuman Ring: All the sensors are fully contained in the body of the smart ring and only non-invasive techniques, such as optical sensing, are used to track the user’s biomarkers. Absolutely no skin puncturing required.

However, if you’re up for wearing both the Ring and the M1, Ultrahuman’s its pitch is you’ll get a deeper level of health tracking as it’s platform is able to link more biomarkers and draw a more detailed picture of how your lifestyle impacts your metabolic health. 

While tracking blood glucose is most commonly associated with people who have diabetes or prediabetes, in recent years a wave of startups has been commericializing CGM technology for a more general health-tracking and/or fitness purpose — creating a new category of “biowearables”. The focus here is on trying to improve understanding of how lifestyle factors like diet, sleep and exercise impact longer term health outcomes. And since metabolic responses to different foods and activities vary from person-to-person the promise for this type of tracking is about giving the user a tool to see how their own metabolism copes with whatever they’re throwing at it — to help them go beyond generalist health advice protocols and really live their best (healthiest) life.

Overview

As a standalone wearable, Ultrahuman’s claim for the Ring is it provides “deep” metabolic insights — drawing on data from the embedded temperature sensor, PPG sensor and motion sensing IMU plus its own algorithmic processing to track three factors which can affect metabolism — namely: Sleep, stress and movement (or, more specifically, activity distribution; so essentially it’s monitoring how sedentary or otherwise you are).

Ultrahuman says the Ring’s battery is good for 4-6 days on a single charge — but caveats that this is “heavily” dependent on factors such as the ambient temperature, frequency of usage and battery lifespan. In testing I found battery life tended toward the lower end of the range. The smart ring ships with a charging dock that plugs into a USB port. Fully charging the battery takes around 1.5-2 hours, per Ultrahuman. I found charging from flat took about 2 hours.

When both bits of Ultrahuman’s sensing hardware are worn in combination (i.e. Ring + CGM), the startup dials up its pitch — saying the wearer can expect “truly personalized” insights. What this means in practice is it’s able to make correlations between blood sugar fluctuations and the biomarkers the Ring is tracking. For example, it says it can spot if a poor night’s sleep led to a worse glucose response. And then if it notices the user isn’t course-correcting their sleep over time, the app can send them nudges to encourage behavioral changes to prioritize getting quality sleep.

The app is thus really central to the experience, working alongside the hardware to present the wearer’s biomarker data and bolt on these algorithmically correlated “insights” and suggestions. It displays a real-time graph plot of changing glucose levels along with a daily metabolic score (in the case of the CGM); and/or a set of aggregated scores for Movement, Recovery and Sleep (in the case of the Ring).

Drilling down a bit more, the latter trio of indexes are fed by a series of “score contributors” — or biomarker data-points — such as “sleep efficiency”, “movement index”, “resting heart rate” and “restoration time”, to name a few. In the case of the Recovery and Sleep indexes, these score contributors are each themselves individually scored within the app; displayed as a line bar that’s either green & full (“optimal”); orange & middling (“good”); or red & low (“needs attention”). You can tap on each to get a quick précis of what they mean and why the measure matters for your metabolic health. You can also track back in each index to see how all your daily scores have changed over time.

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

There are more data-points too: The Recovery index displays your lowest heart rate and average (in BPM) charted across the day; along with a chart showing heart rate variability (HRV), with an average & a max broken out as individual data-points. While the Movement index breaks out number of steps (as well as charting when they happened across the day); activity in METs (aka, metabolic equivalents), which is a measure of your rate of energy expenditure (again charted over time); active hours (& when they happened); total calories (estimated energy usage for the day); and your workout frequency.

The Sleep index is even more data-point heavy: Breaking out metrics for time in bed; total sleep; efficiency; average heart rate; average HRV (in addition to breaking out six individual score contributors as scored visual bar graphs). It also shows (still a feature in beta at the time of writing) Average Oxygen Saturation (or SPO2) as a percentage out of 100% (higher is better); sleep stages (awake; REM sleep; light sleep; deep sleep) — as well as breaking out the proportion you spent in each stage and displaying these across a graph so you can see when each of the various stages occurred as you slept.

Additionally, the Sleep index counts and maps movements (so it tracks how much tossing and turning you do); displays your lowest heart rate during sleep & the average HR, along with a line graph showing the fluctuations over the course of the night; HRV (average, max and a chart mapping the changes); and your temperature (also as an average and as a line graph).

The Ring tab also foregrounds your current HRV (+/- how many points off your average) and your skin temperature at the top level, i.e. without the user needing to drill down into specific indexes to get eyes on those metrics. Elsewhere, there’s a button for sharing an index overview, in a social media-friendly visual card form, if you’re inclined to want to quantify your metabolic health in public.

If all that sounds like quite the dump of data it absolutely is. But the app’s presentation of the tracking does at least foreground the three (proprietary) aggregate scores (Movement, Recovery and Sleep) — giving you an at-a-glance overview of how you’re doing in your quest for better metabolic health.

It also provides brief, text-based summaries, displayed directly under these index scores, to draw your attention to notable data-points and offer suggestions for actions you might take to try to boost your scores. So you don’t have to do the work of drilling down to look over all the contributor data-points if you can’t be bothered to get that geeky.

For example, if you have lower Recovery scores that day the app might suggest it’s “a good day to go for those long walks and try a non-sleep deep rest session”. Or if your Sleep scores are a bit off it might nudge you to “try sleeping a little more to improve your recovery and performance”. (More sleep? If only!) Or if you’ve been diligent about not being too sedentary it might reward you by observing your movement index “indicates consistency” — and “consistency is the key to good health!”. So go you!

But more granular data is definitely down there in the app if you go looking — so the product has been designed with committed biohackers in mind too.

Form factor & design: The ring’s the thing…

As anyone familiar with the plot of The Lord of the Rings could tell you, rings can be tricky things — with a habit of slipping around, and even sliding off, the finger.

Ultrahuman’s Ring is no different. A highly polished internal surface means it fits (ha!) in this somewhat slippy category despite having a chunky form. The startup does ship out a sizing kit before sending the product itself, so you can test different size options to try to find a snug-but-comfortable fit. However these dull plastic dummies clung rather more tightly than the actual Ring does. So I found the size I’d picked ended up being a bit looser on the intended finger when it was the real-deal in place.

The sizing kit recommended testing the dummies on the index finger. However I’ve actually ended up wearing the Ring on my thumb quite a lot of the time as the natural bump of the knuckle helps keep it on and it kind of gets in the way less of whatever I’m doing. It looks (and feels) fine here so this hasn’t been an issue aesthetically. But I was concerned it might affect data capture.

I asked Ultrahuman about wearing the Ring on a thumb vs a finger and it told me this digit isn’t the optimal choice: Rather the index, middle or ring fingers are best. But it did also say they’ve seen “many users” wear it “without inaccuracy” on their pinky fingers or thumbs. “When switching between fingers, there will only be data quality issues if the ring is loose on the fingers and isn’t fitting the way it is supposed to; a snug fit is recommended for accurate data capture,” it added.

Fingers themselves can be tricky things too, of course — swelling or shrinking depending on how warm or cold it is. There’s extra challenge because humans hands are frequently exposed to a variety of other conditions. So, naturally, these environmental shifts can affect the Ring’s fit. The upshot is some ongoing flux — whereby the Ring is either feeling snugger or looser depending on what’s going on around it that day or moment. I’ve therefore got used to needing to swap it between fingers in search of the best fit (or to avoid it getting in the way of whatever I’m doing).

For stuff like household chores (cleaning, chopping and washing veg to cook etc) and some forms of exercise (e.g. lifting weights) it seems least intrusive worn on the thumb (even if that’s not the most optimal placing for data capture). For a specialist activity like climbing I’ve actually had to remove it entirely — since you just don’t want anything getting between your skin and the climbing wall (and certainly not a chunky, scratch-able ring). So it’s not always possible to sustain the tracking, depending on your lifestyle.

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

A more practical concern if you feel you must sometimes remove the ring entirely, is not only is there no data being recorded while you’re not wearing it but you might end up forgetting where you put it when you took it off — with the risk of losing it if you misplace it. I’ve definitely had a few scares over where I put it after taking it off. (And, I mean, just ask Gollum about that precious problem… )

So, on balance, I feel a wrist-mounted form factor (i.e. a band or watch) may have more advantages than a smart ring — being less intrusive for the user (even while physically larger); less exposed environmentally (to regular hand washing, moisturising etc); and at lower risk of being lost (since there’s less need to remove it entirely during the day). Wrist bands are also — IMO, as an owner of an Apple Watch — better suited for exercise-tracking since they’re less likely to get in the way of whatever activity you’re doing (throwing, lifting, pulling, swimming etc) since they naturally sit more securely on the body.

They also seem less likely to get damaged as a result of vigorous exercise as wrists tend to be more shielded from activity than hands.

It seems no accident that fitness trackers started as bands and took over the smart watch category. So a ring form factor does seem a bit of a left-field choice for a fitness-focused health tracker. After all, rings have — traditionally — had a largely decorative purpose. Or, well, exist to signify a certain type of relationship. And smart hardware isn’t typically prized for its aesthetic qualities. So unless you’re after a more decorative look step/sleep tracker a smart ring doesn’t seem the obvious pick for such a purpose.

Commercially speaking, of course, you can see why a startup would not be keen to go toe-to-toe for wrist real-estate with heavy hitters like the Apple Watch. Smart ring hardware thus offers the chance for startups to carve out a fitness tracking niche that can at least supplement (if not entirely supplant) more mainstream wearables. (And more newcomers are making smart ring moves — see, for e.g., Movano Health’s plan for a female-focused twist on finger-mounted tracking.)

Form-factor reservations aside, Ultrahuman’s Ring does look pretty nice, as this sort of chunky-look jewellery goes.

The gold version of the Ring I was testing looked and felt fine (slippy-ness aside). It was a bit bulky but I have small hands so your bandwidth on that may vary.

There’s a choice of colors and finishes — including some attractive-looking black and silver options — and a subtle geometric pattern to distinguish a ‘top’ from the rest of the band without making it fussy or overtly gendered. The startup says the Ring is made of Titanium with a “scratch resistant” Tungsten Carbide coating. This external metallic coating wasn’t immune to scratching — and, over several weeks of wear, the kind of patina you’d expect to develop on a piece of metal jewellery duly appeared. But, to my eye, this didn’t detract from the overall look.

The hardware design also seemed solid and robust, dealing ably with the shifting demands thrown at human hands — and throwing up minimal connectivity issues (but expect a short lag in the morning as it reconnects and offloads data). So I didn’t have any big quibbles with reliability or the hardware’s look and feel. Rather it’s the smart ring as a form-factor that raises questions for me around relative functional utility for this sort of fitness-focused use-case.

For some very active people a wrist-mounted tracker is likely to be a more practical choice most of the time. (It’s no surprise that athlete-focused plays like Whoop have gone for the wrist, for example.) That said, being as a ring is smaller than a wrist band or watch, it may be more comfortable for some people to sleep in. And for those looking for a wearable for sleep tracking, especially, Ultrahuman’s Ring might fit the bill better than a more bulky type of band. (That’s not my own experience with wearing an Apple Watch overnight, but, well, these are subjective kinds of considerations so what works or doesn’t may depend on the person.)

I was a little concerned the ring might pinch my fingers at night — given how body temperature (especially for women) can vary and may mean fingers sometimes swell a little during sleep. I did notice it seemed to fit a bit more snugly in the morning. But, again, I felt I could get around this concern by choosing a bit of a thinner digit overnight. So, again, provided this doesn’t cause a hit to data consistency there are ways to work around this sort of fit concern.

One more thing on form-factor: Ultrahuman has suggested its Ring can record biomarkers such as heart rate more accurately than an Apple Watch given its sensors are taking measures more often. The accuracy of the biometric data being captured by wearables is device specific and an ongoing area of debate — so more research is likely needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn — but as it also notes accuracy may depend on how well fitted the Ring is then, given changeable real world conditions, the ‘quality’ of the data capture seems likely to vary too. Which adds complexity to these kind of comparisons.

Performance & user experience

Ring + CGM

Having road-tested Ultrahuman’s CGM-based metabolic fitness tracking program back in 2021, an experience I wrote up in my January 2022 review (for those after a deep-dive into health tracking with a CGM), I had high hopes for what the combination of the Ring + CGM would mean for the metabolic insights the platform could provide. An issue I flagged in that earlier review was how the app wasn’t able to automatically distinguish between blood glucose spikes caused by exercise (which, on manually logging your workout, the app will inform you are “good” spikes) and those related to food (the bad spikes).

The issue is that while manually logging exercise — or integrating with another wearable, like the Apple Watch, to sync your tracked workouts — provides the app with a signal that activity is happening it can still give a low score to a meal you ate in close proximity to a workout because of how long you spent over the target optimal glucose range (even if the spike was due to an intense workout, not because of what you ate).

Given the Ring can sense movement I was expecting the tracking to have got smarter about distinguishing workout-triggered spikes from food-related spikes. In the event, it still seemed to struggle with this. I found, for example, that meals eaten close to intense workouts would typically still result in a lower score than they might otherwise have done because glucose elevation after the workout contributed to “time over target” (a negative metric) regardless of the quality of the food choices.

Exercise is not the only other potential trigger for a glucose spike, of course. Poor sleep and stress can elevate blood sugar (neither of which are good, obviously). But during testing I even noticed blood sugar could shoot up as a result of a simple ambient temperature variation. Changing clothes in a cold room, for instance, could cause a large enough rise in glucose for the app to warn me about the need to “get movin'” as the critical metric shot over 120 — whereas optimal glucose, which it nudges you to try to maintain, is between 70-110 mg/dL.

Asked about the challenge of making sense of good vs bad spikes, Ultrahuman co-founder Mohit Kumar agrees it’s a “tricky” area — describing it as “a bit of a heuristic problem to be solved”. “Personally, I also get unimpressed by our ability to not distinguish between these two things,” he told TechCrunch. “So we have to take a shot at it and see — how do people react?”

One approach Kumar suggested the team may explore is to adapt the metabolic scoring around these types of events — but with a warning that scores will only be accurate if the user is accurately logging their food intake. Or else only offer this kind of adaption to those who are thoroughly logging their food to avoid the risk of reducing the overall accuracy of the platform for the average user.

On the food logging front, it’s fair to say most users are unlikely to be doing this entirely accurately. Firstly because logging everything you consume is just tedious. But, beyond that, it’s also not always possible to be entirely accurate about what you’re eating — either because the exact thing you ate isn’t listed in the app’s inventory (and custom food entries won’t be structured data that the app can automatically interpret); or you don’t know the exact quantity of each of the ingredients consumed. (The app has a section displaying “total macros” — which counts cumulative calories, protein, fat, carbs and fiber as you log your meals over the day — but the figures it displayed for me were never accurate since I wasn’t weighing and inputting every single ingredient I ate individually.)

Beyond that, you might not even know all the ingredients in what you’re eating. Meals you didn’t prepare can come larded with all sorts of unexpected additions — so if you’re eating out a lot, getting takeaway or eating pre-prepared/packaged meals then food logging can be extra challenging. (And if testing a CGM has taught me anything it’s that sauces are often a minefield of hidden, sugary ingredients.)

The upshot is meals you might not expect to be bad for glucose stability can still surprise you with a spike. Which is also why figuring out what’s a good vs bad increase in blood glucose remains tricky algorithmically, even with access to more data than ever — in the M1 + R1 scenario. Hence why this remains a work in progress for Ultrahuman.

What did the Ring add to the M1 blood glucose tracking experience? In addition to getting a whole new tab chock-full of Ring biomarker data to geek out on, the app blends additional notifications into the main metabolic tracking timeline.

For example, it might drop in with an affirmative clap on the back for being “pretty active today” — or an even bigger plaudit for “achieving your steps goal of 10,000 steps”. Or it might inform you your “heart rate dropped early” (during sleep) — observing that “helps improve sleep quality and recovery”. Or, if you went for a walk after a meal and being active helped manage down the food spike, it might pop up to offer a thumbs-up for the “great job keeping the metabolic score in the target zone”. Or, on the flip side, if you’re slaving away at your desk for hours being sedentary, it might ping over the suggestion: “Time to move?”, along with a nudge that “moving frequently helps with better blood circulation and energy balance”.

Some of these nudges feel pretty similar to stuff you’ll find on a mainstream wearable like the Apple Watch — which, for example, has a feature that can literally tap you on the wrist to encourage you to stand up and walk around a bit every hour. So how useful some of the app’s more basic ‘activity needling’ notification are is likely to depend on whether or not you already own a smart watch as there may be some duplication in functionality.

However, Ultrahuman’s app also sent some more interesting compound notifications — such as the one above in which it links going for a walk after a meal to positively managing down a blood glucose spike — which are clearly distinct vs mainstream wearables. And this is where there’s added value to be (data)-mined — if it can join more dots and make accurate and actionable correlations between the user’s lifestyle and improved blood glucose regulation.

A wearable that’s able to do the smart lifting of connecting lifestyle factors with metabolic outcomes seems more likely to be successful at motivating users to make behavioral changes that can add up to big health positives over time. Because, as we know, just telling someone to do something doesn’t tend to get a great response. But if you’re nudging them in a way that shows them what happened as a result of something they did it it could lead to a eureka moment where the person is inspired to own the change for themselves. That’s the really big promise glimpsed here.

I say promise because it’s still early for the Ring + CGM. Ultrahuman’s approach to notifications and nudges is clearly still a development work in progress (the product roadmap shows a pipeline of features upcoming and even some new and as yet undisclosed biomarkers).

But if they can roll on, crunching the data and more tightly correlating lifestyle choices and blood glucose fluctuations — and use those insights to design more of these smarter nudges that help people understand the impacts (good and bad) of how they’re living on their health — the potential for the program to deliver a  transformative step-change in the power of this type of health tracking looks big. 

They’re not there yet, though. For now, a lot of the Ring’s pings can seem more abstract than joined up and it’s often not clear how the user should respond.

For example, the one above about heart rate dropping early during sleep sounded good but I didn’t know what I might have been doing right for that to happen. Or how, therefore, I should response to that bit of positive feedback — aside from, well, just carrying on? The user experience can therefore sometimes feel quite passive — in an ‘oh that’s nice (or not so nice) to know but now what?’ kind of a way.

It seems clear that the most effective behavioral nudges are going to be those that actively engage people by showing them the agency they have to influence their own outcomes. At the same time, there’s no doubt what a complex endeavour that entails since so many factors can feed into (or take away from) being healthy. 

Limits also remain on how much we know about the interplay between bodily inflammation and long term health. Even interpreting individual metabolic biomarkers can be challenging — such as HRV, a sensitive measure based on tracking the time between heartbeats which aim to quantify the performance of the automatic nervous system and act as a biomarker for bodily stress and rest and recovery but which can also be impacted by chronic inflammation and disease, so knowing how to read a ‘low’ HRV score isn’t simple).

Metabolic health certainly its own particular set of considerations and challenges. And it’s important to note there is still some scepticism of the value for a general consumer, with no specific medical need, to be tracking their daily blood glucose swings. So a product that’s predicated on nudging all sorts of people toward potentially beneficial lifestyle changes — which might, over time, stack up into a meaningful positive for their overall health (or “longevity”) — is necessarily on a journey to design the best approach to achieve optical outcomes for all types of users.

That journey is, evidently, a bit of a balancing act too. (Or even a juggling act when you throw in life’s other typically less health-promoting demands on users’ time and mind.) So iterations and adaptations are to be expected as part of the push to “decode” metabolic health, as the pitch goes.

A quick shout out for the (human) “performance coaches” that Ultrahuman’s app also puts at your disposal via text chat.

These sports scientists and exercise physiologists — which it touts as being “NSCA-CSCS certified with years of diverse experience in training elite athletes and designing performance and rehab training programs” — are there to take questions as you navigate the highs and lows of blood glucose tracking. And, if you give your consent, they can analyze your CGM + Ring data to suggest some personalized lifestyle biohacks.

One example: I had a great experience with a coach called Mugdha who smartly identified the reason why I was regularly getting glucose spikes after lunch and dinner — meals I had thought were balanced and healthy (made of whole foods, with plenty of fiber from veggies plus a good source of protein) so should have meant I stayed within the optimal range. The problem was I was eating a piece of fruit after each meal which was pushing me outside the target range and triggering a bunch of glucoses crashes later on.

We’re endlessly told fruit is healthy for us so it was not something I’d even thought might be a problem. Turns out how you eat fruit is important: The simple biohack the coach suggested was not to eat fruit with main meals; instead try having it as a snack between meals. This tiny change doesn’t make a material difference to my lifestyle but it made a quantifiable difference to how many of my meals spiked — and, therefore, fed into improving my overall metabolic score. Which is pretty nuts — or, er, bananas! — when you think about it.

It’s also interesting that it took a trained human (rather than AI) to spot that issue in my data and provide this super simple fix.

Another couple of fun observations: While wearing the M1 I took the opportunity to road-test a few foodstuffs that are billed as healthy to see what my own metabolism made of them. Namely: Beyond Meat sausages (a vegan alternative to meat). Huel‘s hot & savory “instant meals” (a UK-based Soylent competitor). And the breakfast and dinner recipes of (in)famous biohacker, Bryan Johnson — who open sources all his data as part of his multi-million dollar quest for longevity via epigenetic age reversal (or, well, as close as I could get to recreating his Nutty Pudding and Super Veggie — shrinking the latter to a more realistic portion size for a normal person’s lunch, so like 3x less).

I had a decent metabolic response to the Beyond Meat sausage, eating one of these (mostly pea protein-based) vegan sausages accompanied by steamed and stir fried fresh vegetables. Although the app combined this meal with an intense workout I did before that had elevated my glucose levels — meaning the combination only scored 5/10 (as a result of a 31 mg/dL rise in glucose that kept me out of range for 36 minutes+). Less good: Huel’s Mexican Chilli — eaten alone as it’s billed as a complete meal if you have 2x scoops — which caused a 41 mg/dL rise in glucose that kept me out of range for at least 70 minutes, earning the dish a 3/10 score in the app. I imagine the high cereal-based carb content is what triggered me there. Still, it was not as bad as actual Mexican food: One takeaway meal I ate, consisting of guacamole & tortilla chips plus a veggie taco, scored a big fat ‘0’ on a 68 mg/dL rise after causing 96 minutes+ out of range. So, er, eat tortilla chips at your peril!

Bryan’s Nutty Pudding was given two scores in the app since it initially evaluated it on its own (6/10, on a 40 mg/dL rise that kept me out of range for 10mins+). It then revised the score after I drank a cup of green tea shortly afterwards — scoring that combo a 10/10 because of “minimal glucose change”. But, again, that illustrates the complexities of trying to link even something as relatively straightforward as a change in blood glucose to a specific meal. On balance I think the more accurate score there is the lower one — whereas my own chia pudding breakfast concoction reliably scored higher than 6/10 (so feel free to ping me for the recipe Bryan!). The Super Veggie dish was, perhaps surprisingly, a low scorer (4/10 on a 46 mg/dL rise that kept me out of range for 38 minutes+). But I have found that lentils do seem to spike for me. I would probably have a better response if I dialled back the proportion of lentils and ate more of the other veg… All of which is to underline how insanely personal all this stuff is! Or: What’s good for Bryan won’t necessarily be optimally metabolised by someone else.

It’s also important to remember that a meal is not just food; it’s fuel. So if you’re going to be active after eating you might want to load up on carbs to ensure you are properly energized for your workout. Whereas for desk workers stuck in a chair it’s the opposite scenario. And in the former case Huel, for example, might be a great choice for an energetic pre-workout meal. Basically, you can’t just look at meals in isolation. It depends what you’re going to be doing throughout the day. Hence why tracking and quantifying lifestyle for health and fitness needs to span a variety of factors.

One future scenario for Ultrahuman’s platform might be that it gets smart enough to be able to make increasingly contextual suggestions and do so more pre-emptively than it can now — so, for example, not just nudging you to “get movin'” as your glucose shoots out of range but maybe even popping up at the point where you’re logging your food to say: ‘Hey, this dish looks like it’s going to give you an real burst of energy — so think about pairing it with a workout!’.

As it stands, you do still have to do a lot of the leg work of navigating how to respond to the data yourself if you want to get the most out of the CGM experience.

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

Just the Ring

You don’t need to be wearing a CGM to make use of Ultrahuman’s Ring; it can also function as a standalone health tracker. But in this scenario it’s a lot more vanilla — since there’s no on-board glucose tracking. The focus for the smart ring is on tracking rest and recovery, as well as keeping tabs on how sedentary you are — so the functionality may be of interest if you’re either A) not very active (and have low energy levels) and want help to improve that. Or B) if you’re active and are looking for a device to monitor how well rested you are and also to help with programming your training.

Clearly, there’s plenty of competition for both these scenarios — from the Apple Watch to rival smart rings like Oura’s — so Ultrahuman’s Ring alone definitely loses a differentiating edge. And, personally, in the case of the activity tracking use-case, I’m not sold on a smart ring form factor vs using a wrist band or watch, as discussed above. But others may prefer a smart ring — which lacks a distracting screen of its own. 

On the activity tracking side, you get Fitbit-like movement tracking features (steps, activity and workout mapping etc) plus some Apple Watch-esque nudges (via in-app pings) which are designed to work against being too sedentary.

The Ring’s Recovery feature is intended to function as a daily guide to training — offering a summary for how hard to push in your workouts based on how well rested and recovered it reckons you are. Although more athletic users are likely to prefer something more granular and powerful for workout tracking — such as a more athlete-focused tracker service, like Whoop.

I’m not entirely convinced of the usefulness of a ‘digital coach’ feature. Especially as, in the Ring’s case, it seems super light touch — offering very broad-brush advice — to push harder that day, or “proceed as planned”, or take it a bit easier — rather than serving up more tailored and specific training or recovery recommendations. And being as it’s so general, most of the time, you’re surely going to be able to go with your gut feeling, vis-à-vis how much energy and pep you have on a given day or how tired you feel — so I question why you need an app to tell you how your body already feels?

So my sense here is the average user may struggle to find a great deal of standalone utility in the Recovery Score feature — unless they value the personalized notification as a motivator for exercising more. Or they’re taking the time to drill down and monitor changes to Recovery score contributors in a way that helps them diagnose why they’re feeling less up for it than usual on the running track etc (and use the data-points to course correct, by getting more sleep etc).

Although, again, a simple hack we all know for improving our recovery is to just get more sleep. And you don’t need a tracker to do that.

The area that seems to be the biggest focus (currently) for Ultrahuman with the Ring is sleep tracking. As noted above, this section of the app is very data heavy. During the testing period it also added an additional biomarker: SPO2 — for overnight blood oxygen tracking — so it’s evidently keen to keep expanding what it’s offering here.

The goal may be to put some clear blue water between the Ring and other mainstream wearables like the Apple Watch, which offers a far more basic sleep-tracking experience. So if you’re really focused on quantifying how well rested you are (or are not) — and on trying to figure out exactly what’s getting between you and the good Zzzs — Ultrahuman’s data-heavy approach may be a lure.

It does make sense for the startup to want to hone in on sleep for the other part of its hardware play (the CGM-based tracking) given the key role sleep plays in glucose regulation (and indeed in Recovery) — and therefore to overall metabolic health. However I do have a bit of a reservation over the granularity of the sleep tracking if you’re just using the Ring.

Firstly, for the average user, it might just feel a bit much — and even a bit stressful. And that could end up being counterproductive to the overall health mission.

Secondly, it’s not necessary in our gift to get more sleep than we already do. So receiving regular nudges about the need to get more (and better) shut eye are not necessarily very useful. Most of us probably know we should get more sleep and would surely love to be able to spend more time resting in bed if we could. But the demands of work and life do tend to get in the way. Which is why we end up burning (at least) one end of the candle more often than we’d like.

Sadly, it would require a lot more than the odd in-app nudge to fix society’s chronic sleep deficit problem. (A wealthy patron who could fund our lifestyle without the need for us to work, say. Or children (and pets) who sleep soundly through the night — and/or a partner who never snores. Or a city that actually sleeps. And so on… )

So, well, do we really need an app nagging us about something we likely know but can’t necessary change? And, well, waking up to a daily sleep score that’s not optimal can just feel bad and stressful. So is this kind of granular tracking really the ideal way to encourage better quality rest and recovery? I’m not 100% convinced.

That said, I suspect it this depends on the person. Some people may thrive from being able to analyze all sorts of sleep metrics — and on trying to self-diagnose and remove particular barriers standing between them and better rest. While others may just feel overwhelmed.

Ultrahuman’s philosophy, generally, is geared toward arming users with ample data (those aforementioned Sleep Index score contributors in this case) to encourage them to do the work of trying to connect biomarkers to lifestyle choices and so figure out how to edit their life to try to optimize their scores. But of course not everyone is going to engage with such a data-driven approach. And, clearly, a data-loving biohacking community is more likely to want to dig it and geek out than a general interest consumer — who wants and expects a lot more hand-holding (and even heavy lifting) from their products.

Another issue with the Sleep Index is it can feel especially abstract — in that it can be difficult to know exactly what’s been referred to, let alone how you might go about correcting any poor scores you’re getting. (Beyond the obvious fix of just getting more sleep.)

So, for example, if the app suggests your “sleep efficiency” or “timing” is a problem that “needs attention”, presumably that refers to A) how long you spent actually sleeping while in bed vs time in bed; and B) when you went to bed vs the optimal window based on circadian rhythm. But, well, 1) it’s probably not immediately clear to an average user what those labels mean; and 2) as noted above, even if you drill down into the explainer to try and figure it out few users might feel they have heaps of human agency to fix either of those types of sleep disruption issues. (Not in this hectic life anyway… as the saying goes: ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’)

Another example is temperature which also feeds the overall Sleep Index score. The app regularly informed me my temperature was elevated but it was impossible to know what to do with this information. I didn’t feel ill or have a fever so I was left wondering if the hardware and algorithms were properly calibrated for women (as women tend to have more body temperature fluctuations than men).

Ultrahuman told me they have done “a small adaptation” for women — to account for this greater temperature variation factor. So I even got to wondering whether something environmental, like extra layers of winter bedclothes, might be contributing to these elevated temperature scores. I never figured out exactly what was going on. The app’s vague suggestions for possible caused never seemed to fit. So it remained a bit of a mystery.

The startup told me the Ring actually takes two temperature measures: Ambient temperature and skin temperature, which it uses to try to deduce core body temperature — which it’s tracking so it can offer features like fever detection but also because it says temperature can be an important marker for health in terms of inflammation related to recovery.

It told me elevated temperature can be a signal of over-training. Or it could be linked to a thermodynamic effect of food (or alcohol, although I wasn’t drinking at all during the testing phase so could discount that). Or to lack of sleep… So, in short, it’s complicated!

Ultrahuman recommended the metric is used in conjunction with other biomarkers the app tracks to try to narrow down whether there’s an “actionable” insight to be had off-of a “needs attention” reading on it or not… But, again, I wasn’t able to figure out what it might be linked to in my case. And the example underlines the challenge of intelligently interpreting so much data. (Temperature is just one of some ten or so biomarkers feeding the three Indexes — so there’s a lot of potential linkages and amplifications to consider).

The upshot, for an average (most likely under-rested) Ring user, is the Sleep index can be a frustrating part of the app. And frustration can generate stress which can negatively impact metabolic health and sleep itself… So there could be a risk of over-tracking itself being counterproductive to the healthy-purpose the product is shooting for.

The same can be true for food tracking, via the M1, too of course. But at least when it comes to food there’s more bandwidth for making small tweaks (even just to the timing of meals, as with the fruit example discussed above). Plus Ultrahuman’s in-app coaches are on hand to analyze your food logs with an expert eye and offer intervention suggestions that don’t necessarily require major behavioral changes.

But biohacking your way to better sleep? It’s a notion that’s far more experimental — and seems even more socioeconomic-class dependent — than other types of lifestyle interventions. (And of course very few of us have the wealth of a Bryan Johnson to dedicate to implementing optimal shut-eye schedules.)

Despite this, Ultrahuman is leaning into biohacking sleep. Discussing the recent addition to the Sleep Index — SPO2 — Kumar suggested users could act on a low score for overnight blood oxygen by experimenting with mouth taping, a non-scientifically verified practice than involves taping the mouth during sleep to encourage the body to breathe through the nose instead.

The experimental ‘sleep hack’ went viral in recent years, reportedly after being promoted by TikTok influencers. The claim is it helps retrain the body to breathe through the nose rather than the mouth — promoting deeper and more restorative breathing and oxygenation during the night. However there have been only limited scientific studies into the practice and there’s not enough evidence to confirm whether the technique is really helpful or even entirely safe. (And plenty of doctors have warned against trying it out.)

So while having the SPO2 data-point in the app might be a useful signal for a user to initiate a conversation with their doctor — if they are concerned they might have sleep apnea — it’s not a metric you can necessarily do much with, practically speaking, day-to-day (not unless you’re willing to test out a viral TikTok trend on yourself). So there may be limited value in showing the user a daily percentage score if they can’t really do much to improve it. Tracking trends (up or down) for them is where the app will want to get to.

Zooming out, a more general niggle I had with the Ring’s UX is I often found its messaging contradictory vs the data-points it was reporting — and/or out of step with the real-time reality of what I was doing. The Index scores especially often felt out of sync with how I felt (i.e. well rested/recovered or not) — or how much I’d recently moved.

For example, drilling down into the Recovery Index one day I was met with a notification that “your resting heart rate is on the lower side today. This indicates better rest and recovery”. However the positive-sounding feedback was displayed directly above a bank of “recovery score contributors” almost all of which were in the red, including “resting heart rate”, specifically — which was listed as “needs attention”. The overall Recovery Score at that moment was also 64 (out of 100) — which in pure numerical terms doesn’t look worth celebrating.

In another visually contradictory instance, the app displayed a score of 100 for the Movement Index one morning (presumably as I’d got a late night walk in). Yet the text below this read: “Your recent movement index trends indicate you’ve been moving lesser than usual. Today’s a new day to get back on track.” (The word “trends” here suggests it’s looking at more than the most recent movement data but the presentation of the two so close together is disjointed and risks being confusing.)

Another example followed a sleep-related notification which informed me of “optimal recovery detected” — along with text that read: “Your HRV is trending higher than the previous night. This is a marker of improved rest and recovery”. Great, you’d think. However the Sleep Index contributors displayed directly below this showed HRV in the red (“needs attention”). So, er…

The challenge here — aside from the headline one for any health/fitness wearable of intelligently interpreting what the tracked biomarkers actually signify for the user (and suggesting useful lifestyle tweaks or behavioral changes without turning them off) — seems to hinge on balancing how much/granular data to show while also pulling from the data on their behalf to distill and display trends in a way that makes sense based on what the user is experiencing and any other data-points being made available to them in the app.

At times, the Ring tab felt pretty baffling in this regard.

More clearly separating trends-based observations from real-time data-points might help. Even just by putting more visual emphasis on trends vs individual data-points — since, ultimately, trends and smart notifications is where the average user should be directly most of their attention.

But, as discussed, the Ring is still a beta product. So let’s see how this element evolves. (A recent addition by Ultrahuman in this area is emailed “weekly insights” — which it says it hopes will help users “understand their metrics in a longer trend line”.)

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

Bottom line

Health tracking and biohacking is not new in consumer tech terms but in some ways the field still feels like it’s just getting started as the challenge of decoding all the biometric data that sensing wearables are picking up just keeps stepping up. 

CGM technology, with its near real-time window onto blood glucose levels, provides an especially fascinating — and relatively recent — addition to the mix. One which holds the promise of powering truly personalized interventions that could move the needle for all sorts of people — in a way that general healthy lifestyle advice, about the benefits of eating well and getting enough exercise, all too often won’t. But it’s also clear that cutting-edge products in the category are still grappling with how best to interpret and present the information they’re tracking. So, at times, the user experience can feel experimental and immature.

Ultrahuman’s platform is no exception — perhaps especially as it took a ‘reverso’ approach which started with CGM hardware and has only now bolted on general fitness tracker, adding a set of more familiar biomarkers to the blood glucose-driven metabolic scoring it started with.

Adding the Ring to its hardware mix may not only serve to widen the appeal of its platform by attracting a more general consumer (who would never be fine firing a CGM into their arm), but could help the startup dial up critical differentiation in the category — by providing it with more data to identify correlations between blood glucose-related inflammation and lifestyle factors. The key will be figuring out how best to package insights into actionable and effective behavioral nudges — interventions that might even be applied more broadly if (or when) blood glucose tracking doesn’t require a semi-invasive CGM… So Ultrahuman’s team has got plenty to keep them busy. 

For now, the combo of the Ring plus CGM shows clear flashes of potential for unlocking smarter interventions as we get a tighter understanding of how a person’s lifestyle impacts their metabolism. New features were being introduced over the period I spent with the beta product, with lots more slated to come, so the experience continues to evolve at pace. But in the not too distant future it looks a pretty safe bet that some of the cutting-edge tracking being pioneered by startups like this one will bleed out into the mainstream.

Taking Ultrahuman’s sleep & fitness tracking Ring for a spin by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Traeger’s latest pellet smoker brings welcomed innovations to a new price point. The company just unveiled its latest Ironwood design, which features a handful of features that debuted on the more expensive Timberline product line a few months ago. As a long-time Traeger smoker owner, I’m excited about these updates as they make using the grill more manageable and cleaner.

I’ve been using the $1,999 Ironwood XL grill for the last week. So far, I’ve cooked a large batch of competition chicken thighs, a couple of whole chickens, and a tray of brussels sprouts. I expect to publish a full review on the smoker in the coming weeks; I need to cook a few more things first. So far, the smoker has made a good impression though I have some reservations about build quality.

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The major innovation involves the grease trap. It’s so much easier in the new Ironwood and Timberline grilss. In previous Traeger models (and nearly all of the competition), the drippings flow down a large metal pan and into a narrow channel that leads to a bucket. This channel is often the problem, requiring constant attention and frequent cleanout. Now, the entire underbelly of the smoker is the channel. All the drippings fall onto a sloped piece of metal that leads to a large bucket in the middle of the smoker. Traeger introduced this redesign on the revised high-end Trimberline models a few months back, and I love it.

This design offers a significant advantage. Every bit of food scrap and drippings goes in the same spot, resulting in a cleaner burn. And then, when the smoker has cooled off, the owner can push the remaining scrum into the bucket without removing any part of the grill. It’s so easy. I hate cleaning my other Traeger grills. The new design changes the game.

The other significant change involves the smoker’s hood. Instead of having a door on the front of the hood, the entire hood folds back. As a result, the hood is one piece save a tiny hole for thermometer wires. The upside is much-less air leakage without a door. The downside is when you open the hood, the interior temperature drops very fast — in chilly winter Michigan, I lost 100 degrees of internal temp within two minutes, and it took about 25 minutes to recover.

Overall, the redesigned smoker is impressive, but I have concerns about the durability of the LCD control screen and temperature knob. The control knob is critical in the operation of the grill, and it’s constructed out of cheap plastic. The gearing inside the knob is made of even worse plastic. I fear it will weather poorly and quickly degrade when exposed to the elements. This key touchpoint feels chintzy, and the rest of the grill feels bombproof. As for the touchscreen, it works poorly in extreme weather. Thanks to an overnight ice storm, my Ironwood XL tester was covered in ice this morning, so I tried the touchscreen after quickly brushing it off some of the snow and ice. It didn’t work. The touchscreen had to be completely clean of ice before it responded accurately to touch. Will it work in the rain? I’m not sure, and that’s a major concern of mine. Who runs a smoker in the rain and snow, you ask? Me; I do.

I need to live with the smoker to give final impressions. So look for a review in the coming weeks. But from my first cooks, I’m impressed with the evolution of Traeger’s design. Key areas were updated to solve fundamental shortcomings, and that’s a great start.

Treager’s latest pellet grill features improved hood (yay) and a touchscreen (nay) by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTag’s competitor Tile is now introducing its own plan to make its device safer, with the launch of a new feature called “anti-theft mode,” which prevents the tracker from being detected by anyone but its owner. But it’s taking things a bit further, and will now require users to register using multi-factor authentication, including biometric data, and a government ID to use this new protection. Users will also have to agree to new terms of use that allow Tile to provide their personal information to law enforcement at its discretion when a criminal investigation is underway, without having to wait for a subpoena. And it’s threatening to sue anyone who uses Tile to commit crimes that violate its terms of service.

The goal of this new agenda is to serve as a deterrent towards criminals who may have otherwise turned to non-AirTag devices following Apple’s crackdown, including for stalking, theft, or any other criminal acts. However, it’s unclear if Tile’s position of being “highly collaborative” with law enforcement, as its announcement states, is one that’s fully protecting people’s rights to due process — a court order, subpoena, search warrant or some sort of legal request should be issued before a company simply hands over user’s personal and private data.

“Location sharing and finding have become a part of our daily fabric, and it’s not going anywhere. We develop products for the vast majority of people who use them as intended, and for those who do not, we are committed to cooperating fully with law enforcement,” said Life 360 co-founder and CEO Chris Hulls, whose company acquired Tile for $205 million in 2021, in a statement. “To meaningfully address stalking with technology, we must implement safeguards like ID registration of all location-enabled devices that are small enough to be planted on a person so law enforcement have information to pursue justice for victims. In the meantime, we’ll do what we can at the product level to keep people safe from the outlying cases of bad actors while increasing the likelihood of recovering stolen items with Tile to help people live more relaxed lives,” he said.

But the deterrent may come across as a threat to any and all of Tile’s users, not just criminals. State the company, “users must acknowledge that personal information can and will be shared with law enforcement at our discretion, even without a subpoena, to aid in the investigation and prosecution of suspected stalking.” 

Meanwhile, the new anti-theft mode takes on theft by rendering Tile’s tracker invisible to anyone who tries to use the Scan and Secure feature to scan for trackers on the stolen goods. This allows the victim to continue to track their item, but makes it more difficult for the thief to locate a hidden tracker or tag when committing a crime.

Tile will now require anyone who wants to activate the anti-theft mode to verify themselves with multifactor authentication, including biometrics, and their government-issued ID. It also says its technology can detect fake IDs. Once complete, the anti-theft mode can be enabled across the users’ devices. The company says that requiring users to register their accounts with an ID removes the anonymity associated with trackers, which deters stalkers and abusers from using these devices in such a way.

What’s more, the new terms of service allow Tile to additionally sue anyone who’s convicted in court for stalking using its trackers. The ID verification process makes prosecution easier, it says, and this also serves as a deterrent. It says it would sue for a $1 million fine (though of course, that’s up to the courts to decide.) The company explains that lawsuits are expensive, but there are so few cases of stalking with Tile devices that it decided it would be willing to take this on. The threat of the fine would also work as a deterrent, Tile believes.

In announcing the news, Tile calls out Apple’s technology as “insufficient protection” for victims and claims the proactive alerts Apple sends make AirTag trackers easier to find by anyone, including thieves, in an attempt to disparage Apple’s product. But in trying to balance consumer demand with safety protections, it’s positioning itself as a pro-law enforcement company as both a marketing ploy and deterrent, at a time when people’s trust in law enforcement is at an all-time low. It’s not clear that consumers will respond well to this, even if they’re not criminals.

Combined, the changes come across as an overcorrection on Tile’s part. Until recently, Tile may have looked like a viable alternative for criminals given it didn’t have anti-stalking safety tech at all until last March, and even then its tools weren’t as comprehensive as what was provided by Apple. Instead, Tile’s Scan and Secure technology designed to detect unknown trackers traveling with a person lacked precision finding, its scans took longer to perform, and they had to be triggered manually. It didn’t send proactive alerts about trackers traveling with you.

But instead of implementing similar tech upgrades to compete with Apple, Tile is requiring more user personal data and issuing threats.

Tile takes extreme steps to limit stalkers and thieves from using its Bluetooth trackers by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch5 will now offer improved period tracking features thanks to a new partnership with Natural Cycles that leverages the smartwatch’s temperature sensors to make better predictions. The launch follows last fall’s announcement of a new temperature sensor on the Apple Watch Series 8 that similarly allows wearers to improve their period predictions as well as view retrospective ovulation estimates when the watch is worn overnight.

According to Samsung, the advanced period-tracking features will become available to smartwatch owners across 32 countries globally, including North America, Europe, and Asia.

It explains that Natural Cycles has developed an algorithm that uses body temperature and other fertility indicators to make predictions about fertility. This will be used along with the Watch5’s new infrared sensor to track skin temperature changes overnight. The data is encrypted and stored on the device, Samsung says, where it’s used to power its Health app’s Cycle Tracking feature.

Samsung had been late to market to launch its own period tracking feature, only adding the option to its Health app in 2020, long after Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, and other third-party apps had done so. But the manual period tracking method is reliant on historical data to make predictions — and that can only go so far. Adding the ability to track temperature changes can improve its accuracy.

“The Natural Cycles app has helped millions of women around the world take control of their fertility and this partnership will allow Samsung to leverage our fertility technology to offer temperature-based cycle tracking through a smartwatch for the first time,” said Dr. Raoul Scherwitzl, co-founder and co-CEO of Natural Cycles, in a statement.

However, it’s worth pointing out that Apple cautions its own customers that the temperature-tracking features it introduced should not be used as birth control or to diagnose health conditions — even though it may track temperature changes that could be your first alert to other health problems, like polycystic ovary syndrome or fibroids.

Plus, Apple points out, overnight temperature tracking can be impacted by other factors, like the sleep environment, and it notes that body temperature naturally fluctuates when you sleep. Instead, Apple says temperature tracking is used to provide improved period predictions and retrospective ovulation estimates only.

Samsung doesn’t share those cautions in its own announcement, though, touting Natural Cycles’ ability to determine “each user’s unique fertility status.” Likely, a doctor would suggest this method on its own should not be used to determine fertility, we’d argue. But it could be useful in combination with other methods, including consistent AM basal temperature readings using a thermometer, other ovulation tests, and manually entered period tracker data.

Today’s news shows Samsung is attempting to keep up with a market where Apple has been leading. But since it’s rushing to compete on this front, it chose to bring in a partner instead of creating an algorithm of its own in-house.

It’s not the first time Samsung used a partnership to boost its Health app capabilities, either. The company previously announced a deal with Calm to upgrade the app’s Mindfulness section with content, for instance.

Samsung says the new skin temperature-based cycle tracking capabilities will come to the Samsung Health app on the Galaxy Watch5 and Watch5 Pro within the second quarter. 32 markets will support this feature, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.

Samsung adds temperature-based period tracking to its Galaxy Watch5 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch