But with its handsome leather strap and pretty analog face, the What? has turned some heads in the few days I've been wearing it. Most people never ask me about my Apple ( AAPL) Apple Watch. The small team of engineers hails from a wide variety of geographic backgrounds including Finnish and Italian. The watch assemblies are made by a firm in Switzerland with a long history in the business. I imagine that can be fine tuned over time.įor Igor Basargin, who is Russian, What? is a nice change of pace from his prior life as a lawyer.
HEXIO PLUS DRONE SOFTWARE
It's a bit of a gimmick, and the software seems to involve too many steps to save a moment. On the watch face itself, the little dots of e-ink turn from grey to black to indicate you've got a moment in the month of September.
HEXIO PLUS DRONE BLUETOOTH
When you press the red button on the side of the watch, it uses Bluetooth wireless to tell the app on your smartphone to create a "moment." Basically, it's just a time stamp that opens a round window in the app for your to take a picture or a selfie commemorating that moment in time. The watch is a solid-feeling metal piece, with an elegant white or black face that is mostly traditional analog except for a layer of e-ink underneath the surface. I had attended their unveiling on Sunday at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, where the company had rented out the rooftop for a view of the lunar eclipse. The docents are always dressed in some kind of interesting garb, and this season seemed to be vaguely spooky Elizabethan gowns.Īmong wearables, the Austrian firm What? was showing off a smartwatch that is getting lots of looks. Wednesday night's show was well attended, with guests noshing on hors d'ouevres, sipping wine, and kicking the tires. We’ve requested a review unit, and will be report back on how well these claims hold up after we’ve tried it on the slopes for ourselves.The startups have novel inventions that work with your smartphone across a range of product categories from smart lighting to wearables to drones to toys. And the company claims it’s the only one that can keep pace with serious adrenaline junkies, delivering a top speed of 45 miles per hour, while also adjusting to changing altitude on a downhill run. In its favor, the Hexo+ does have one of the more nuanced implementations, with lots of detailed choices for setting up your shot in the app. At $1,349, it's more expensive than the high-end model of our favorite drone, the Phantom 3, and that price doesn't include a camera - you need to supply your own GoPro. And the Hexo+ doesn't have any of the sense and avoid technology now arriving on consumer grades units like the Yuneec Typhoon H. That was pretty unique last year, but in the time since that feature was first introduced, it has become more commonplace, now offered on almost every high-end camera drone on the market. The Hexo+ had no trouble keeping pace with a biker or a minivan, and as you can see from the video above it kept us nicely in frame.
I felt like a falconer commanding my mechanical bird of prey But it is also fairly buggy, so we’ll see if that gets cleaned up when the feature is officially released.
The feature is very cool, giving me the sensation of a sci-fi falconer in charge of a hunting drone. Now you can have total control over the drone's position without needing an additional device. Before, your only choices from the app were take-off, landing, choosing the camera movement, and adjusting the orientation. The Magic Wand is crucial because the Hexo+ isn't sold with a remote, although it is RC compatible. For times when you want to make adjustments to the drone’s position, the company also wanted to show off a upcoming feature it’s calling the Magic Wand, a new gesture control that allows you to fly the drone with the wave of your phone. It can follow you, track you while hovering in place, or perform maneuvers like a 360-degree orbit or pan from left to right. You use the app to select its position, orientation, and movement. The Hexo+ is built for action sports, following a snowboarder down a hill or a surfer riding a wave. We were back in Las Vegas recently and got the chance to go hands on with the finished version. The company is now shipping units to its Kickstarter backers and preorder customers. We got our first taste of these capabilities a year ago, when we raced a car through the Nevada desert against a prototype of Hexo+, a French drone that ditches the remote control and simply follows your cell phone. As drones get more advanced, these aerial cameras increasingly require less piloting, handling the flying and filming for you.