Sony's W Series

Sony's W Series Walkman is a barebones MP3 player with one key selling point: it's waterproof. But that can be a difficult thing to highlight on store shelves — at least when you're limited to traditional retail packaging. For its customers in New Zealand, Sony decided to try something different. With the help of ad firm DraftFCB, the company came up with a brilliant plan to help set its product apart from alternatives like Apple's iPod shuffle. The earbud / MP3 player combo comes packaged inside a full bottle of water, a clever marketing tactic that immediately highlights its waterproof construction.

From there, Sony concentrated on product placement for this "bottled Walkman," selling it in vending machines at gyms and indoor pool facilities. This made it possible for consumers to buy an MP3 player alongside their normal workout refreshments — but at a cost much higher than your average bottle of Gatorade.

Bolt for Android

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Free calling apps, such as Viber, Skype, and others, are quite common, but they all suffer from the same fatal flaw: they require you to remember to use their special apps when you’re calling someone on their networks and use the standard phone app when you’re calling everyone else. Plenty of companies have tried to integrate calling into their existing apps, like Facebook and Apple with FaceTime Audio, but those features have generally been difficult to access and have seen little adoption among users. Bolt, a new calling app available for Android today, is looking to fix that problem by combining its free calling service with a full-fledged phone dialer app that can replace your phone’s standard dialer.

The premise of Bolt (which has no relation to the mobile browser of the same name from a few years ago) is simple: you install the app and use it to place all of your calls. It functions very similarly to how iMessage works on iOS devices for messaging. If you are calling another Bolt user, the app will intelligently route the call over VoIP and it will not count against your wireless plan’s minutes. If you call any other number, the app will fall back to your standard wireless carrier and use minutes from your plan.

new retro

Not so long ago, wood was everywhere in the world of consumer electronics. In the middle of the 20th century, everything from televisions to microwaves to radios came as a bundle of technology housed inside a wooden case or cabinet. These gadgets were imposters, disguised as furniture so as to slip into our homes unnoticed next to the armoire and the wood-paneled wall. So they were made to feel natural, to feel like part of our homes.

Soon, though, gadgets became the focal point of our living rooms. And as devices from televisions and cars to smartphones and tablets were accepted and commoditized, as manufacturing speed and cost outweighed all other factors, as plastics and metals became both easier and cheaper to work with, wooden electronics became a cottage industry consisting mostly of handmade smartphone cases and high-end audio gear.

But wood’s relegation to the sidelines of the electronics industry isn’t because it’s unappealing, says Rick Osterloh, the SVP of product at Motorola. And just about a year ago, he and his team set about to bring it back. After many false starts (”There were many moments like that,” he says with a sigh when I ask if the team ever thought about giving up) and a lot of high-volume carpentry, Motorola finally launched its Natural Collection: Moto X backs in bamboo and three different wood finishes. I’ve been using a bamboo model for about two weeks, and I think the future might look a lot more like our wood-paneled past than we thought.

watch without a face

This was my introduction to Durr. If I proposed building a watch that doesn't tell the time, you'd probably call me crazy. But that's exactly what two designers known collectively as Skrekkøgle have done. Durr doesn't want to tell you what time it is — it doesn’t even have a display to do so. It simply measures the time between moments by vibrating. I've been wearing one on a daily basis for almost a month now, and my time with it has been enlightening.

Xperia Z1

For the longest time, the prevailing trend with mobile phones was to take last year’s handset and make it smaller. Shave a few millimeters off, shed a couple of grams, and give users the same experience but in a leaner shell. The rise of smartphones and their incessantly improving spec sheets derailed that habit, but now Sony’s returning to the old ways with its new Xperia Z1 Compact.
In all the important ways, this is still the Xperia Z1. The processor and camera are untouched, the software is identical, and the physical design retains its signature mix of waterproof ruggedness and glossy stylishness. Only the Z1 Compact shrinks it all down to the footprint of a 4.3-inch screen.
As Sony Mobile CEO Kuni Suzuki recently said at CES, “we are Sony, so of course we’ll do things a little differently.” The Compact swims against a tide of ever-expanding Android flagship phones and finds itself occupying a weirdly neglected space between Apple’s 4-inch iPhone and the litany of 5-inch contenders. You can already buy 4.3-inch phones and you can certainly buy top-tier Android handsets, but it’s been a while since you could get both in the same device. Is the Xperia Z1 Compact such a phone?

Withings Pulse

The walking portion of my daily commute got a lot shorter when I started at The Verge. The subway used to drop me one avenue and three city blocks from my previous office, and the walk added about 4,000 steps to my daily average without any extra effort on my part. Now the subway lets off across the street from the building, drastically reducing both my commute time and my average daily step count. I noticed, too; I just felt worse.

So I turned to the Withings Pulse to help me get things back on track. The Pulse certainly has all the tracking features I might need — everything from steps to sleep to heart rate is collected by this thumb-sized device. It joins a family of health-tracking products from Withings, which already include a scale and blood pressure monitor. All three products are pulled together in the Withings Health Mate app, which aims to put the focus on overall health rather than just tracking the statistics logged by the devices. I knew that my step count had decreased since starting the new job, but there had to be other areas that needed improvement as well.

Of course, every fitness tracker promises to make you a fitter, healthier, happier, and better person. The $99.95 Withings Pulse certainly collects the most information, but how does it hold up next to established players like Nike, Samsung, Jawbone, and Fitbit? I clipped it to my belt and started walking — it was time to get back in gear.

Hapifork

I'm a fast eater. I've tried to become one of those people that takes more than ten seconds to eat a slice of pizza, but I’m still usually done before my friends have even made a dent. I need to slow down, though, and not just for my own peace of mind. A 2010 study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that people who were given identical meals released more hormones that made them feel full when they ate the meal in 30 minutes rather than five. That was enough to make me at least want to try to slow down, and maybe appreciate one or two of my daily meals.

But it's annoying to be so conscious of how you eat all the time. There are gadgets that passively monitor everything that happens when you exercise, but there aren't many that do the same with food. Apps like MyFitnessPal and LoseIt! rule dieting, but tracking everything you eat is just as much a burden as it is a perk. Unlike fitness tracking, which the FitBit Force and other devices do passively, inputting food data isn't mindless enough to be convenient or enjoyable.

The Hapifork, the surprise darling of CES 2013, promises a quick and intelligent way to help you eat more slowly. (It also says it will help you "eat healthier," "lose weight," and "cut calories.") The fork passively monitors how fast you eat, vibrating and lighting up to let you know when you take too many bites too quickly. It claims to be the answer to all your bad eating habits, with one simple tweak.

The device looks more or less like a regular fork, but its base is wider, almost like an electric toothbrush. It’s weird to use such a big fork at first, but it's not so large that you can’t get used to it. At the bottom of the base are two lights: a small bar that indicates how charged the battery is, and a circular indicator of your eating speed. In addition to vibrating every time you take a bite too quickly, the circular light will turn red. If you're eating at a good speed, which means waiting 10 seconds between each bite, the light glows green.

Before using the Hapifork for the first time, you have to do a few things: connect the fork to your computer via its Micro USB port, install the software on your desktop, and leave it connected to charge for about four hours — that gives it about a week’s worth of power. While it charges, you create your profile and set the preferences on the Hapifork's web dashboard.