Recommended Reads on the Mobile Beat This Week
This Smartphone You Can Smoke Is the Ultimate Vaporware
A fun story from The Verge about a smartphone that has a built-in vaporizer for smoking while texting (or anything else you feel like doing on your phone). It sounds like a ridiculous joke–that is, until you get to the update at the bottom of the piece.
What Americans Really Think About Virtual Reality
The folks at Fast Company got a preview of an interesting consumer study coming out Tuesday about people’s thoughts on the fast-emerging field of virtual reality. One takeaway: minorities seemed more interested in the technology than whites. The study authors say that may reflect the increasing diversity of younger people in the U.S., who as a group were found to be more interested in VR than older people.
BlackBerry Priv Review: Nope, Not for Me–Not Even for My Worst Enemy
Reviews came out Friday for the BlackBerry Priv, the struggling smartphone company’s first handset running Google’s Android software, which has a physical QWERTY keyboard and ships to buyers later this month. A Gizmodo reviewer, needless to say, did not like it.
Turn Any Watch Into a Smart Watch With the Chronos Disc
This piece from Bloomberg describes Chronos, a skinny metal disc you stick to the back of your watch to make it more like a smart watch. It uses Bluetooth to get notifications from your smartphone, and you can tap the watch and make gestures to control the phone, too.
The Savings App Designed by a Behavioral Economist
A story in The Atlantic about an app called Qapital that lets you do things like set up savings goals that your money automatically goes toward and prompt a donation to charity whenever you buy a fancy coffee.
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