New Year Ideas | Now you see me
Cool technology products to work, play and clean with in 2014
We sometimes forget that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. So while a high-end, super-specialized desktop might be very exciting for a limited number of people, sometimes the best examples of technology are the ones we take for granted in our day-to-day life.
We looked at some of the coolest products of 2013:
Chromebook: a new kind of computing experience
Chromebooks have some serious advantages over PCs at the same price. Computing tasks for most people are either based around Web browsing, or word processing. This doesn’t really require a powerful PC any more.
A specialized device like a Chromebook has its own advantages—it can boot up in seconds, like a tablet. Thin and light, it’s as portable as those mobile devices, but the full body design still makes it a productivity machine. The interface is simple and easy to understand, and configuring the device is as simple as logging into your Gmail account.
It’s not an all-purpose device, but for the average buyer, the Chromebook is the best computer you can get for the budget, with the design of an ultrabook at the price of a netbook.
The exact specifications don’t really matter—the Chrome OS is not demanding, and while laptops such as the Lenovo S210T are excellent little machines, they take longer to boot and struggle when you’re running multiple applications. The HP Chromebook 14, which is the same price, was running in 2-3 seconds, and launched Quick Office, the offline document editing suite, equally quickly. In the middle of working on a document, we decided to launch Bastion (a free trial of the game is available on the Chrome Web Store), and continued to play the game without closing the document editor—it performed smoothly. All for ₹ 26,990.
3Doodler: learn to draw in thin air
3D printers “print" an object in layers. You “cut" the object into thin horizontal slices that you print using melted plastic instead of ink. Each layer cools and sets in the time it takes to print the next one. This way, you can build a 3D object layer by layer. Today, the cheapest 3D printers cost around $500 (around ₹ 30,950).
The experience of creating objects with these is limited—you’ll be able to print small plastic shapes in one colour, and it’s most likely going to be a jagged design. A small toy takes a couple of hours to print.
You get plastic which can be fitted into the 3Doodler; once you’ve charged it up, you start painting in air. The pen is not easy to hold because it is thick and heavy. It becomes hot, and the smell of the heated plastic isn’t pleasant.
But the first time you make a design out of plastic, the experience is magical.
LG HomBot Square
When we’re thinking about robots or cool gadgets, vacuum cleaners rarely enter the discussion. But take something like the Roomba from iRobot, or LG’s HomBot, and you’re talking about some smart computer programming that can find its way around the real world.
As soon as you set it up, it scoots off with cheerful efficiency. The square design lets it reach into corners that were just out of the range of its agitating brush earlier. A turbo mode lets it pull up everything without any worries, though the round design in the previous version, particularly when you set it to spiral cleaning, was a lot more manoeuvrable.
The new HomBot, expected to launch in India this year, is expensive—you will be spending ₹ 50,000 on what is, at the end of the day, a vacuum cleaner.
While it’s possible to justify spending that much money on an iPhone, given the wide range of uses it has, with a vacuum cleaner—no matter how smart it is—that’s kind of hard.
That said, it is small, without the bulky bumpers of its competitors, and fast. There are still some issues with the HomBot—much like the second one, which released in 2012, this version also has some problems with wires. It’s a low-slung machine, and the wires can get stuck in the wheels. The little robot just gets hopelessly stuck and looks utterly pitiful as it tries to figure out what to do next.
Other than wires, obstacles around the house weren’t a problem. The HomBot climbed on top of carpets like a trooper, and scooted under the bed (which has fairly low clearance) with elan.
In case it’s going anywhere you don’t want it to, all you have to do is clap. Yet, this is clearly a device you will buy because you want it, not because you need it.
Gopal Sathe & Dhruv Rathore. Rathore is a computer engineer-turned-artist and musician living in Ontario, Canada.
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