BERG has just announced that its adorable, yet pricey Little Printer is now shipping its first run, after kicking off preorders back in August.
There was quite a bit of interest when London-based design studio BERG first announced Little Printer in 2011, and now early fans will finally be able to play with the product themselves.
As we’ve said , the Little Printer is a stylish device that could best be thought of as a ‘stock ticker but for Web content’. It sits on your desk and prints out information it receives from sources you configure via a mobile app.
BERG has so far secured partnerships with The Guardian, Foursquare, Google and Lanyrd, among others. These partnerships are important, as they’re the only limit to what can be printed through the little device. Of course, the real magic will begin once more developers start exploring Little Printer’s API.
The device is certainly a novelty, but also serves an interesting purpose for those of us that are endlessly connected to a screen. Little Printer represents a way to disconnect from the digital, without being left out of its benefits . It’s a product I would wholeheartedly recommend, had it not been for its $259 USD (£199 GBP) launch price — rather steep for what is essentially a 4.25″ high thermal printer.
Hopefully that price will drop over time, but if the cost doesn’t deter you, snag a first-run Little Printer via the link below.
➤ BERG Little Printer
Meet the woman behind the Mio Alpha, a sleek strapless heart rate monitoring watch (video)
Last week at Mobile World Congress , I caught up with Liz Dickinson, the creator of MIO , the world’s first strapless heart rate monitor sports watch , and founder and CEO of MIO Global .
Dickinson flew out to Barcelona to talk to press and (potential) partners about her company’s latest product, dubbed Mio Alpha , which is essentially a strapless continuous heart rate monitor sports watch.
You’ll note the difference between what Dickinson invented over a decade ago, and the company’s next flagship product (PDF): as early reviews point out , this is a heart rate monitor watch for athletes – or at the very least for people who are very serious about their sports and fitness.
The way the Mio Alpha watch monitors heart rates as accurately as possible – even when people are moving really, really fast – is by using two green LEDs and an electro-optical cell to “sense” the volume of blood under the wearer’s skin.
The Mio Alpha watch uses patented technology from the research labs at Philips Electronics and garnered a lot of attention thanks to a Kickstarter campaign to get the gizmo funded.
The Kickstarter campaign ended up raising over $320,000 for the development of the watch, well over the initial goal of $100,000.
The watch costs $199 but will only ship to buyers in the United States and Canada initially.
What’s so cool about the Mio Alpha – besides the fact that it’s cutting-edge technology wrapped in stylish design, and that it also tells the time – is that the watch can communicate live heart rate stats to both Android and iOS devices via a wireless Bluetooth connection, although the company doesn’t have a mobile app of its own for now.
Instead, the Mio Alpha links up with third-party apps like Runkeeper , Mapmyrun or Endomondo for now, while a ‘different’ kind of mobile app from MIO Global will be coming later this year.
In the interview embedded below, Dickinson explains the reasoning behind this strategy, and tells us more about the Mio Alpha.
MTV and Swipe Telecom launch the Volt in India, a 6-inch smartphone with pre-installed TV player
MTV has partnered with mobile handset maker Swipe Telecom to release its first co-branded smartphone called the MTV Volt in India.
As spotted by Next Big What , the 6-inch device runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1 and has both a front and rear-facing camera at 1.3 and 8 megapixels respectively. Along with Wi-Fi connectivity, an FM radio player and GPS functionality, the so-called ‘Fablet’ – short for fabulous tablet – also has a built-in TV player for watching MTV on the go.
The exclusively white device weighs 239 grams, which is considerably lighter than the 7-inch Nexus 7 at 340 grams, but runs on a slightly underwhelming 1GHz dual-core processor based on ARM Cortex chips. Reports say it has a HD display, with Tech2 suggesting it has five-point multi-touch and a pixel resolution of 864×480.
The smartphone is equipped with 4GB of internal memory, although this can be increased by up to 32GB through a microSD card slot. It also packs a middling 512MB of RAM for handling day-to-day tasks and Android apps, as well as an Li-Ion Polymer 3200 mAh battery for a full charge lasting between 8 and 10 hours. That’s a little higher than the Surface RT, and much better than the 4 to 4.5 hours offered on the Surface Pro.
The MTV Volt will set you back Rs 12,999 (US $241), which is higher than the 16GB Nexus 7 at $199 but slightly less than the more spacious 32GB version at $249 in the US Google Play store.
The six-inch form factor is an unusual choice, as it sits somewhere above the Samsung Galaxy Note II’s 5.5-inch screen but below most of the smaller tablets like the iPad mini and Nexus 7.
MTV, the youth brand of Viacom18, plans to develop a number of MTV smartphones and tablets designed for young and aspiring adults. At least one new product will be launched every quarter as a result of the deal, totalling between 10 and 12 devices over a two-year licensing period with Swipe Telecom.
The MTV Volt will be available in 10,000 retail stores across India, as well as Swipe’s e-store and a number of online portals including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Infinibeam and eBay. There’s no word yet on whether the device will eventually be released in other countries.
Image Credit: fonearena