What’s not to love about the latest technology and the hottest trendy products? Our Cutting Edge section keeps you on the vanguard of electronic wizardry with our featured gallery of gadgets that are newly launched or coming soon to a store or website near you.
MUSICAL MOTIVATION
The Motorola MOTOACTV ($249 for 8GB or $299 for 16GB) combines a GPS fitness tracker with a smart music player that will track your workout data and store it online. Info such as your speed, distance, and calories burned as well as other performance data can be turned into charts, tools, and programs that help you spot your strengths and weaknesses. The fitness device can also store up to 4,000 songs and “learns” what songs motivate you the most in order to create a high-performance playlist. The free MOTOACTV Android app syncs the device to your phone, so you can see text messages and answer calls.
SHARP AND SLIM
The Motorola DROID RAZR ($300 w/ 2-year contract), available on Verizon’s 4G LTE network, features a design that is both thin and tough. The 7.1mm-thick smartphone is made with Kevlar fiber for strength and water-repellent nanoparticles that protect the phone from everyday spills. The 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced display streams on-the-go movies in vibrant colors and smooth action, so there are no blurred images. Optimize the phone to quickly fit your preferences with the Smart Action app—easily switch from the settings you prefer at work to the ones you prefer at home or set your phone to start playing music whenever headphones are plugged in.
THE ICE CREAM GALAXY
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be the first smartphone released with Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, complete with a new look, feel, and features. For instance, forget using your finger to unlock your phone—just smile and the Face Unlock feature will recognize you via the front-facing camera. Android Beam makes sharing easy—touch two NFC-enabled Android phones together to pass along contacts, directions, websites, etc. And voice typing lets you dictate text messages or emails. In terms of the phone itself, it has a 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display and will be available at 4G speeds. The price was not available at press time.
NEW KIND OF CAMERA
Conventional cameras only capture a single plane of light, but the new Lytro camera ($399 for 8GB or $499 for 16GB) captures the entire light field, which gives you some new capabilities as a photographer—like the ability to focus after the picture is taken. You will be able to focus and re-focus on any area in the picture at any time and since you focus after the fact there is also no auto-focus or shutter delay. The software for interacting with these “living pictures” is currently for Mac only, but there is a Windows application in development.
SCAN ON THE GO
Now you can scan anything, anywhere with the Doxie Go ($199), a battery-powered, portable scanner that does not require a computer. The Doxie Go has built-in memory that can hold up to 600 pages as well as ports for a USB drive and a SD Card for additional storage. It will sync to your computer when you connect it or you can use the iPhone/iPad Sync Kit ($39) to send scans directly to your mobile device. ABBYY OCR technology recognizes the text in your documents to create searchable PDFs that make it easy to copy and paste.
