If you spend $750 or more on a phone, you probably don’t want to buy a $129 battery case. I’ve gotten more angry tweets about Apple’s just-released smart battery cases for the current-generation iPhones than I can recently remember. Apple’s cases have arrived months after the iPhones debuted in September and October, and after reports …

I knew the Vive headset I was wearing was too tight. This was the HTC Vive Pro Eye, a new model introduced at CES this month in Las Vegas, that adds full-on eye-tracking. It’s otherwise very similar to the existing high-end Vive Pro headset that HTC introduced in 2018. I’ve gone through enough eye-tracking setups to know that it would work …

This year’s CES wasn’t big on AR news, but Microsoft may be waiting until Mobile World Congress to spring information on the next expected update to its AR headset, the HoloLens. An invite to a press conference on Feb. 24 at MWC suggests the HoloLens 2 might be big reveal.  Sure, the invite itself seems mysterious, with an image of a futuristic Barcelona, …

The iPhone XR has pretty great battery life, but the iPhone XS, not so much. Apple on Tuesday released smart battery cases for the iPhone XS, iPhone XR and iPhone XS Max. They’re available now for $129 (£129, AU$199). The new battery cases come in black or white, are wireless Qi charging compatible, have Lightning-out ports and, according to Apple, they’ll …

I’ll never forget riding a flying horse in VR while pedaling a bicycle and nearly wanting to throw up. That happened years ago when I tried VirZoom, a low-cost stationary bike that worked with fitness games and both mobile and console VR headsets. VR and fitness biking can be a rough mix. NordicTrack aims to do Virzoom one better with a …

Mixed-reality headsets like the Magic Leap One and Microsoft HoloLens cost thousands of dollars. Even smart glasses like the Vuzix Blade cost around $1,000. At prices like that, it’s hard to imagine augmented reality (AR) headsets ever taking off. Rokid, a China-based AI company that launched a pair of somewhat glasses-like smart glasses at CES 2018 called the Rokid Glass, showed a prototype …

Do you fantasize about the days when little clamshell PDA devices were all the rage?  At last year’s CES in Las Vegas, the Gemini was a novelty that brought a mechanical keyboard to an Android phone. The Gemini’s sequel of sorts, the Cosmo Communicator, is coming this summer for around $799 (about £620 or AU$1,110), also made by the UK-based …

Somewhere in a labyrinth of simulated Venetian canals in a Las Vegas mall, there’s a slick-looking glowing storefront that’s easy to miss. THE VOID, it says in large letters. Star Wars stormtroopers beckon from the windows. We’ve come to climb inside Disney’s Ralph Breaks The Internet movie at CES 2019, courtesy of The Void’s location-based VR experience, “Ralph Breaks VR,” …

I loved watching Penn and Teller when I was young. Inexplicably, I threw up as a kid during one of their shows, and then I remember meeting them in the lobby and how they made me love magic. I still practice tricks and think about how magic bends reality. Penn Jillette also lost over a hundred pounds in 2016 after …

The year of electrocardiogram tech is underway. You didn’t think it would just be the Apple Watch, did you? Withings’ newest fitness watch, the Move, was announced at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. It has the ability to take electrocardiograms, a chart of your heartbeat often abbreviated to EKG or ECG. It’s also a regular-looking analog watch — and at …