All the Things We Loved This Month
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BoostedBoosted’s Rev Might Make You Want to Ditch Scooter Share
Boosted, the company best known for its orange-wheeled electric skateboards, now makes an e-scooter. The $1,599 Rev boasts a 24-mph top speed and can carry a 200-pound human up a 25 percent incline. Its battery, inspired by the one in Teslas, can last for 22 miles. It also has some thoughtful design details, like a tube that wraps around the deck to make it easy to lock up and a folding mechanism that you can operate with one hand. Read the story.
CannondaleCannondale's New Fitness Bike Can Track All Your Rides
The new Cannondale Treadwell is a lightweight "fitness bike." Not a commuter, not a cruiser, but something that sits between the two categories—the sort of no-fuss bike you can take to the beach, to the farmer's market, or on a 20-mile Saturday morning ride along the river path. It's a fine enough bike, but the real innovation is its integrated sensor. The small black fob sits on the hub of the front wheel, where it inconspicuously logs all of your on-bike activity. If you want to study your ride data, you just download Cannondale's app, pair your phone to your bike, then spin the wheel to activate the sensor. Read the story.
Phuc PhamNew Balance's New Shoes Give You a Speedier, Bouncier Mile
New Balance thinks competitive runners are shifting their eyes from marathons to one-mile races. So it's designed a new shoe, aptly named the 5280, to work best for that particular distance. It's light, but insulated just enough to help reduce impact while pounding down on asphalt. It's also meant to maximize rebound and has a carbon-fiber plate, which makes the shoe stiffer to help with acceleration. The idea is to make a shoe that has some of the virtues of track spikes or football cleats, without actually having to attach spikes or cleats. Read the story.
AmazonAmazon Debuts a New Echo Show Amid Alexa Privacy Concerns
Amazon's new Echo Show 5, the third generation of its countertop smart display, has learned a few new tricks. But its killer feature is privacy. It has a mechanical slide that lets you close the shutter on its front-facing camera, and a new way to clear Alexa's equivalent of your browsing history. Just say “Alexa, delete everything I said today,” and poof—it's gone. Read the story.
Getty ImagesThis Dating App Exposes the Monstrous Bias of Algorithms
Monster Match looks like a dating app: You create a profile, swipe to match, and chat to set up dates. But there's a twist. As you swipe, the game reveals some of the more insidious consequences of dating app algorithms, like narrowing the field of choice and limiting the queue to fit previous preferences. It's not so much a dating platform as it is a game to show the problem with dating apps—one that's pretty damn fun to play. Read the story.
BandaiTamagotchi Have Returned to Bewitch a New Generation
The new Tamagotchi looks a lot like the one invented in 1996. The black-and-white screen has been swapped for one with color, and there are a few new features, like connectivity across Tamagotchis. But the key features remain unchanged, from the three unmarked buttons that navigate the screen to the simplicity to the gameplay. It's not just meant to appeal to nostalgic adults, but to reintroduce the pleasures of the retro toy to a new generation of kids. Just don't let it die from neglect. Read the story.
LenovoLenovo Makes the Leap Into Foldable-Display Laptops
Lenovo's new (as of yet unnamed) foldable PC comes with all kinds of imaginative use-cases. You can use it as a clamshell laptop, but the default keyboard is an on-display, touchscreen keyboard. You can also use it as a two-in-one, where you prop it up as a tablet and then use a Bluetooth keyboard. You can use it as a large tablet, or slightly folded like a book. It has a 13.3-inch diagonal display, with a 4 by 3 aspect ratio, when it’s in full-screen mode. When it’s folded, it turns into a 9.6-inch display. Read the story.
Neil Godwin/T3 Magazine/Getty ImagesNetflix Boosts the Audio Quality of Its Streams
Ever watched a Netflix show and found the sound a little... mushy? It’s these kinds of observations, ones barely discernible to the average ear, that led Netflix to spend the past several months working on a solution that would make audio across all of its programming—both original shows and licensed content—sound better. The company borrowed some tricks from its adaptive video streaming process, which uses machine learning to recognize network conditions and adjust the video quality up or down. The result should be shows that sound better, no matter where you're watching from. Read the story.
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