Chris Hunter’s technology column: What is wearable tech?

Hello again and thanks for reading the last few columns. This week’s is a topic that I feel will really take off in 2014 and just get bigger and bigger, even though not that many people know what it is.

Wearable technology is starting to become interesting, when you look online at all the ideas that should come to fruition this year.

This has been around for a few years as niche products, but it has been a really small market and computing power wasn’t there at a size that made it easy to wear.

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However last year a couple of devices were announced that could be the key to change this.

The first one was smartwatches. These devices are wristwatches with a lot of computing power that give you the ability to answer calls, see notifications of email and texts on your wrist and in some cases actually reply, take pictures and much more.

Although you all may be thinking what’s the point, how many times have you scrambled around in your bag or had to halt a conversation due to your phone ringing only to see it’s someone you don’t want to talk to.

How easy would it be to glance at your wrist quickly and see if you want to answer before you go for your phone? The second and potentially revolutionary device was created by Google who demonstrated and released to developers ‘Google Glass’.

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This looks like a pair of glasses without lenses but you have a small screen over one eye.

This can be used as an aid to navigation, a wonderful way to take photos and keep your hands free. You can ask Google Glass anything and they will search Google for the answer. Nothing I can say can do this justice so if this short paragraph has caught your interest go to this link http://goo.gl/azFKxO

As I said in my opening few lines, some of the stuff coming soon is just wonderful in my opinion.

I just love browsing websites such as indiegogo.com or kickstarter.com just to see what ideas individual inventors have come up. We are starting to move into the world of what even 10 years ago would have been a pipe dream or even science fiction becoming actual products.

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Just a couple of examples that have caught my eye are an NFC ring (I will be going into more details on NFC next week) that allows you to share info by just touching, or even unlock a door (www.nfcring.com), and a watchstrap style bracelet that is actually an 8GB memory stick and USB cable for a phone, camera or any other micro USB device.

I will be doing my best to answer questions that you can email in to me at [email protected] with the word Guru in the subject line or make an appointment with me by going to o2.co.uk/guru and clicking on ‘book an o2 guru’ and then searching for Mansfield, or another store if that suits you better.

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