Winter time is the anti-touchscreen season. Even with the screen sensitivity turned up via settings, gloves make fine control on a touchscreen difficult. If said gloves are of the giant variety worn snowboarding or skiing, even using the slim buttons can be a chore. Enter YodelUp, the first wearable designed for gloved fingers. It’s up for funding now on Kickstarter.
YodelUp is essentially a ruggedized smartphone remote on a wrist strap designed to fit over gloves. It can control music functions (play, pause, and volume) and works as a walkie-talkie with the Zello app. The functions aren’t revolutionary; they’re just handy and well thought out. It’s the heft of the body that makes YodelUp stand out.
YodelUp’s appearance is counter to the smart gear trend toward smaller, slimmer, and trimmer. No one wants to wear a massive smartwatch to a wedding or the office, but the cold wetness of a day on the mountain, plus a rough fall or two, could easily spell the end of more delicate wearables.
YodelUp is not trying for be-all, everyday-wearable status. It’s designed to be large and in charge, that’s the whole point. If it were slim and small with a touchscreen or minimal buttons, it wouldn’t fit the niche for people who want to keep their gloves on while they’re up on the mountain. The rugged body is not just a design conceit: tactile edges are an important addition that makes it easy to feel what you’re doing through your gloves. It’s also waterproof and shockproof.
Brothers Ramin and Darius, the minds behind YodelTech, are both music lovers and avid skiers, and YodelUp is clearly born to address their frustrations. Anyone who watched their glove or worse, their phone plummet to the snow under a ski-lift knows the struggle is real. That can happen when people take their gloves off for calls or to manage music for the ride. But with YodelUp you don’t have to pull your phone out of your pocket or take off your gloves.
At $71 to $101 via the Kickstarter Campaign, YodelUp isn’t cheap, but it’s a less pricey option than smart helmets (many of which are still in development themselves) or gloves with built-in remotes. While it may not offer the wealth of functions found in your other wrist-wearables, it’s more useful on the mountain than your Apple Watch simply because it’s not buried under layers of fabric.
But do you need gloves or a winter landscape to appreciate YodelUp? Not really. Since it’s waterproof, it’s also handy as a remote in any wet situation. The Bluetooth range is about 30 feet, so if you spend the majority of your days in the pool but want to have music control, YodelUp can do double duty. Yes, there are other devices that can serve as a poolside remote or a hands-free device for driving (YodelUp could fill in there too), but none that will do just as well on the mountain. And, since the walkie-talkie uses a cell signal, it’s a year round go-just-about-anywhere chat tool.
The YodelUp Kickstarter campaign hasn’t been feeling the love. Perhaps it’s the timing — it’s nearly the end of the season, the hype train for winter gear pulled out of the station in last year. The first YodelUps are set to ship in December, 2016, just in time for the next powder season. Yodeltech has until March 25 to hit the $43,000 campaign goal a relatively modest amount for a piece of smart tech. There are still YodelUp rewards available for $81.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.