The 2016 Rio Olympics are how history and there was no shortage of tech at this year's event. Athletes used all kinds of gadgets to help them train and stay fit, from heads-up displays used by cyclists to jump trackers worn by the volleyball team. Here are a few of the gadgets that made it to Rio.
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Smart Cycling Glasses

You may have seen U.S. cyclists wearing Solos smart glasses, a kind of Google Glass for athletes. The glasses have a tiny heads-up display that shows metrics like heart rate, pace, distance, and cadence. The data appears in real-time, so cyclists know if they are moving at their projected pace. The glasses have built-in headphones and can run for around six hours before needing a charge. The Solos glasses are expected to become available next Spring and should cost around $500.

Joint and Muscle Therapy

Athletes with the U.S. gymnastics team used LumiWave's Infrared Light Therapy device to treat minor muscle and joint pain. Each of its eight "pods" beams infrared light into body tissue, which helps increase blood flow and provide short-term pain relief. The device has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "for temporary relief of minor muscle pain and spasms and minor joint pain and stiffness." While gymnasts have access to it now, the device is on pre-order to the general public starting at $449.




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Jump Tracker

Wearables provide analytics data to help athletes train. The U.S. women's volleyball team used the Vert Wearable Jump Monitor, which clips onto clothing to track how high, how far and how often each player jumps. The data is sent to an app to help coaches ensure athletes don't over-exert themselves, which can lead to injury. It can also be used for basketball and other sports. You can buy your own for $125.

 


Visa's Payment Ring

​Crime was a big concern at the Rio Olympics. Visa provided a wearable payments ring to its sponsored athletes at the games, allowing them to make cashless payments. Tap the ring on a compatible payment terminal and you're done. Visa is also linking pre-paid cards to payment bands and smartwatches like the Swatch Bellamy.

It doesn't happen often but Bluetooth is getting an upgrade all the way to a new version, Bluetooth 5. Announced last week by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), will have double the speed, quadruple the range and increases data capacity by 800%. It should also work far better outdoors than current offerings. In an age of smart connected homes and smartwatch devices this is very good news indeed.

Bluetooth is lower power consuming than Wi-Fi, but has been limited by range and bandwidth, until now. Bluetooth 5 is expected to start arriving later this year and early in 2017 inside new devices.

Expect new smartphones, smartwatches, speakers, headphones, smart bulbs, connected cameras and more to sport the new Bluetooth 5 connection. There are currently over 30,000 companies working with the Bluetooth SIG so expect this to appear on a huge scale when it starts to arrive later this year.

This could also mean indoor location tracking, like that used by Apple in its Stores, could become wider spanning and more accurate than ever.
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Expect to hear manufacturers announcing their devices which will pack Bluetooth 5 towards the end of 2016.

Several reviewers and critics have said that the smartphone has hit a wall with respect to design and innovation. Fortunately, the people at Fingerprint Cards don’t believe that. They recently announced that they have collaborated with TPK, a leading company specializing in cover glass and lamination technology. Through this collaboration, Fingerprint Cards can now offer smartphone manufacturers new, highly attractive and innovative design options where the fingerprint sensor (FPC 1268) is integrated with and under the cover glass.

Jörgen Lantto, President and CEO of FPC, comments: "By teaming up with TPK, we can  provide a highly compelling offering to the smartphone manufacturers, making it possible to mount the fingerprint sensor under the cover glass."

Traditionally, fingerprint readers required a discrete area just for their use. To integrate them most efficiently, smartphone manufacturers have tended to build them into either the home button on the front (as Apple and Samsung do) or the power button on the back or side (as with Google's Nexus and Sony's Xperia).

And the benefits of this technology isn’t just aesthetic. LG Innotek, the research arm of Korean manufacturer LG, points out that waterproofing a smartphone becomes significantly easier without a discrete button for the fingerprint reader. Plus, the sensor itself is less susceptible to being scratched if it sits under the same tough cover glass as the display.

Leading the list of possible adopters of this technology is Huawei and Google. Currently the two leading manufacturers, Samsung and Apple have their own proprietary designs and are not likely candidates for this new technology. But given the desire to have fully water repellant models, both companies are most likely considering under glass implementations.

The first commercial devices are expected to reach the market in second half of 2016.

Samsung is rumored to be developing a device that offers both a phone and tablet together
The company is changing the world of smartphones and tablets by putting them together in a foldable device. The rumored project is called Project Valley.

This isn’t the first time Samsung introduced a foldable smartphone concept to the public. In 2014, an ad was released to share Samsung’s idea of a ‘smartlet.’ But in March 2016, the patent for the device was made public, further fueling speculations that Project Valley is already in the works and after three years of development, it is gearing up for release in 2017.

The phone measures 5 inches tall, but can offer a 7-inch display when unfolded. The phone offers a foldable OLED display and will come in two variations based on the processor chip being either a Snapdragon 620 or Snapdragon 820. Moreover, the device will also have 3GB of RAM, non-removable battery and a microSD card slot.
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The company has put together a humorous commercial on YouTube.

Right now for the most part, the touchscreens that we interact with are only as large as manufacturers make them, and as expected, the bigger they are, the more expensive they get. However, what if you could have a touchscreen display as big as a kitchen countertop, or as small as a coffee table?

Turns out Sony is experimenting with that idea because during the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), Sony introduced a prototype projector that can turn any flat surface into a touch-sensitive display. To top things off, it also comes with a depth sensor so that the projector will be able to see what has been placed on the table, and in turn offer up information about it.

The “Interactive Tabletop” can also recognize various objects that are placed on a flat surface. In the demo at SXSW, the Interactive Tabletop recognized when a copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was placed on the table. Light projection of its characters then sprang to life from the projector, and those projections could then be dragged around the table with a user’s finger.
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Sony’s new device isn’t something the company has said it plans to commercialize at this time. It’s simply a prototype. Indeed, right now the commercial uses for such a device seem limited to simple gaming or entertainment applications. However, the concept does bode well for a future where we can interact with light-projected holograms as easily as we interact with physical objects today.

Another announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this past week was ZTE’s new hybrid called the Spro Plus. The company said the new device could become your second-most-used gadget, after the smartphone.

The Spro Plus is, first and foremost, a portable, battery-powered, laser projector. It can project a 300-inch sized picture onto a surface, and with 500 lumens of brightness, it'll look decent even in rooms that aren't very dark. 

However, unlike most projectors, which are pretty simple affairs, the Spro Plus also doubles as an Android tablet running the new Marshmallow version of Android. It has an 8.4-inch, 2K LCD screen; 3GB of RAM and 32 or 128GB of storage. The 4W stereo speakers, made by Harman/Kardon, provide better sound than you'd get from an ordinary tablet.

It's all powered by a huge 12,100mAh battery, which ensures 6 hours of projection time; though if you want full brightness, you'll need to connect the Spro Plus to a power socket. 

Finally, the ZTE is a connectivity hub; besides the USB and HDMI ports and a headphone jack, it also has Wi-Fi connectivity, and one version will have a 4G LTE slot, so you'll be able to use it as a mi-fi-style hub. 

We don’t have firm specs on size and weight but the prototype they showed in Barcelona came in at about 2 pounds and sized like a 10-inch tablet (although a very fat one).
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ZTE is quite proud of the Spro Plus's size and weight, as it's quite a bit smaller than its predecessor, the ZTE Spro 2. We don't have the exact measurements, but it weighs around 1 kilogram, and is sized like a 10-inch tablet (albeit a very fat one).  ZTE hasn’t announced pricing or availability but it appears that the unit will be available early this summer.  

​Own an iPad and a Mac. Now you can turn your iPad into a slick graphics tablet with an inexpensive piece of software. You’ll need a stylus, but we talk about that later.

Astropad co-founder Matt Ronge thinks his company’s $20 app, when combined with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil or any iPad and stylus, can match and even exceed the current champ of the tablet world, the Wacon Cintiq.

“iPad Pro is an amazing drawing platform but iOS is far too limited for the professional artist,” says Ronge. “So we wanted a way where we could get the best of both worlds, the power and flexibility of the Mac coupled with the touch interface of the iPad.”

Astropad, though, takes it a step further, letting you draw on your iPad Pro with the Pencil using any app on your Mac (even Photoshop) via the magic of your iPad Pro. That’s some slick digital magic right there.

The app’s been out for a while, letting artists draw on their Macs with regular iPads and even iPad Pro, but the latest update adds serious support for the iPad Pro screen size, along with the game-changing Apple Pencil. The way it works is by having the iPad mirror and control what’s happening on the Mac. Astropad’s developers had to make their own screen sharing tech, though, since the existing tech (like AirPlay) has a poor image quality and high latency. “Neither of which are acceptable for a professional artist,” says Ronge. “So we spent over a year creating our custom tech called Liquid that is both low latency and is very high quality. This is what sets us apart from others that have tried to build something like Astropad.”

In the new version of the app, there’s advanced stroke-tuning to remove stray marks and support for tilt with Pencil, letting you simulate brushes more accurately. There’s also a special pressure sensitivity curve for the Apple Pencil that Astropad has tuned to take better advantage of the peripheral, and the team has even improved the image quality on your iPad so whatever you’re working on is in crisp, clean high resolution.

A Wacom tablet needs a wired connection to your Mac, requires you to learn its own set of pen gestures, doesn’t let you draw right on your image, and can cost $1000 or more. Astropad is $20, totally wireless, and uses the Pencil features you already know and love.

Astropad already sees 60% of its new users and 50% of currently active users on iPad Pro, so this addition should make things a lot easier for users both new and old.

The Astropad software supports several different pens. If you have an iPad Pro, just get the Apple Pencil – it’s the best. If you have any other iPad, they recommend the Adonit Jot Touch with Pixelpoint ($100). If you don’t need pressure sensitivity, you can opt for either the Adonit Jot Pro ($30) or the Pogo ($15).
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As a comparison, the Cintiq solution starts at $800 and goes to $2,800. The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are $900 to $1,180. 

If you’re like me, you carry both a laptop and a tablet with you when you travel. I’vet found that I can’t totally abandon my laptop yet and there are times when I really need a full set-up out in the field. Enter Duet, an iOS app that turns any iPad (other than the original iPad) into a second screen for either your Mac or Windows PC. It also works with an iPhone, but I’ve found that the lower resolution of the phone screen gets in the way of the productivity.

Unlike its competitors that rely on wi-fi for their connectivity, Duet uses a standard USB/Lightning cable. With a tether, you can even watch 1080p videos at 60 fps. Prior versions of the software allowed for only a single second screen but with the new 1.2 version of Duet, users can now take advantage of iOS’s split-screen capabilities (when tethered to a Mac) an allocate two-thirds of the display for Mac apps, while the other third can be used for your favorite split-screen iOS apps. The split screening only works on iPad Air 2 or iPad Pro.
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Duet is available from the Apps Store for $9.99. It’s a bit pricey as apps go, but an inexpensive investment in a road warrior’s kit.