Tech Watch

Keyboard phone · Clicks Technology

Pre-orderFrom $649Ships December, expected

A small Android phone built around a physical keyboard, pitched as “designed for doing, not doomscrolling.” The keys are touch-sensitive, so they double as a scroll pad, and a message hub pulls chats from several apps into one place. There’s a programmable signal LED, a physical kill switch, a 4.03-inch AMOLED, 5G, a headphone jack and Qi2 charging.

Magnetic e-paper display · Seeed Studio

Available$49.90

A 3.97-inch touch e-paper screen the size of a sticky note, with a magnet on the back for the fridge or a monitor bezel. ESP32-S3, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a microphone, and about a week of standby on a 750 mAh battery. Besides Seeed’s own app it runs open firmware: CrossPoint as an e-reader, TRMNL dashboards, or ESPHome for Home Assistant.

E-paper dev board, LoRa and NFC · M5Stack

Out of stock$65

The same 3.97-inch, 800×480 e-paper size as the reTerminal Sticky, as a dev board with the radio extras: touch and a frontlight, an ESP32-S3, LoRa (SX1262) for long-range, low-power messaging, and NFC. 1,150 mAh battery. Made for e-readers, signage and off-grid IoT projects.

Vagus nerve stimulator

AvailableFrom $269

A neck-worn stimulator for the vagus nerve: about four minutes a session, hands-free, with sleep, stress and focus programs run from an app. It’s sold as a general wellness product, not a medical device, and the evidence on its own page is a user survey and a 40-person pilot with no placebo group, so the claims are early.

macOS utility app

AvailableFree, open source

A menu bar app that bundles the Mac utilities people usually buy one by one: window snapping, an app switcher, clipboard history, a per-app volume mixer, screenshots and recording, a system monitor, even a Dynamic Island. It’s modular, so you install only the tools you want. macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, and it installs with brew install --cask vorssaint.

Word processor for authors · Hugh Howey

AvailableFree, open source

A distraction-free word processor for writing books, made by the author of Silo. Your library is a bookshelf with covers and word-goal progress bars; inside a book, one Enter is a new paragraph, two a scene break and three a new chapter. Spellcheck runs only when you ask, cut passages wait on a Darlings tab to be restored, and books are plain HTML and JSON files on your own disk, exported to EPUB, Word or PDF. No account. An Electron app for macOS, Windows and Linux, MIT licensed, at version 1.6.1 in late October. Hugh's video walks through it, and I'm planning a fork for my novel.

On-device AI models

AvailableFree to 100k devices a monthSome models in beta

Small AI models that run on the device, with a native SDK for Swift, Kotlin and JavaScript: speech recognition and enhancement, PII redaction, filler-word detection, moderation, language detection, and a few vision models. No tokens or logins. They say their speech model transcribes ten minutes of audio in about two seconds on an iPhone.

Tiny tool-calling model · Cactus Compute

AvailableFree, Apache 2.0

A model built to call tools on the device. Cactus puts it at a single 8 to 29 MB file depending on how many of its 2 to 20 layers you keep; the full 20-layer file on Hugging Face is 35 MB. It picks which of an app's functions to run and fills in the arguments, and it also does structured extraction and embeddings. Cactus says it beats models ten times its size at phone tool calls. In thevoidkernel's video it reads an Android phone's battery in airplane mode, then, driven over Telegram, places a call, searches YouTube and sends back a screenshot. It also drives a simulated robot cat. There's a browser playground.

Language-learning reader

Available$15 once

Reads along with you in a language you’re learning: it marks the words you don’t know yet on any web page, in books, under videos and in chats, and keeps one known-word list across all of them. A browser extension for Chrome, Brave and Edge, plus an Android app; iPhone is still to come. The first 1,000 words in each language are free, and your word list stays on your own devices.

Pet-raising racing game · Game Garage

In developmentFree demo out now

A racing game where you raise your ride: cosmic creatures called Lumi evolve into the vehicles you race on. There’s a single-player story mode and CosmiClash multiplayer. Coming to Switch, Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, with no release date yet; the demo is free and it’s wishlistable on Steam.