Month: January 2016

Some dude named Shakespeare once wrote: brevity is the soul of tweet. Smart fellow. The 140-character limit is not merely some incidental feature of Twitter; it's the very essence of the service. The mandate to be concise means that Twitter distinguishes itself from abundant conventional blogging platforms. Tweets can be observations, jokes, questions, or carefully distilled ideas, but they cannot be lengthy treatises or complex arguments.

This essential feature is under threat. Re/code is reporting that Twitter is considering removing the 140-character limit and replacing it with a 10,000-character cap. This isn't the first time we've heard such reports; Re/code wrote the same thing in September.

The report suggests that long tweets will be hidden behind some kind of user interaction to expand them, meaning that Twitter timelines will continue to pack in multiple tweets, and we won't be forced to scroll past long essays on the service. This means that the Twitter experience with longer tweets will be similar to the current one.

Withings is known for its elegant line of products as well as their typically high price tags. In an effort to appeal to the masses, the company debuted the baby of its fitness tracker family at CES 2016: the Withings Go. The coin-sized device promises to automatically track your activity and sleep, show your progress on its e-ink display, and be so small and light that you might end up misplacing it somewhere.

If you've been shopping around for fitness trackers at all, you'll immediately notice the Withings Go's resemblance to devices like the Jawbone Up Move and the Fitbit Zip. It's a small disk that can fit into a wristband or a clip carrier so you can wear it in different ways. Jawbone's Up Move as well as the Misfit Flash use LEDs to indicate settings and time rather than full displays, but the Withings Go uses an e-ink display that covers one side of the disk. It uses a dial to show your activity goal progress for the day, and the same bar can change to show the time. While we haven't seen how this will look on the device yet, it seems like it would be a better substitute for a watch than other LED-equipped devices since those tend to tell time with nuanced blinking lights.

Like other Withings trackers, the Go monitors activity and sleep automatically and will recognize when you're walking around your home or running around the block. It's water resistant up to 5ATM, or up to 50 meters, meaning you can swim with it as well. Withings has always included swim tracking in its devices, and the Go doesn't deviate from this as it recognizes swim strokes automatically. When the device senses you're completing vigorous activity, it will monitor distance, calories, and duration without the need for any interaction from you; all of that information is then shared with the Withings Health Mate app for Android and iOS. You won't even have to worry about charging the device regularly, as it's powered by a removable button cell battery which will last at least eight months.