Skip to main content

Finger phone gadget smashes Kickstarter target in hours

Sgnl - Make Phone Calls with Your Fingertip
Remember when you were a kid playing secret agents by sticking a finger in your ear to mimic speaking on some kind of futuristic phone? Well, the future is apparently here — courtesy of a new Kickstarter campaign called Sgnl.

Sgnl’s concept? To give you a wearable wristband, complete with built-in microphone, which channels sound waves up your finger and directly into your ear. The wristband can act as a standalone device, but it’s primarily designed to be worn as a watch strap.

Related Videos

“The technology is a body conduction unit,” Hahn Ryu, director of business development for creators Innomdle Lab, a spinoff from Samsung, told Digital Trends. “There’s an actuator built into the strap that translates a voice signal into a vibration. When the BCU module is in contact with your wrist, the vibration goes all the way up your fingertip. If you touch your ear it then vibrates the air in your ear canal, which lets you hear sound.”

It’s definitely a neat idea, and while it may strike you as a bit of a gimmick, Ryu pointed out that there are actually some very useful use cases.

“We decided to create it because we were seeing smartwatch owners having conversations using speakerphone,” he said. “That’s okay in some cases, but it can also be awkward if you don’t want people listening in. That’s how we started the project. Then, once we had developed the technology, we realized that it also solves the problem of people losing their Bluetooth headsets, or getting their EarPods tangled in their pockets.”

Whatever the applications, it certainly seems to be creating a buzz. “We’ve been blown away by the response,” Ryu said. “We thought we would be a giant success if we could hit our funding goal in the first couple of days. We managed it within the first hour. In the sixteenth hour, we hit the 200 percent mark. We’ve just closed the first 24 hours and the campaign is 265 percent funded. It’s way beyond our expectations. We’re truly humbled by the response.”

If you want to get involved, you can do so by visiting the Kickstarter page, where Sgnl units start at $109.

Editors' Recommendations

You can now try the OnePlus 11 for free for 100 days — here’s how
Someone holding the OnePlus 11.

Buying a new smartphone is always a gamble in terms of customer satisfaction — mainly because they cost so much and can be so different from the device that the buyer is currently using.

To combat this, OnePlus is giving customers the chance to try the OnePlus 11 entirely risk-free. Starting today, the company is running the "100 Days No Regret" program, which allows OnePlus 11 buyers to use the new flagship for up to 100 days and still be eligible to return it for a full refund.

Read more
You aren’t ready for this Galaxy S23 vs. iPhone 14 Pro camera test
Deep purple iPhone 14 Pro and Cream Galaxy S23 crossed over

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 is here, and it's quickly become one of the best phones you can buy in 2023. For $800, you’re getting a small but mighty phone with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset, long-lasting battery life, and a powerful triple lens camera system with a 50-megapixel main shooter.

But how does one of the best Android phones stack up against Apple’s smallest flagship, the iPhone 14 Pro? It has just as many cameras as the Galaxy S23, a powerful 48MP main camera, and costs $200 more than Samsung's handset.

Read more
Nothing Phone 2: news, release date and price rumors, and more
Nothing Phone 1 with Glyph lights active.

The Nothing Phone 1 made its debut in July 2022, and it had a reasonable amount of hype behind it due to the involvement of Carl Pei, a co-founder of OnePlus. It was a quirky phone due to the unique light show on the back that makes it stand out from the competition, but on the software front, it’s very similar to other Android phones out there. It received mixed reviews, though the consensus leaned more on the positive side.

This year, we’re expecting the Nothing Phone 2, as confirmed by Pei in January during MWC 2023. Here’s everything we know so far about the Nothing Phone 2!
Nothing Phone 2: design

Read more