French-based Parrot has brought a bumper crop of products with it to CES this year, ranging from in-car entertainment with Android Auto (and something called Apple Car Play?) to new drones, headphones and new plant monitoring products for your home.
The most exciting product for us is the RNB6 in-car entertainment system with Android Auto compatibility, details of which actually popped up last night running Android Lollipop and compatible with Android Auto. Today’s information says that the RNB6 will make it to market, but there’s no price attached to it just yet.
Zik Sport
More than just a sports-oriented version of the company’s high-end Zik / Zik 2.0 headphones (we’ve got a Zik 2.0 headset on the test bench at the moment), this new sports headset is loaded with biometric sensors to help you track your workout.
Zik Sport brings the company’s Adaptive Noise Cancellation technology and “Street Mode” passthrough from its big brother, and promises to measure your heart rate and analyse your run (ground contact time, cadence and vertical oscillation).
The headset will connect via Bluetooth 4.0, making it compatible with a wide range of phones and tablets.
New Mini Drones
Parrot’s Mini Drones were some of the most fun cat-scarers toys of the last year, and the range has been expanded for 2015 with two new Jumping Sumo models and a new Rolling Spider.
You can now get a “rover” Jumping Sumo with headlights, and a “cross-country” model that has a new backbone, so it’s better equipped for getting across obstacles.
The new Rolling Spider, “Mechanical Firefly” has headlights allowing you to better inspect poorly-lit areas.
Parrot Pot & H2O
We thought one of Parrot’s more unusual products for 2014 was its Flower Power plant monitoring system, and a raised eyebrow usually follows any mention of it. It seems the company’s pretty happy with Flower Power’s performance, as they’ve just announced two new products in the family – Parrot Pot, and Parrot H2O.
First, the Parrot Pot is an actual pot – a “smart pot”, if you will – into which you can plant flowers, shrubs or anything, really. The Flower Power app knows over 8,000 types of plants and can use soil moisture, fertiliser, ambient temperature and light levels to determine the best watering solution for your plant. It’s got a 2L reserve, and can intelligently ration the water should you forget to fill it up (and ignore the notifications on your phone reminding you to do so).
Last but not least, the Parrot H2O lets you turn any screw-top bottle into an extra water reserve so you can get up to 3 weeks of autonomous watering. You might never need to look at your plants again!
Local pricing and availability is yet to be announced for each of these items, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on them all.
Which Parrot prouducts are you most interested in? Tell us in the comments!
the mini drone clip was awesome
Looking at the rear photo of the RNB6, I wonder what the unmarked connector below the Ethernet, USB and iPhone block is for.
micro usb plug. It would be for plugging the headunit into a PC to load firmware/files/recover from a bad flash.