Tag: wearables

Even Realities G1 Smart Glasses Review: Superb Display, But Slow Info

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I’ve been wearing the Even Realities G1 glasses for four months, and while many people have commented on my new frames, only two friends asked if my glasses were “smart.” For someone who wore Google Glass in public and lived to tell the tale, this technological anonymity is high praise indeed. They look like glasses you might actually want to wear, and they don’t draw unnecessary attention to your (OK, my) face.

But as Clark Kent accessed his superpowers after taking off his spectacles, inversely, this mild-mannered reporter benefits from real-time language translation, access to AI, turn-by-turn navigation, and a personal assistant, all by keeping his glasses on.

Most smart glasses, like the Ray-Ban Meta, rely on Bluetooth audio, but the G1 features a small but brilliantly effective heads-up display called the Holistic Adaptive Optical System, or HAOS. Look carefully at the lenses and you’ll see a faint rectangle in each eye. This is where a micro-LED optical engine projector displays crisp, green digital text (640 x 200 pixels). Glance up (choose the angle via the app) and a seemingly two-foot-wide text homepage appears to float around five feet in front of you. Considering all this, it’s astonishingly clever given how light and, well, normal the frames feel.

The digitally surfaced lens is actually two bonded lenses but manages to be no thicker or heavier than a standard design. Prescription lenses cost $129 extra and, aside from the occasional glimpse of the projector screen in bright sunshine, works as well as any glasses I’ve ever owned.

Nestled on the end of each arm you’ll find two rubbery nodules. These contain the battery, buttons, and antennae that exchange real-time data with your phone over Bluetooth. They’re marginally heavier than standard glasses, but because the weight is kept away from the nose, they feel good. The frames are made from solid magnesium and have a cool matte finish, with the temples coated in silicon for added grip. Add in screwless hinges and a classic oval shape, and you’ve got a stylish proposition even before you charge them up.

Photograph: Christopher Haslam

The charging case is equally well designed and holds enough power to recharge the glasses 2.5 times. The 60-mAh battery in the glasses has enough power for 1.5 days.

So, they’re nice glasses—but what do they actually do?

Virtual Assistance

The idea of the G1 is not to replace your smartphone but rather to offer a pared-back interface that gives you help and information when you need it, then vanishes when you don’t.

After installing the app and syncing the glasses, when you glance up you will see a screen with the date, time, battery level, and upcoming diary dates (assuming you’ve given permissions). You can also receive messages and alerts from social and messaging apps. You can’t respond to any messages, though, which seems both odd and a shame given the onboard microphones and the transcription software used.

The right side of the main display is for QuickNotes. If you pinch the small box on the right arm, a note will flash up saying “Quick Note Recording.” When you speak, your words will be saved and displayed on the screen when you next look up. If you mention a date, time, or place, the AI assistant will add it to your diary. It’s great if you are a fan of voice notes. I’m not, but as someone who meets new people all the time but remains terrible at remembering names, I loved being able to have names, and even job titles, on display, for my eyes only.

Translation

Open up the Translate box on the Even Realities app, choose from one of 13 languages (including Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean), decide what language you’d like things translated into (in this case English), and press Engage. If someone then speaks to you in that language, the G1 glasses will listen, translate, and write the words on your HUD.

Annoyingly, however, it’s no Babelfish. With one-on-one conversations it worked OK, and I enjoyed understanding my wife’s rusty Spanish. Similarly, I had success rewatching Squid Game without subtitles. But without someone wearing their own pair and translating my English, it is one-way traffic.

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October 25, 2024
These Smart Glasses Will Read Your Emotions and Watch What You Eat

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“We can manage what we measure, but what we mostly measure are things like money or speed,” Nduka says. “What we can’t really measure is quality. And quality is about emotions. And emotions can be sensed most sensitively with expressions.”

AI Vision

Humanity has been asking whether AI can truly know how people feel for a long time, and most of the answers come down to, well, probably not. Even without a bunch of advanced cameras and AI smarts, reading emotions can be tricky.

“Gauging emotion through facial expressions is kind of somewhat debatable,” says Andrew McStay, a professor and director of the Emotional AI Lab at Bangor University in the UK. McStay says that even if the company were using AI to “smooth out” the data collected by the sensors to make it more usable, he’s not convinced it can actually read emotions with accuracy. “I just think there are fundamental flaws and fundamental problems with it.”

Cultural differences also inform how different people display emotion. One person’s smile might mean congeniality or joy, while others might be a nervous expression of fear. That type of signaling can vary widely from culture to culture. How emotions register on the face can also fluctuate depending on neurodivergence, though Emteq says it wants to help neurodivergent users navigate those kinds of awkward social interactions.

Strand says Emteq is trying to take all of these factors into account, hence the pursuit for more and more data. Emteq is also adamant that its use cases will be wholly vetted and overseen by health care providers or practitioners. The idea is that the tech would be used by therapists, doctors, or dietary consultants to ensure that all the data they’re collecting straight off your face isn’t used for nefarious purposes.

“You’ve got to be thoughtful about how you deliver information, which is why we have experts in the loop. At least right now,” Strand says. “The data is valuable regardless because it empowers whoever is making the assessment to give good advice. Then it’s a question of what is that advice, and what’s appropriate for that person in their journey. On the mental health side, that’s especially important.”

Strand envisions therapy sessions where instead of a patient coming in and being encouraged to share details about stressful situations or anxious moments, the therapist might already have a readout of their emotional state over the past week and be able to point out problem areas and inquire about them.

Nearsighted

Regardless of how good Emteq’s smart glasses are, they’re going to have to compete with the bigwigs already out there selling wearable tech that offers far wider use cases. People might not be interested in sporting a bulky-ish pair of glasses if all they can do is scan your face and look at your food. It’s not far-fetched at all to imagine these internal facing sensors being incorporated into something more feature rich, like Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.

“This has always been kind of the way with these kinds of products,” McStay says. “These things often start with health, and then quickly they kind of get built out into something which is much more marketing oriented.”

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October 15, 2024
Meta Missed Out on Smartphones. Can Smart Glasses Make Up for It?

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Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said have been in the works for 10 years.

Zuckerberg emphasized that the Orion glasses—which are available only to developers for now—aren’t your typical smart display. And he made the case that these kinds of glasses will be so interactive that they’ll usurp the smartphone for many needs.

“Building this display is different from every other screen you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Meta Connect. Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth had previously described this tech as “the most advanced thing that we’ve ever produced as a species.”

The Orion glasses, like a lot of heads-up displays, look like the fever dream of techno-utopians who have been toiling away in a highly secretive place called “Reality Lab” for the past several years. One WIRED reporter noted that the thick black glasses looked “chunky” on Zuckerberg.

As part of the on-stage demo, Zuckerberg showed how Orion glasses can be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, respond quickly to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messages example, Zuckerberg noted that users won’t even have to take out their phones. They’ll navigate these interfaces by talking, tapping their fingers together, or by simply looking at virtual objects.

There will also be a “neural interface” built in that can interpret brain signals, using a wrist-worn device that Meta first teased three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on how any of this will actually work or when a consumer version might materialize. (He also didn’t get into the various privacy complications of connecting this rig and its visual AI to one of the world’s biggest repositories of personal data.)

He did say that the imagery that appears through the Orion glasses isn’t pass-through technology—where external cameras show wearers the real world—nor is it a display or screen that shows the virtual world. It’s a “new kind of display architecture,” he said, that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes and create volumetric imagery in front of you. Meta has designed this technology itself, he said.

The idea is that the images don’t appear as flat, 2D graphics in front of your eyes but that the virtual images now have shape and depth. “The big innovation with Orion is the field of view,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who was in attendance at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more engaging and useful for most applications, whether gaming, social media, or just content consumption. Most headsets are in the 30- to 50-degree range.”

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September 25, 2024
Meta Teaches Its Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Some New AI Tricks

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The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are the first real artificial-intelligence wearable success story. In fact, they are actually quite good. They’ve got that chic Ray-Ban styling, meaning they don’t look as goofy as some of the bulkier, heavier attempts at mixed-reality face computers. The onboard AI agent can answer questions and even identify what you’re looking at using the embedded cameras. People also love using voice commands to capture photos and videos of whatever is right in front of them without whipping out their phone.

Soon, Meta’s smart glasses are getting some more of these AI-powered voice features. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the newest updates to the smart glasses’ software at his company’s Meta Connect event today.

“The reality is that most of the time you’re not using smart functionality, so people want to have something on their face that they’re proud of and that looks good and that’s, you know, designed in a really nice way,” Zuckerberg said at Connect. “So they’re great glasses. We keep updating the software and building out the ecosystem, and they keep on getting smarter and capable of more things.”

The company also used Connect to announce its new Meta Quest 3S, a more budget-friendly version of its mixed-reality headsets. It also unveiled a host of other AI capabilities across its various platforms, with new features being added to its Meta AI and Llama large language models.

Courtesy of Meta

Courtesy of Meta

As far as the Ray-Bans go, Meta isn’t doing too much to mess with a good thing. The smart spectacles got an infusion of AI tech earlier this year, and now Meta is adding more capabilities to the pile, though the enhancements here are pretty minimal. You can already ask Meta AI a question and hear its responses directly from the speakers embedded in the frames’ temple pieces. Now there are a few new things you can ask or command it to do.

Probably the most impressive is the ability to set reminders. You can look at something while wearing the glasses and say, “Hey, remind me to buy this book next week,” and the glasses will understand what the book is, then set a reminder. In a week, Meta AI will tell you it’s time to buy that book.

Courtesy of Meta

Courtesy of Meta

Meta says live transcription services are coming to the glasses soon, meaning people speaking in different languages could see transcribed speech in the moment—or at least in a somewhat timely fashion. It’s not clear exactly how well that will work, given that the Meta glasses’ previous written translation abilities have proven to be hit-or-miss.

Zuckerberg says Meta isalso partnering with the Danish-based mobile app Be My Eyes to bring a feature to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses that that connects blind and low-vision people to volunteers who can view live video and talk the wearer through what is in front of them.

“I think that not only is this going to be a pretty awesome experience today, but it’s a glimpse of the type of thing that might be more possible with always-on AI.”

Courtesy of Meta

Courtesy of Meta

There are new frame colors and lens colors being added, and customers now have the option to add transition lenses that increase or decrease their shading depending on the current level of sunlight.

Meta hasn’t said exactly when these additional AI features will be coming to its Ray-Bans, except that they will arrive sometime this year. With only three months of 2024 left, that means very soon.

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September 25, 2024
Google Is ‘Thinking Through’ How to Make the Pixel Watch Repairable

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If you break the Google Pixel Watch—whether the first-generation smartwatch from 2022 or the latest model launched earlier this month—there is no way to repair it through official channels. Instead, if you successfully make a warranty claim, Google will send you a replacement unit instead of repairing your model. This lack of repairability highlights the company’s inexperience in the smartwatch space. You can take a broken Apple Watch to Apple to repair cracked glass or replace the battery, and the same is true for Samsung’s Galaxy Watches.

There’s some good news though. At a Climate Week NYC panel, focused on repairable technology—hosted by Back Market and moderated by One5c—Nicole Azores, a manager of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google, said on Tuesday that the company is thinking through the design of the Pixel Watch to make it more repairable.

“Watches and wearables are still fairly nascent, and we are thinking through how to make this repairable,” Azores said on the panel. “We’re thinking about repairability on a broader scale, not just on phones and tablets, and we want to make sure that all of our products eventually become repairable. I think watches being so new as a category, there are some design elements that need to be considered on how we make them repairable.”

When Can You Fix It?

Azores did not provide any additional information, including a timeline. Consumer tech products typically have a two- to three-year development time. But it’s unclear whether this more-repairable framework will show up in the Pixel Watch 4 next year or even later than that. Google has stuck with the same design for its Pixel Watch over the past three generations, though the Pixel Watch 3 launched in two sizes for the first time.

This is the first time the company has publicly commented on the irreparability of its smartwatch. Until now, Google representatives have typically said the company has nothing to share when repairability concerns are brought up.

The Pixel Watch is a latecomer in the world of smartwatches, but the software it runs—Wear OS—has been around for a decade (formerly called Android Wear). Google managed the operating system, as manufacturers like Fossil and LG made the smartwatches themselves. That changed in 2022, when Google released its very own smartwatch, following its effort to jumpstart the waning platform alongside Samsung and Fitbit.

Google reportedly captured 8 percent of the wearable band market share in the fourth quarter of 2022, the timeframe of when the first Pixel Watch launched. Research group Canalys says the company shipped 880,000 Pixel Watches in that period (the rest are Fitbit devices).

Just the Starting Point

Lack of repairability will doom many of these watches as electronic waste to the landfill, which according to a recent UN climate report has already reached a crisis point. In 2022, there were around 137 billion pounds of e-waste, and less than a quarter was recycled. By 2030, e-waste is expected to grow by 33 percent, outpacing the recycling rate.

There are ongoing efforts to enforce repairability in tech. Last year, the European Union passed regulations requiring smartphones and tablets to have longer-lasting batteries or easier methods for users to replace batteries using common tools beginning in June 2025. While it doesn’t have to comply with this legislation, Apple’s new iPhone 16 debuted a new adhesive that makes the battery inside easier to remove,

Whether it’s in the Pixel Watch 4 or Pixel Watch 5, this design change is a win for consumers. Now Google needs to focus on improving the repairability of Fitbit’s wearables. Despite the prevalence of its trackers, the company doesn’t have any repair centers to send your device in for fixes.

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September 24, 2024
Apple Watch Series 10 Review: Sleep Apnea Notifications and a Bigger Display

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On its 10th birthday, the Apple Watch faces some serious challenges. While it’s still one of the world’s most popular smartwatches and fitness trackers, the wearables market has become flooded with dupes and wannabes. Additionally, there are few good reasons to upgrade to a new Apple Watch, especially since a hand-me-down Series 6 is compatible with the latest updates to watchOS and looks basically the same as a brand-new model. An older Series 6 also has blood oxygen sensing, a now standard health feature that the newest Apple Watches do not have due to a patent dispute with the health-tech company Masimo Corp. Finally, and most devastatingly, the Apple Watch also faces serious competition from the Google Pixel Watch 3.

After a decade spent defining a new market, the Apple Watch is just not the only good-looking smartwatch—or the only smartwatch worth owning—around anymore.

Charged with making this year’s Apple Watch irresistible, the company made a bunch of upgrades. The Series 10 now comes in a polished jet black finish that is indeed very shiny. The watch’s case is also much thinner and lighter, with a new S10 chip that is single-sided to be flatter, and a brighter, bigger, wide-angle display. The Series 10 now tracks your breathing disturbances while you sleep and can tell you if you might have sleep apnea. It charges faster, has a new speaker, a new depth gauge, and a new water temperature sensor. And watchOS 11 is still the best watch OS. It just is.

The Watch Series 10 might not deserve breathless adulation, and I’m pretty sure Beyoncé isn’t going to release pap photos of herself wearing it (unless she does, in which case, my bad), but this is still just the best smartwatch for iPhone users. The absence of blood oxygen sensing is a significant obstacle, but at the end of the day, it’s still the watch that’s the hardest for me to take off.

Big Views

The most unbelievable thing about the Series 10 is that the display on the 46-millimeter model is actually bigger than the display on the 49-mm Watch Ultra 2. This trickery is accomplished through the miracle of geometry. The watch case has curved edges and the display extends down the sides, while the Watch Ultra 2 has a flat display and a titanium case that protects the corners from bumps and bangs.

Photograph: Adrienne So

It’s also much thinner and lighter than previous watches, and it’s especially noticeable when compared to the 45-mm Google Pixel Watch 3; Google’s watch is 14.3 mm deep while the Series 10 is just 9.7 mm deep. I personally don’t have problems wearing big, chunky sports watches—the bigger the better, I always say—but I do know people, including my own husband, who can’t sleep while wearing one because they’re too big.

The back is also now metal, both to incorporate some hardware changes and to improve the hand feel, although I don’t actually see or feel that much of a difference when I compare it to the previous Apple Watch’s ceramic back. I do love the polished aluminum jet black finish, even though it shows my greasy fingertips like whoa.

The curved edges do echo the Pixel Watch 3’s design, but the screens perform differently. I compared the two watch screens and the Series 10’s does have a wider viewing angle; the Pixel Watch 3’s display becomes unreadable much more quickly than the Series 10’s when you twist the watch away from you. I have a hard time finding this change to be that useful—I am a very active working mom of two kids and two dogs, yet somehow even I don’t find flicking my wrist towards my face to be that difficult.

Photograph: Adrienne So

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September 17, 2024
Samsung Galaxy Ring Review: One Ring to Rule Them All

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Like most fitness tracking rings, Samsung’s Galaxy Ring has been positioned as a minimalist health wearable for people who don’t want the pings and buzzes of a wrist-worn smartwatch or fitness tracker. But that’s only part of its appeal. Its real appeal is that it’s a supplemental wearable if you already have a Galaxy Watch and a Galaxy phone.

When I received my tester, I immediately charged it and added it to Samsung’s Health app, where it joined my Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra. You can elect to send battery-intensive tasks to either the watch or the ring to save battery life on one or the other. I delegated heart-rate monitoring to the watch, and after two days, the ring’s battery life was still at 97 percent.

I can’t think of any other devices that work together that seamlessly for such an immediate, quantifiable improvement. I did compare the Ring’s measurements to an Apple Watch Ultra, which I will discuss later, but after a few days, I switched back to the Galaxy Watch. This is what the ring was made for, so this is the most appropriate testing scenario.

Box It Out

Even from the first unboxing, the Galaxy Ring compared favorably to the Oura Ring. It arrives in an awesome clear charging case with a USB-C connector that snaps shut with a cover. I love this cover. You would not believe how often I manage to knock the Oura Ring off its charger when it’s sitting on my desk. You can also check the battery level by putting the ring on the charger. An LED around the perimeter shows the ring’s battery level, unlike the Oura, whose light just shows if the battery is full or not.

Photograph: Adrienne So

The Ring is titanium and comes in three finishes; I tested the titanium silver. Samsung has a sizing guide consistent with other fitness tracker rings as I was bucketed into my usual size 8. Like most other rings of this type, it has an array of sensors on the inside; a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor with three LEDs to track changes in blood volume, an accelerometer, and a skin temperature sensor.

I can’t feel any of these sensors when wearing the ring. I don’t mind wearing the Oura Ring, but the Galaxy Ring is more than a gram lighter and is noticeably thinner and lightweight. As a bonus, you can go into your Health app on your Samsung phone and click Find My Ring and the LEDs will start flickering! You can’t see them in daylight, but at least the company has acknowledged that one of the major problems with smart rings is how often you lose the darn things. I keep taking mine off mindlessly to wash dishes, lift something heavy, or play the violin. It’s also rated at 10 ATM and IP68, and I have kept mine on while swimming and paddling with my kids.

The battery life depends on how many tasks you want to outsource to your watch. If I’m wearing my Galaxy Watch, the Galaxy Ring lasts over a week. Without it, it lasted a standard three to five days of continuous tracking.

On Period

The Galaxy Ring measures a fairly similar set of metrics to the Oura Ring. For example, it offers an Energy Score, which is similar to Oura’s Readiness Score in that it takes in several factors, like your sleep time and consistency and the previous day’s activity, and spits out an easy-to-understand number to show you how ready you are to tackle the day.

To do that, it tracks your sleep. You can click through the Samsung Health app to check your sleep stages, including how long you’ve been awake, your blood oxygen, and whether you’re snoring. It usually records more sleep time than my Apple Watch Ultra; I’m guessing it’s easier for the watch to tell that I’m reading in bed instead of sleeping when my arm is holding my Kindle up to my face.

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August 18, 2024
Amazfit Helio Review: Woefully Behind and Lacking Features

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Smart rings have arrived. They’re no longer the preserve of Finnish pioneer Oura; we have tested rings from Ultrahuman, Ringconn, and Movano in recent months, and our Samsung Galaxy Ring review is in the works. These finger-based trackers are easy to wear and provide potentially valuable insights about our health and fitness. As perhaps the dominant Chinese player in the fitness tracking space, Amazfit should be well-placed to jump aboard the trend, but the Helio smart ring feels like a work in progress.

Amazfit grew from Huami, founded more than a decade ago. The company has lots of experience turning out affordable gadgets, and Amazfit is a sub-brand that released its first smartwatch in 2016. Huami rebranded to Zepp Health in 2021, and the Amazfit app became the Zepp app, even though the Amazfit brand was retained for the devices. (Please just pick one name.)

We have tested a few of Amazfit’s fitness trackers, including the Amazfit GTR Pro (5/10, WIRED Review) and the Amazfit Balance (5/10, WIRED Review). Amazfit was bullish about the ring and watch combination, with the Zepp app aggregating data from both, so it sent me the Cheetah Pro alongside the Helio. (Amazfit also sells the ring bundled with other models.) The duo works well, but testing the Helio ring alone quickly revealed its shortcomings.

Rushed Ring

Photograph: Simon Hill

The Amazfit Helio comes in only one color and two sizes. Amazfit calls the color titanium. It is titanium alloy, but the finish looks bronze with a subtle, classy-looking dot pattern on the top and a tiny indentation on the other side to help you align the sensors correctly. The Helio weighs just shy of 4 grams, is 2.6 mm thick, and is comfy to wear. It is bulkier than a regular ring but not terribly so.

The Amazfit Helio is rated at 10 ATM for water resistance. You can swim or shower with it on. It comes with a wee, wireless charging plinth, just like Oura’s, and a USB-C cable, but you must supply a power adapter. Amazfit offers size 10 or 12. (Luckily, I am size 12.) Eventually, it will offer sizes 7 through 13. The limited options boost my impression that Amazfit has rushed the ring to market.

The ring seems durable. Mine is mostly blemish-free after a couple of weeks, and I tend to be tough on smart rings, though I did manage to gouge my porcelain bathroom sink. (You must remember to remove your ring before cleaning, lifting weights, or any activity where it is likely to touch a hard surface.) Like most smart rings, the Helio works best on your index finger, but this makes it more likely to come into contact with … well, everything.

Mighty Metrics

The Helio has the usual sensor suspects, including a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, temperature sensor, and electro-dermal (EDA) sensor. It can track your heart rate and heart rate variability, active minutes, total steps, calories burned, and a few other bits. You must install and link the Zepp app (iOS, Android) to review your data.

Photograph: Simon Hill via Zepp app

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August 12, 2024
Plug-and-play bike wearables clip everyday shoes into clipless pedals

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Clipless bicycle shoes are great for cycling, but not a whole lot else. German company ClipClap looks to offer everyday cyclists a way of getting those clipless cleats off ASAP, a welcome alternative from hobbling around town in uncomfortable bike shoes. Its wearable adapters clip in while the rider’s in the saddle, and immediately stow away when he or she swings their leg off.

We’ve seen a number of different products designed to flatten clipless pedals into platform pedals for use with casual shoes, but ClipClap claims to be the first to offer a pedal adapter that allows a cyclist to actually clip into clipless pedals with regular shoes on. We were skeptical of that claim at first, since it seems such a simple and intuitive solution, but we have yet to see anything else that performs the same function.

ClipClap advertises its adapters for everything from long-distance touring to technical mountain biking, but, to us, the value proposition really comes to life in relation to urban commuting. Instead of having to carry an extra pair of shoes, or work and run errands in stiff, cleated bicycle shoes, the ClipClap adapters let you ride in your regular sneakers or dress shoes. Simply strap them snugly around the outside of the shoe, secure the Velcro closure, and clip into the pedal using the cleat on the underside of the base plate.

Dialed in with a basic pair of Adidas sneakers
ClipClap

The ClipClap adapter allows you to install cleats just as you would with a clipless shoe. ClipClap offers two versions, a two-hole Explore model for mountain and gravel bike pedals, and a three-hole variant for road bikes. Each one is designed to work with a variety of genre-specific clipless systems from name brands that include Shimano, Look, Xpedo, Magped and more. Simply install the appropriate cleat for your pedal type using the included screws.

The ClipClap adapters aren’t necessarily ultralight at 11.3 oz (320 g), but they’re certainly lighter and more compact than a separate pair of shoes, storing easily in a backpack or pocket. We do wonder how the adapters compare to the locked-in feel of a shoe that envelops the entire foot, but they certainly appear to be capable for at least leisurely cycling, if not all-out world championship racing.

The ClipClap adapters are designed to stow more easily than extra shoes
ClipClap

The ClipClap adapters also seem like they’d be quite useful for bikepacking and adventure rides on which the rider is looking to cut out the unnecessary weight and bulk of extra shoes but also intends to spend time hiking – whether for leisure or out of necessity – on steep, rugged or overgrown hike-a-bike segments of trail (or non-trail).

Beyond merely offering a more convenient way of pedaling, the ClipClap company also believes its adapters promote a more sustainable lifestyle, encouraging people to ride a bicycle when they might otherwise take a car. To further its green objectives, it uses recycled inner tubes for high-grip areas of its straps and recycled plastic components elsewhere in the build.

ClipClap won a German Design Award in 2023 and has been nominated for other awards
ClipClap

ClipClap launched its adapters last year and took home a 2023 German Design Award around the time it began production. We spotted the handy gadgets at the 2023 Spezialradmesse (Specialty Bike Show) this past weekend. A pair of either Explore or Road adapters retails for €79 (about US$84), and ClipClap offers shipping around the European Union. The company also sells select pedals and cleats, as well as bundles that include the adapters, pedals and cleats.

Source: ClipClap

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May 1, 2024