Every great life event becomes a little less great when smartphones are involved.
Either you’re fumbling for yours, or the idiot in front of you is blocking your view with his.
If you truly want to live in the now and capture it, you need to put your phone down — and pick up a FrontRow.
Just released, FR is a hands-free camera that offers the best of GoPro and Google Glass, with some unique advantages and minus the whole creepy voyeur thing.
From Ubiquiti Labs, creators of the well-regarded AmpliFi home WiFi network, FR is a small mountable/wearable camera that offers two image options: live streaming to social media for up to two hours of footage, or “Story Mode,” which automatically captures a photo every few minutes and builds a first-person narrative video of your day — and uses some internal smarts to edit out the bad pics.
We saw a final prototype in June, and it’s a good-looking little life-logging machine. It’s about the size of a large pocket watch, very lightweight and pairs with your smartphone via Bluetooth. It offers HD clarity (720p, 1080p and 2k) via a forward-facing 140-degree wide-view lens (plus, a second camera on the other side). It also captures sound via an array of microphones. And it’s all controlled via a high-resolution touchscreen and one side button.
You can wear FrontRow on a lanyard or use an included magnetic clip (both a car window and flexible coil mount are coming soon). The lanyard may seem a little “young” for your sartorial tastes, but the other mounting options are ideal for concerts, sports activities, sightseeing or anywhere else where you’d rather — to appropriate a term from another piece of convenient tech — set it and forget it.
FrontRow is available now for $399.
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