CES wrapped up in Vegas about a week and a half ago now, and I've had some time to actually sit with the roundup pieces instead of just skimming headlines during the show itself. Every year I tell myself I'm not going to read the "weirdest gadgets" lists because they're basically the same three items reshuffled, and every year I read them anyway. This year the one that's stuck with me is the belt.
It's called Belty, made by a French outfit called Emiota, and it is, I am not making this up, a belt that automatically loosens itself when you've eaten too much. It has an accelerometer in the buckle to track your steps and it syncs to an app so you can look at graphs of your waistline over time. I keep going back and forth on whether this is the funniest thing to come out of CES 2015 or the most depressing, and I honestly think it might be both at once. Somewhere in Eureka Park there's an engineer who solved "my pants are uncomfortable after Thanksgiving dinner" with a motor and a Bluetooth chip, and I don't know whether to applaud the effort or gently ask if anyone considered a bigger belt.
Then there's Kolibree, the smart toothbrush, which tracks your brushing technique and coverage and sends the data to your phone so an app can tell you that you missed a spot in the back left, which, yeah, I probably did, I was half asleep. I get the pitch for kids maybe, gamify the boring chore, fine. But it's the same instinct as the belt: take something mundane and bolt a sensor onto it because sensors are cheap now and Bluetooth Low Energy makes the syncing part trivial. The chip costs more than the toothbrush used to.
I don't want to be the guy who just yells "not everything needs an app," because obviously some of this stuff is genuinely useful and I'd sound like my dad complaining about the microwave. The Withings Activité Pop, also announced around CES this year, is actually a decent example of restraint done right — it's a normal-looking analog watch, $150, that happens to track steps and sleep without a screen or a charging cable eating your evenings. No app-first identity crisis, it's just a watch that quietly also does a thing. That's the version of this trend I can get behind.
But for every Activité Pop there are ten belts and toothbrushes, and I think what bugs me isn't the individual gadget, it's the pattern. Somebody in a product meeting somewhere decided the checklist for "innovative" now requires an app and a subscription-shaped roadmap, whether or not the object in question benefits from it at all. My own complaint here, and I've said versions of this on here before going back to when I ranted about the first wave of "smart" light bulbs a couple years ago: I do not want my belt to have a firmware update. I do not want to open an app to find out my toothbrush needs a new battery. I already own four chargers I can't identify by sight and I do not need a fifth for something that goes in my mouth.
There's a broader thing happening where CES has basically become a preview of a Kickstarter catalog crossed with a trade show for parts suppliers, and I mean that a little bit fondly, because a lot of genuinely dumb ideas get funded that way and dumb ideas are how you occasionally stumble into something great. Somewhere in this pile of belts and brushes is probably next year's Fitbit, and nobody knows which one yet, including the people who made it.
Anyway. I went and checked, and no, I did not buy the belt. I did seriously consider the toothbrush for about four minutes before remembering I still haven't opened the box for the fitness tracker I got for Christmas two years ago, which is sitting in a drawer with a dead battery and a companion app that's probably been discontinued by now. That's usually how it goes with me and these things — three days of enthusiasm, then it's a drawer object. If Belty ships and actually works as advertised I might eat my words in a year, loosened waistband and all. Until then I'll be over here brushing my teeth the old-fashioned way, missing the same spot in the back left that apparently everyone misses, sensor or no sensor.