Gadgetory

hi I'm out here with the verge and I'm here CES with Black & Decker's smart tech which is a smart battery so we made fun of smartphone devices a little bit at the birds here because often they just aren't that useful but this is actually kind of me and fairly simple design what it is is a battery that's compatible with any kind of Black & Decker or power tool that uses the 20 volt battery and once you plug it in it'll pair with a smartphone and you can control it using it out so there are parts of this app are a little bit more like what we usually mean when we say smart device which is to say they're not quite as useful one of them is projects which we'll just load a series of projects from the Black & Decker website like how to build a bookcase now it'll load it and it's you know probably helpful but it's also the kind of thing that you could probably just look up on your own the same goes for the messages which will give you notifications on things like projects and I think and give you some kind of notifications on whether your battery is getting low or other features but this seems like it's not quite something black & decker's figured out the other major thing you can do this lock this which essentially just means disabling the battery so I'm going to lock this right now it's successfully locked and nothing happens when I pull this trigger now I'm gonna unlock it and it's working again now the obvious question is what happens if you lose your phone and the answer is just that you repair it with another phone and then you can unlock it let me be the coolest feature here is that this is also an external battery pack you can plug a USB cable in and use it to power your phone or your tablet or anything else that could be charged with say mo see if you want to buy these these are going to come out in early summer and they'll cost $69 again this is black and decker smart tech if you want to see other cool stuff from CES you can check us out at youtube.com slash the verge