Gadgetory

hi i'm russell brandom with the verge and that today we're looking at green stone it's a sort of weird hardware widget up from the chat app fire chat fire Chad does everything through mesh networking so if you don't have connectivity to the larger internet you can just connect directly from phone to phone the problem with that is there's a really limited range so unless you have a lot of phones in one place it can be hard to make any kind of network so their answer is this thing which is going to sort of fill the gap between the phone so you can see there's instructions on the back on how to use it so this is basically the thing if you shake it it lights up to kind of wake it up and look for connections to other phones the idea is instead of having a lot of phones in the same place all the phones will connect to this now everything's happening over bluetooth which doesn't really reach very far they say 90 feet which is optimistic but basically you want a line of sight it's the same way your phone connects to a SmartWatch or a headset any sort of short range wireless tech so you need a lot of these in one place if it's going to work at all there are best successes being in basically crowds of people they do a lot of electronic music shows burning man that sort of thing if you get that it means all of you can be in the same chat room and the chat room just lives on this it can hold a thousand messages at once and it never needs to connect to a cell tower or a satellite or sort of any larger server everything's just on your phone and in this guy and also you can leave and come back so I could you know message Jake on this walk out of the room Jake comes back and connects to this and the message would live on this and then send to him which is great because Bluetooth connections are kind of flaky so this is still a prototype they're not selling these but they're probably gonna be handing them out at some electronic music shows over the next six months it's cool I'm excited to see if it works