inPulse smartwatch turns programmable, and it can almost play Doom (video)

Once upon a time the inPulse was a BlackBerry peripheral, but no more -- now, it's a fully programmable device-agnostic Bluetooth wrist computer. That's because its manufacturer Allerta released an SDK this week, which lets the 52Mhz ARM7 processor and 8Kb of RAM within display whatever you'd like on the 1.3-inch, 96 x 128 pixel screen. Like the time of day... or this tiny, practically unplayable 3D game. Yours for $149.
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Recon 6.0 Programmable Rover hopes to make coding appeal to the younger set (hands-on)

SmartLab's Recon 6.0 Programmable Rover is an interesting little toy-gadget we found while perusing the floor at the International Toy Fair. Designed as a teaching tool for basic programming skills, this little bot comes with an owner's manual that'll teach your little tyke basic programming concepts in an easy-to-use package. All coding is done right on the front panel itself using easy-to-understand arrows and symbols, and you can make it do things like deliver sodas, guard a bedroom, or recite pre-recorded messages to unknowing family members or pets. We wish it had a video camera up top rather than just a microphone and speaker, but maybe letting Junior start out with just the basics isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's available now for around $60, so if you've had enough dominos maybe give this a once-over.
SmartLab ReCon 6.0 Programmable Rover

Researchers from Harvard and MITRE announce world's first programmable nanoprocessor

We've seen plenty of breakthroughs involving nanowires over the years, but none of those have involved an actual programmable processor -- until now, that is. That particular "world's first" was just announced by a team of researchers from Harvard University and the MITRE Corporation this week, and it's being described as nothing short of a "quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up." As for the processor itself, it consists of an array of nearly 500 germanium nanowires that have been criss-crossed with metal wires on a chip that's just 960 micrometers (or less than 1 millimeter) square. That becomes an actual processor when the researchers run a high voltage through the metal wires and switch the individual intersections off and on at will -- we're simplyfing things a bit, but you get the idea. What's more, the researchers note that the architecture is fully scalable, and promises to allow for the assembly of "much larger and ever more functional nanoprocessors." Head on past the break for the official press release.