Don’t call the Motorola Hint a Bluetooth headset. It makes everyone at Motorola wince. They’d rather you call it a wireless earbud, or, in a brilliant slip of the tongue from Motorola design chief Jim Wicks, an “earable.” The Hint is a tiny, Bluetooth-enabled earbud that is designed to keep you in immediate, voice-enabled touch with the world around you. But it’s not for phone calls, or at least not just for phone calls. It’s for getting directions, for doing quick voice searches, for hearing the text message you just got or quickly adding something to your to-do list. The Bluetooth headset is dead; long live the wireless earbud.
Motorola has taken it upon itself to give us the future the movie Her promised us – or at least one key ingredient in the future. The new Moto Hint is a single wireless earbud that comes in a variety of designs, and while it isn’t quite as invisible as the headset showcased in Her, it is designed to give its wearer the ability to quickly and easily ask their phones questions. The Moto Hint is an accessory for the new Moto X specifically, and so won’t bring its magic to the downmarket Moto G, but it will let you instantly query the new flagship with requests like “What’s the weather like?” to instantly get a spoken forecast. You can also ask for directions, and receive turn-by-turn voice navigation, or dictate and send messages, plus of course make and receive calls. Finishes include fabric, leather and wood to match your Moto X, along with both black and white body accents and silver or black metallic finishes. Does having just a single earbud make you look more or less crazy when you’re talking to yourself? It’s a question we’ll have to wait a while to find out, as this ships in the U.S. later this fall. It also has a retail price of $149.99, which is kind of steep for mono sound, but then again, what price can you put on getting an early taste of our virtual assistant-heavy future?