The wailing wallet: Wallor lets you know if you’re being pickpocketed

There is a lot of talk about the arrival of a cashless society in which all of us rely on digital wallets. However, just like smartwatches haven’t stopped us lusting after gorgeous mechanical timepieces, so too does the advent of services like Apple Pay not preclude us from enjoying a good leather wallet.

A current Kickstarter campaign called Wallor is aiming to combine the best bits of traditional wallets and their digital counterparts, with a physical leather wallet that also connects to your smartphone — and will let you know if someone picks it from your pocket.

More: Kickstarter ‘Wonder Wallet’ is a smart device that will hold your cash, too

Creator Viorel Cretu told Digital Trends that he came up with the idea of a wallet that will alert you if someone tries to steal it after suffering a similar experience himself.

“I had my wallet stolen in February during [a trip abroad] and all my IDs were inside,” he said. “[There was my] national ID, medical insurance, three debit cards and one credit card. All my cards [had] wireless chips integrated, so every payment under $20 did not require any pin code. [As a result] the thieves took $600 from my accounts using this simple method. I lost two months and spent $800 to recover my IDs and health cards.”

That is a good enough reason for any inventor to set about solving a problem and Cretu is convinced he has done exactly that.

Inside the Wallor wallet is a special radio-frequency identification-blocking layer, which protects your cards from high-tech thieves and their mobile scanners. As for the alarm, the wallet will also trigger an alert on your smartphone if you or your wallet are more than a few feet away from one another. A connected app (which can also store your credit cards for a clutter-free experience) additionally lets you track the location of your wallet, in real time, anywhere on the planet.

Wallor offers a variety of designs and colors and a clean, attractive finish. It’s also impressively slim, with a thickness similar to an iPhone.

There are some other neat things about it, which you can read about by checking out the wallet’s Kickstarter page here. You can currently pre-order a unit, starting at $56 — although be quick because the campaign only has three days left to run.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2hkAFCr
Luke Dormehl