“How ever did we live without this?” asked Robert Sorokanich in Gizmodo.com. A Japanese company has developed a new plug-in peripheral for smartphones called Scentee, which delivers notifications by scents rather than ringtones. The “smell dongle,” which retails for $35 on the company’s website, plugs into the headphone jack and contains a small scent cartridge containing “enough fragrant liquid for 100 sprays.” Using a smartphone app available for both Android and iOS platforms, users can program the plug-in to deliver “a scented puff on timed intervals, as an alternative to audio notifications.” Odors currently available are rose, lavender, coffee, rosemary, and strawberry. Users can even link certain smells with specific -notifications—with each scent pack available for $5. That means that if you use it with your phone’s alarm clock, you “really can wake up and smell the coffee.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Trump seeks to cut drug prices via executive orderspeed read The president's order tells pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug prices, but it will likely be thrown out by the courts
-
'Haiti's crisis is a complex problem that defies solution'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Hamas frees US hostage in deal sidelining Israelspeed read Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old soldier, was the final living US citizen held by the militant group
