The Phoenix weighs just 27 pounds. Photo: Suit X

SuitX, a company driven to lower the cost on bionic technology to help people walk, won a prestigious robotics competition that will help it fund a pediatric exoskeleton for children with neurological disorders.

Last week started with SuitX debuting an exoskeleton for $40,000 and ended Saturday with a $1 million prize in the United Arab Emirates AI and Robotics Award for Good.

Your smartwatch market leader. Photo: Apple

So the Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch. It just became the most popular in a hurry.

Shortly after its debut last year, the Apple Watch set out to take over the market it was late to, accounting for two-thirds of all smartwatch shipments in 2015, according to a report by analysts with Canalys.

By Canalys estimates, that’s about 12 million units with more than 5 million Apple Watches sold during the final quarter of 2015.

Steve Sanchez says the Phoenix is a breakthrough in exoskeleton comfort. “This is the first suit I’ve tried where I don’t feel like I am riding a robot,” he said. Photo: SuitX

Dr. Homayoon Kazerooni has created bionic machinery that can help a person rise out of a wheelchair and walk. Yet, there’s one barrier preventing some people from walking – cost.

This week, Kazerooni’s work takes an important step forward. His company, SuitX debuted a lightweight exoskeleton, dubbed Phoenix, for people with mobility disorders at an initial price of $40,000, about two to four times cheaper than other devices.

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti uses an iPad for some science work on the International Space Station. Photo: NASA

There’s a smartwatch app for almost everything, but very few are useful to the men and women who work in microgravity.

So NASA is asking the pubic to design a smartwatch app for its astronauts to do everything from keeping them organized during science experiments to alerting them to space debris approaching.

ZTE will sell the nubia Z9 directly to U.S. customers. Photo: nubia

When ZTE started making sponsorship deals with the New York Knicks and the Golden State Warriors, to be the teams’ official smartphone, it was trying to raise its profile in a U.S. market that had never seen one of its phones.

But the Chinese telecommunications company changed that in a big way Thursday when it used a large Times Square billboard to announce its high-end nubia Z9 Android smartphone will soon be available in the U.S.

The Z9, which will bypass service providers and sell directly to U.S. customers, features a 5.2 borderless screen, 16 MP camera with image stabilization, fingerprint sensor technology controls that work with grip and gestures.