Reports started surfacing late last night that smartwatch and crowdfunding pioneer Pebble is about to sell out to Fitbit for a comparatively small payday. TechCrunch, citing a post on the big-ticket site The Information, says Fitbit will pay something less than $40 million for Pebble. Our previous coverage of Pebble would indicate that that price would pretty much cover the … [Read more...]
About Dan Rosenbaum
Fitbit Cuts Guidance, Stock Gets Hammered
Live by the wristband, die by the wristband. Fitbit reported its third-quarter earnings this afternoon, reporting year-over-year growth of 23 percent to $503.8 million. Analysts had been expecting $506.9 million, which doesn't sound like much of a miss; earnings of 19 cents per share met expectations. Unit sales grew 11 percent, and so did average selling price. The real … [Read more...]
Qualcomm Buys NXP For $47 Billion Cash
The rumors proved to be true: Qualcomm, the leader in cellphone chips, is buying NXP, maker of NFC chips. Price: $47 billion, an 11 percent premium over yesterday's close. Although NXP is best known in the wearables and smartphone worlds as the leader in NFC technology, the rest of the world knows it as the biggest maker of processors in the car industry through its recent … [Read more...]
Apple Leads a Flat Smartwatch Business, Says IDC, With Garmin Strong
The authoritative market research company IDC says smartwatch sales dropped 51.6 percent last quarter from the year previous, although it suggests that the results are distorted by Apple's vast success last year. In 3Q15, when the Apple Watch was generally available for the first time, Apple sold 3.9 million units, IDC said, accounting for 70.2 percent of the market. This … [Read more...]
ShotTracker TEAM Attracts Hoops Stars in $5M Seed Round
We last wrote about ShotTracker about two years ago, when the company first shipped its basketball analytics wearable. We're told now that that there's a team version of ShotTracker -- and that it's attracted former LA Laker Magic Johnson and former NBA Commissioner David Stern as part of a $5 million seed round. The standalone version of ShotTracker comprises a sensor on … [Read more...]
Samsung Ships New SoC for Wearables
We do love us a good component story here ate Wearable Tech Insider, and this one almost got past us. Samsung is now shipping mass production of its Exynos 7 Dual 7270 application processor, a 14nm device designed for wearables. Before you fall asleep, understand that the 7270 is 10mm square and includes a 1GHz dual-core CPU; LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radios; and … [Read more...]
Apple Watch’s Heart Monitor is More Accurate than Fitbit’s, Says JAMA
The journal JAMA Cardiology has published a research letter that found that the Apple Watch's heart rate monitor is more accurate than the one in Fitbit's Charge HR, and is matched only by the Mio Alpha. The study, led by doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, compared the heart rates reported by monitors in a range of wrist-worn consumer devices to the rates reported by an EKG … [Read more...]
Microsoft Abandons the Band
Sure looks like Microsoft is breaking up the Band. The excellent Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet is reporting that all references to the Band 2 at Microsoft's online store have disappeared, as has the SDK. That can't be good, and Foley reached a Microsoft spokesman who says the company has sold its inventory of Band 2s and has no intention of releasing another Band this year. They … [Read more...]
Panasonic to Ship Flexible LiIon Battery This Month
Flexible batteries -- ones that can be repeatedly flexed without losing integrity -- are nothing new in the lab. But Panasonic now says it will start shipping sample units of a flexible LiIon battery at the end of this month. The batteries, about 0.5mm thick, retains more than 99 percent of its capacity when flexed more than 1000 times, even around a 25 mm radius or twisting … [Read more...]
Android Wear 2.0 Delayed Until 2017
The Android development team at Google dropped a new developer preview of Android Wear 2.0 today, but buried the lead until the very last paragraph: it won't ship until "early 2017." Developer Preview 3.0 adds some interesting features: support for fully round watch faces; on-watch support for a Play Store (important for Wear watches being used with iPhones, which don't run … [Read more...]