The road to market for LG Watch Urbane Second Edition LTE has been as long and rocky as the product's name itself. The first Android Wear watch to be able to operate untethered from a mobile phone, it was supposed to ship at the end of last year but was held back for unspecfied technical problems. Now that it's out, The Verge has a review, and it's less than wildly … [Read more...]
Qualcomm Launches Purpose-Built Snapdragon Wear Chips
At Mobile World Congress a few months ago, Pankaj Kedia, Qualcomm's top exec for its wearables business, told us we should expect the company to ship many different variants on a single platform. Qualcomm is starting to pay off on that strategy, launching the Snapdragon Wear 1100 processor at the big Computex conference this week. The Wear 1100, Kedia told VentureBeat, is … [Read more...]
Reports have Jawbone Either Pivoting or Circling the Drain
Something's up with Jawbone. The wearables/Bluetooth speaker/earbud maker was in the news today, and not in a good way. TechInsider reports that the company, which raised $165 million in a down round a few months ago, has stopped producing its UP2, UP3, and UP4 fitness trackers, selling existing inventory to liquidators. And Fortune says that Jawbone is exiting the Bluetooth … [Read more...]
Clothes Make the Man and Woman Feel Better
How would you like clothing that would not only make you look, but also feel, like a million bucks? Microsoft—the original grey suit people—is thinking about doing something about that. The company recently applied for a patent for a shirt that can detect your “affective state” and if it’s a downer, send you feedback to perk you up or cool you off. There is so much room for … [Read more...]
Hyundai’s “Iron Man” Suit: Sci Fi Without the Fi
Hyundai has announced—in Korean, on its Korean website—that it is working on an exoskeleton suit that it compares to Iron Man, and that is identical to Lt. Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) in Edge of Tomorrow. The exoskeleton is an upgrade of Hyundai’s lighter weight H-LEX (Hyundai Lifecaring ExoSkeleton) that was designed to assist seniors and disabled people with mobility problems. … [Read more...]
Pebble Updates Watches with Heart Rate Monitors
Pebble, the smartwatch pioneer, today announced big updates to its basic model and its more deluxe Time product. Both get design updates -- the Pebble 2 is thinner and the Time 2 gets a bigger and higher-res color screen -- but the big change is the addition of a heart rate monitor. Even given Pebble's roots as a notification device, the addition of the heart rate … [Read more...]
Fitbit Buys Coin’s Wearable Payments Tech
Fitbit's been trying for more than a year to get NFC payment technology into its products; we picked up a strong rumor a few months ago (which we were unable to adequately confirm) that Fitbit had built production quantities of a fitness tracker with payment tech but was unable to get it to work properly. Today comes news that Fitbit has bought the wearable payment tech … [Read more...]
Fairy Tale Tech at the Met
Claire Danes was travelling light when she arrived for “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 fashion extravaganza from its Costume Institute. Her fairy-tale princess dress, designed by Zac Posen and hand-sewn in organza and fiber optics, was stunning in the lights on the red carpet and even more spectacular in the … [Read more...]
Tata Group Develops Smart Watch For Its Own Enterprise Use
When you're as big as the Tata Group (and if you don't know about the company, you should read up on it), you can develop hardware products just for your own internal use. That's apparently what the company is doing with a piece of wristware building a safety watch for workers in several of its subsidiaries. The Economic Times of India reports that Tata CIO Gopichand … [Read more...]
Fitbit’s Road to Success Narrows
Wearable Tech Insider does not do stock or financial analysis, but Fitbit's 1Q results, released yesterday, said interesting things about the state of the company. Sales and earnings in the quarter beat analysts expectations, but the company's profit outlook for 2Q were a third to a half of what was expected. (Sales, however, were projected to be strong.) As a result, the … [Read more...]