iCharts Research firm IDC reported last week that Apple sold about 11.6 million watches in 2015, a figure that's about half of what stock analysts had been expecting. For the full year, the company was in third place in the consumer wearables market, following Fitbit and Xiaomi. As a whole, IDC said, the wearables market jumped 127 percent in the 4Q15, and 172 percent … [Read more...]
JAMA Says Fitbit Makes The Most Accurate Fitness Tracker, But It’s Not The One You Think
The apparent inaccuracy of wearable fitness trackers has long bugged us, but we had been unable to put real scientific numbers to it. Fortunately, there are real researchers in the world, and they've established scientifically that most of the step-counting data you get from trackers is pretty bad. A letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- as mainstream … [Read more...]
Smartband Business Jumped 684 Pct This Year, Says Canalys
Fitbit, Jawbone, and Samsung are leading the smartband business, says the industry analysis shop Canalys, whose earlier work has impressed us. On a worldwide basis, the smartband market grew 684 percent from 1H13 to 1H14 -- although Canalys doesn't say if that's units shipped or revenue. Due to their relationships with distributors, Fitbit and Jawbone lead the basic … [Read more...]
The Microsoft Bra
It turns out that Microsoft is working on things besides tablets, enterprise infrastructure, and office productivity apps. Some researchers are working with ladies' undergarments. To be more accurate, researcher Mary Czerwinski is looking into how stress can lead to overeating (PDF), and she's tracking it by placing electrocardiogram and electrodermal sensors in brassieres. … [Read more...]
Do Wearables Make You More Productive or Just More Trackable?
CNN's got a pretty good thumbsucker (journalistic lingo for a long analytical article with no noticeable news hook) about wearables: what they mean for personal and industrial productivity and what the privacy implications might be. The author, Dr. Chris Brauer, a lecturer at the University of London, did some interesting research on a panel of users, and reported that 68 … [Read more...]