We're all for greater adoption of technology in sports, but as New Yorkers with a bit of a "thing" about Boston and cheating, we report this with satisfaction: The Red Sox have been caught using Apple Watches to relay stolen signs to their batters. On the one hand, yay for a new business use case for wearables. On the other hand, those sumbitches were cheating. On the third … [Read more...]
About Dan Rosenbaum
Fossil Debuts Two Android Wear Smartwatches
There's been no lack of activity in wearables at Berlin's IFA consumer electronics show, but Android Wear was notably absent until Fossil unveiled two new devices with their first full-round screens. The Fossil Q Venture and Q Explorist have always-on AMOLED touchscreens -- 42 mm for the Venture and 44 mm for the Explorist. They're both based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1200 … [Read more...]
Garmin Shows Three New Fitness Bands at IFA
Garmin, which has shown great skill at micro-segmenting the fitness band business, announced three new mid-range devices at the German IFA consumer electronics show. At the higher end, the vivoactive 3 is a GPS smartwatch with NFC payment capability licensed from FitPay. Featuring a heart-rate monitor and an always-on touchscreen, the vivoactive 3 includes auto sensing for … [Read more...]
Fitbit Ionic: Minimal Acceptable Product?
Apple aside, Fitbit may be the most recognizable name in the fitness band business. Then why do its products seem to just barely clear the bar? It's tough to judge something before we get out hands on it, so we're willing to give the Fitbit Ionic the benefit of the doubt for now. But its announcement this week did little to make our pulse race. Its major new features -- a … [Read more...]
Intel (Finally) Ditches Wearables for AR
Once upon a time, Intel wanted to establish itself as the go-to chipmaker for wearables. What's more, the company bought the pioneering fitness band company Basis -- its first consumer-facing business in a very long time. Now comes word that Intel has finally and officially killed its wearables business. In truth, it was a long time coming. Intel rarely talks about internal … [Read more...]
Don’t Believe Everything You Read: Wearables Are Far From Dead
You could get whiplash from reading the general tech press about wearables. Engadget looks at the collapse of Jawbone and decides that wearables are over. Steve Levy at Wired is fed a story about Google Glass Enterprise and writes that wearables' future is in the factory. Faithful readers of Wearable Tech Insider know that the real deal is a bit more nuanced. Jawbone, as … [Read more...]
Upskill Closes Series B Financing, But Won’t Say How Much
Upskill, the industrial AR software company that used to be called APX Labs, announced this week that it's closed a Series B round of financing from Boeing and GE Ventures, but won't say how much it raised or on what valuation. Boeing and GE Ventures (which also participated in a second-round in late 2015 year) are big customers of Upskill's Skylight software platform. Both … [Read more...]
VivaLnk’s Fever Scout Wearable Thermometer Gets FDA OK
One of the more interesting products we saw at CES earlier this year was the Fever Scout, a reusable soft wearable thermometer. We held off writing about it because it hadn't gotten FDA approval -- a deficit the company now says has been remedied. We generally like this category: TempTraq, a one-time use disposable thermometer patch was a big hit last year. But VivaLnk's … [Read more...]
Swatch’s Hayek Gets Smartwatch Religion, but Barely
Swatch CEO Nick Hayek is saying that the time giant is working on its own operating system, and expects to have something on the market next year. Cautious as it is, Hayek's comments late last week on the eve of the Baselworld watch show are his company's biggest step yet into the emerging market. Hayek's correct objection to the existing generation of smartwatch OSes -- … [Read more...]
Withings Brand to Vanish as Nokia Takes Over
As one of its lesser-heralded announcements at Mobile World Congress this week, Nokia said it would retire the Withings wearables brand this summer, relaunching the products under the Nokia name. Withings has been one of the longer-lasting brands in the wearables and consumer digital health fields. It was bought by Nokia in April of last year for € 175 million. Nokia, … [Read more...]