It’s a good news, bad news kind of thing. Good news is that the Mi Band 2 fitness tracker will be available with an LED screen to consumers June 7, according to Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun. Bad news is that it will be available only to Chinese consumers. However, other Xiaomi products have launched China-only and were seen in other markets within months of the Chinese launch. The … [Read more...]
Aricent Announces Kids’ Wearable Platform Based On Snapdragon Wear 1100 Chip
Yesterday, we had news that Qualcomm introduced a low-function chip for simple wearables. Today, we're seeing news about how it'll be used. Aricent announced at the big Computex show the ADAPT wearables platform for children, a reference design that will help companies quickly build products around Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 1100 chip. That chip includes motion detectors as … [Read more...]
LG’s Untethered Android Wear Smart Watch is Pretty Rough, Says The Verge
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...]
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...]
Can You Hear Me Now? Glove Converts ASL Sign Language to Sound
American Sign Language is a rich and complex language that takes time and effort to learn, just like any language. For people who are hearing impaired, ASL means being able to communicate with the world. Now, two undergraduates at the University of Washington have won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a device that translates ASL to sound or text. Navid Azodi and Thomas … [Read more...]
Revolar: Personal Safety at Your Fingertip
Personal safety alarms have been around for a while in the form of whistles and loud audible alarms buttons, but they had a major flaw: you couldn’t be sure if there was anyone around to hear them, or whether the person who heard them would be someone who would help. Revolar’s button alarm, along with others such as ROAR for Good’s Athena, make sure that if you’re in trouble, … [Read more...]
Team Wearables: Another Sport Heard From
Rugby (or, as its participants like to call it, real football) can be brutal. Fifteen men to a side, dressed in shorts, shirts, and knee socks (and no pads) run into, around, and over each other to kick, pass, and carry a ball into an end zone as many times as possible. Elbowing and head-butting bring penalties, but have been known to happen. Even the vocabulary is a bit on the … [Read more...]
Faster Next Gen Apple Watch to Have Cellular SIM, Says WSJ
We're coming up on the first anniversary of the Apple Watch's announcement -- as opposed to its shipment -- so expect a lot of stories about its shortcomings, benefits, and future. The Wall Street Journal has one such, which cites "sources" as saying the next version of the watch will have a faster processor and be able to connect directly to cellular networks. Both guesses … [Read more...]