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...]
LG’s New Android Wear 2.0 Watches Are Rumored
We're starting to see detailed reports about the imminence of the next generation of Android Wear watches. Android Police and TechnoBuffalo are running sneak photos of two versions of the LG Watch Style. (Seriously, can some smart branding person please whack LG upside the head?) There are two versions being tipped: a standard Android Wear 2.0 watch at $249, and an LTE … [Read more...]
How Accurate Are Walking Trackers? A Report from CES 2017
For the last few CES shows, we've been strapping on as many fitness trackers as would fit on our wrists, hitting the floors and conference rooms, and comparing results. We don't expect accuracy -- we don't do a manual count of steps -- but we hope for a degree of consistency. When we first did this three years ago, trackers showed error of more than 35 percent, which meant the … [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...]
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...]
Samsung’s WELT: A Terrible Thing to Waist
Samsung, while it's not putting out fires, recently announced that the WELT, the company’s e-belt product, has met its Kickstarter goal and is ready to go to market. What, one might reasonably ask, is an e-belt? The WELT is basically a fitness tracker in a (men’s) genuine leather belt, with at least one unique feature. Like wrist-based trackers, WELT tracks data such as … [Read more...]
Samsung Licenses Valencell’s Ear-Worn Sensor Tech
We get many announcements of corporate alliances and licensing deals crossing our desk every day, but the one between Valencell and Samsung looks particularly provocative. Valencell makes interesting biometric sensor sets that sit in the ear. If you've got earbuds that count steps or track your pulse rate, odds are good that they use Valencell tech. But there aren't many of … [Read more...]
Canalys Predicts 7.5M Cellular Smartwatches This Year; 54M by 2020
The market research house Canalys is projecting that 53.6 million cellular smartwatches -- ones that don't need to be tethered to phones -- will be sold in the the year 2020. At first blush, that looks like a pretty enthusiastic prediction, particularly in light of the company's wildly optimistic count of 7.5 million being sold this year. The underlying logic, though, … [Read more...]
Google Reportedly Readies Android Wear Watches of its Own
The website Android Police is reporting that Google is getting ready to ship a pair of Android Wear smartwatches under its own brand. This bodes ill for the health of Android Wear. The whole point of Android Wear was to create a software platform that OEMs could basically plug into hardware, but only about a half-dozen companies -- all of them pretty big, but at least one of … [Read more...]
IDC Says Apple Shipped 11.6M Watches Last Year, About Half of Analysts’ Guesses
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...]