Items tagged with wearable
In early August, at its Unpacked 2018 event in NYC where the Galaxy Note 9 was officially unveiled, Samsung took the opportunity to showcase its latest high-end wearable device as well, the new Galaxy Watch. Although the wearables market as a whole hasn’t quite lived up to initial predictions, Samsung has persevered and steadily iterated and improved upon its initial designs. As a result, the company now has a relatively extensive line-up of wearable products, targeting a wide array of lifestyles. The new Galaxy Watch is the polished, jack-of-all-trades of the family. It has the aesthetics...
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Garmin has announced a new wearable that has some very cool tracking capabilities called the vivosmart 4. The device is very slim, and the coolest feature of the wearable is that it has a wrist-based pulse oximeter. A pulse oximeter is a medical device that can track oxygen saturation or the amount of oxygen that is in your blood. Oxygen saturation is a key indicator of many health-related issues, especially at night. Low levels of blood oxygen during sleep is a key indicator of potentially serious sleep problems like sleep apnea. The vivosmart 4 can monitor oxygen levels at night allowing users...
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Anyone who has ever owned a smartwatch can tell you that they are great as long as they are charged nightly (or at least every other night). A watch from a Chinese firm Mobvoi dubbed the TicWatch Pro claims to be able to provide up to 30 days of battery life via a 415mAh battery. It can achieve that long battery life due to the fact that it has two screens integrated into the face of the wearable. The top layer of the screen sandwich is a traditional LCD that gives you black numbers on a greyish face like many digital watches and calculators that have been around for decades. Layered under...
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A company called Seismic, a wearable robotics spin-off from SRI International, is showing off a new wearable suit that is meant to help the wearer boost their muscle power by working with the user's muscles. Tiny motors embedded in the suit are designed in a way that contracts like human muscle. These tiny motors are embedded around the joints in the body and attach via grips in the clothing that function like tendons. Computer sensors are also embedded into the suit along with a computer for controlling the sensors allowing the tracking of body movement. The software can tell the artificial muscles...
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The wearables market might not be exactly booming right now, but regardless growth is expected in the segment. Apple is currently leading with its Apple Watch. However, Google is aiming to take the wearables fight directly to Apple, and hinted back in May that it could be rolling out a Pixel Wearable running its Android Wear OS to directly combat Apple. We have some detail on what to expect from Google for its forthcoming wearable and at the heart of the smartwatches will be a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm chips haven't exactly been confirmed, but there were strong hints from Qualcomm's Pankaj...
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Google has announced that it has added new features to Google Assistant on Wear OS that will make it more useful for smartwatch users. One of the new features is smart suggestions that allow users to choose from contextually relevant follow-up questions or responses to continue the conversation they start with Google Assistant. When users ask the assistant about the weather, they are shown the weather and can then tap on a suggestion to see the extended forecast for the weekend. Google Assistant can also allow users to hear the answers to their questions. An example is when a user is listening...
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Fitbit and Google have announced that they have teamed up to innovate and transform the future of digital health and wearables. Fitbit will use Google's new Cloud Healthcare API to further integrate into the healthcare system by connecting Fitbit user data with electronic medical records (EMR). Fitbit says that combining its data with the EMR can give the clinician a more comprehensive view of the patient and improve care. Both Google and Fitbit also hope to help users better manage chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension using Twine Health, a company that Fitbit recently acquired. Leveraging...
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Hot on the heels of Nintendo tasting super-sweet success with its NES Classic Edition, companies all over have been wondering whether or not they could repeat the big N's success -- including Atari. We find this out through a new update to the website for GameBand, a wearable device that up to this point supported only Minecraft. With the teaser below, few secrets are kept. To guess at what's coming, it helps to look at where we're coming from - or, at least where GameBand comes from. The Minecraft edition of the wearable includes a multi-OS copy of the game, allowing fans to get their...
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Samsung Gear S3 Frontier (Left), Gear S3 Classic (Right)Samsung just wrapped up an event at the IFA expo in Berlin, at which the company unveiled a duo of new Gear S3 branded smartwatches. The new Samsung Gear S3 Classic and Gear S3 Frontier leverage many of the design elements from last-year’s sleek Gear S2, like the rotating control dial, perfectly round screen, and fast wireless charging, but many other aspects of the Gear S3 have received significant upgrades.Gear S3 Frontier Control Dial And ButtonsAlthough they are internally similar, there are a few external differences between the Gear...
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Over the past couple of years, the availability of smartwatches has simply exploded. There's no shortage of good watches out there that suit a variety of purposes, with a major overall focus being on fitness. In fact, the selection that's out there might prove so overwhelming, that choosing one could feel like an "exercise" in patience. However, with as popular as smartwatches over on these shores have become, there's one market that Asian vendors are tackling that seems to be largely ignored over here: smartwatches for children. Why would a kid ever need a smartwatch? That's simple: when children...
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Last summer, it leaked out that Nintendo was planning to release an ambitious non-gaming product, one that monitors your QOL, or Quality Of Life. Being a company that's integrated to the core of video gaming, the development of a QOL product came completely out of left field. As we can now see, it might be a little bit too out of left field, as Nintendo has decided to put the project on ice. These latest plans were revealed during an earnings call, by Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima. Despite no questions being raised about the progress of the QOL device, Kimishima decided to get it over with,...
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This past spring, Google released a much-needed update to its Android Wear platform, one that added both gesture and Wi-Fi support. That latter feature meant that people would be able to send and receive messages on their watch or get quick info about who's calling as long as they were connected to a Wi-Fi network. Overall, it's a quite convenient feature. Admittedly, though, few Android smartwatch wearers are going to be content with that. What if you want to go for a run? Unless your city happens to have city-wide Wi-Fi access, you're going to be left out of the loop until you get to a network....
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Keep those smartphone cameras ready because you never know what you'll encounter when out and about. Lucky for us, smartphones are fairly ubiquitous these days, making it possible for two different people to take snapshots of what appear to be Motorola's second generation Moto 360 smartwatch out in the wild. One of the photos was taken by a Reddit user (ThatGuyWhoRuinedIt) near a convenience store in Chicago, the city where Motorola's U.S. headquarters exists. Unfortunately he was late for a meeting when he spotted the wearable, so he didn't have time to approach the person and ask questions about...
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Microsoft introduced its “fitness” Band late last year in an attempt to tap into the growing wearables market. Supplies were incredibly constrained at launch and it took Microsoft a few months to get production numbers up to a comfortable level. Once production was humming along, the discounts started piling on. Microsoft struck the first blow with a meager $20 discount of its own, while Target countered with a $50 discount, making for a pretty sweet 25 percent savings off the MSRP. In the month since Target temporarily slashed the price on the Band, things have been relatively quiet…. until now....
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