After announcing its upcoming Android smartwatches in March, LG has continued their effort in expanding the functionality of wearable tech. It just introduced a new line of wearable called KizON waistband, essentially a cutely designed GPS tracker, set for July 10 release in South Korea. Attentive parents elsewhere will have to wait for launches in Europe and North America later this year. In addition, there is a One Step Direct Call button designed to help the small children to contact their parents easily. So at least it is more than a glorified, kid-friendly ankle monitor.
Tag: wearable
Withings Activité Hides Smartwatch Features Within Fashionable Body
We’ve harped on this before: one of the biggest barriers to mainstream acceptance that faces the wearables industry is fashion. People don’t want to wear clunky technology just for the sake of having the technology on their bodies. Companies have begun to recognize this – most prominently with Motorola crowdsourcing high-quality designs for its Moto 360 – and the new leader in the consumer-facing fashionable technology is Withings, whose Activité watch is a classy wearable in disguise. It features a common second dial that tracks how close the user is to their daily fitness goals, which are synced via bluetooth to the watch. The watch tracks both steps and sleep, and the watch will vibrate gently to awake the user from the lightest point in their sleep cycle. It’s a well-designed watch first that happens to have some technology built in – something users have been clamoring for for some time.
PayPal Makes the Smartwatch Smarter
As if Starbucks needed to make it easier to part with $6 for a latte, the coffee giant has volunteered its San Jose location, on PayPal’s campus, to become a pilot tester for PayPal’s new wireless payment system built for the Samsung Galaxy Gear line. The process sounds simple – the user’s name and photo pop up on the computer at the register, a push notification is sent to the watch when the sale is rung up, and the user confirms payment with a tap. Bluetooth LE technology is already making our lives easier and more exciting, and this payment system is a realistic vision of a potentially very near future.
Nike To Potentially Leave FuelBand Behind
In somewhat surprising news, Nike has announced that it fired the majority of its FuelBand team, and is pivoting its business away from wearable hardware and into exclusively software. That means that all FuelBands will likely not be produced in the relatively near future, and the slimmer model planned for this fall will not make it to production. For now, though, the present generation of FuelBand will continue to be sold. It seems as though this move isn’t necessarily because the wearable market is faltering; indeed, wearables and fitness tracking more broadly continue to boom. This has more to do with the fact that Nike’s digital app ecosystem continues to out-perform its physical hardware like, and as Apple and Google stand poised to join the battle for consumers’ wrists, Nike likely simply decided now was the time to re-focus the business plan.
FiLIP Is A Smartwatch Child Tracker
In a somewhat surprising, if inevitable, development of the wearable tech trend, FiLIP, a smartwatch and “locator” for kids, is being marketed to both parents and children via AT&T’s lineup as an exclusive device. It doesn’t have the functionality of something like the Galaxy Gear, but it’s mostly a colorful method for keeping track of your kids, while also keeping tabs on who they call. Parents can “whitelist” phone numbers, can set boundary limits for their children, and will get text alerts if their kids go “out-of’bounds.” It’s the dream of helicopter parents world-wide, and should make raising children that much more over-protective. How well this device sells might be an indicator of a new market of parenting devices, and should be watched.
Quantified Self Takes Center Stage
The New York Times published a piece this morning about the various options for keeping track of personal health, encompassing the trend known as Quantified Self. The article covered the technological specs of Jawbone’s Up and FitBit’s Flex, ultimately settling on the Flex as the best choice because of its Bluetooth connection. Though the article was more cursory than all-encompassing, it’s important to note that the Quantified Self movement is reaching mainstream adoption, and is continuing to expand with new devices and platforms.
