All the other news stories from the week
Yeah, you know what time it is. Welcome to the this week’s edition of And finally, the place to find out about some more of the smaller stories from the wearable tech world you may have missed.
If you missed the headline-grabbing stories, don’t worry, we’ll catch you up. Among the biggest stories, third-party watch faces are tipped for the Apple Watch, while Nest is interested in buying Nokia Health. Elsewhere, Casio launched a cheaper version of its Pro Trek Wear smartwatch, Garmin introduced Connect IQ 3.0 with a bunch of new apps and Intel decided it’s had enough of wearables.
There’s also been plenty of other stories that didn’t quite make the news cut, but we’ve saved them for you. We’re nice like that.
Read on to catch up on the best of the rest of the other wearable tech stories of the week.
Apple Watch gets some Sleep Cycle love
Sleep tracker apps for the Apple Watch have picked up since the Watch Series 3 turned up, most likely due to the fact that the battery life can comfortably make it through an entire day and night, making sleep tracking worthwhile.
The Sleep Cycle app is ready to embrace the Watch with a new enhanced version that uses the Watch’s taptic engine to give you a nudge when the iPhone app identifies that you’re snoring. Other Watch-related features include a silent alarm that once again embraces the Taptic engine and view heart rate readings from your sleep time.
This smartwatch types with your wrist
Some very clever folk at Darmouth College think they’ve found a solution to typing out messages on your smartwatch. Instead of tapping on a small screen (which we all know is ridiculous) or dictating to your watch, it’s come up with a way to compose messages by moving your wrist in different directions to indicate letters and words.
The circular WrisText smartwatch features an alphabetical keyboard and a wristband packed with proximity and vibration sensors to react to the wrist movements. Users can create messages by moving their hand in one of six directions. In a five-day test, testers did initially struggle to get to grips with it, but did become proficient after a few days according to the team behind WrisText.
The smartwatch is set to be shown off at the CM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which takes place in Montreal from 21 April to the 26 April.
Samsung Gear S3 will unlock your PC
It’s that feature you’ve all been waiting for. Samsung has been on a big software update spree with its wearables over recent weeks, but there are more goodies on the way.
Samsung updated its Flow app for Android and one of the new features added is the ability to use the Gear S3 or Gear Sport to unlock Windows 10 PCs. Additionally, it’ll also sync notifications from your Gear smartwatch, giving you a bit of that Apple Watch/Mac style hook-up experience.
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Check out the meatier stories of the week on our dedicated news page.
