The latest wearable tech news murmurs and blips
Merry Christmas you lovely, lovely people. We hope you’ve enjoyed tucking away the turkey and mountain of sprouts, but have every intention of putting that brand new fitness tracker to good use after the festive period is done.
If you can pull yourself away from your pressies and the TV repeats, it’s actually been a pretty eventful week in the world of wearables. Google has confirmed its making two Android Wear smartwatches, Fitbit has rolled out a pretty big software update for its flagship tracker the Charge 2 and it’s apparently very hard to get hold of a Apple Watch Series 2 smartwatch right now. Oh, and we revealed our Wareable 50 for 2017 to help you find out the biggest trends for next year.
Away from the headline-grabbing stories, there’s also been plenty of other speculation and rumour-mongering that didn’t quite make the news cut but we’ve still saved them for you, because we’re nice like that.
From future Apple Watch chat to big announcements in 2017, here’s the best of the rest of the other wearable stories of the week.
Apple Watch Series 3 could be super slim
Yes there’s already chatter about the next generation Apple Watch and are we surprised? Well, not really. It’s been fuelled by a patent that was discovered that suggests the Cupertino company’s next wearable is set to get significantly more svelte. Now we know Apple likes to make its tech slimmer than the previous generation so there’s no surprises there. But the filing appears to show us that it could be achieved by moving the haptic motor to the wristband of the Apple Watch to make the body less portly.
We know that the Series 2 bulked up a little to accommodate the extra hardware on board, so we can definitely warm to the idea that there’s still scope to make it skinnier.
What are U up to HTC?
HTC has sent out invites (that’s it above) for an event and it’s taking a leaf out of Apple’s book and keeping things cryptic. Some initial suggestions believe it could just be a new smartphone while others believe the ‘U’ in the invite could mean it’s something to do with Under Armour and HTC’s partnership. Maybe we will finally see that Android Wear smartwatch we’ve been waiting a while for. It’s also speculated that it could be something VR related, but HTC has clearly done a good job of keeping guessing until we actually find out what it is on 12 January.
Pokémon Go creators say no to wearable
In the same week that Pokémon Go creators Niantic finally released a dedicated Apple Watch app for its giant of an AR game, the studio had to respond to rumours that it was making its own wearable.
It came courtesy of images, which appeared to show a device referred to as the Nex + Ingress Band. The wearable, which looks similar to another wearable that appeared on a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, is said to be compatible with Niantic’s other AR title Ingress. While it has denied it’s making its own wearable, that’s not to say it hasn’t left the hardware work for someone else to do instead to make it happen.
Making sporty hearables just got easier
This is big news for fitness tracking hearables. Valencell, a company that provides biometric sensors for wearables including the Jabra Sport Elite, Bose SoundSport Pulse and the Atlas Wristband, has teamed up with fellow sensor company STMicro to build a biometric developer kit. The module, which will be able to monitor heart rate data, VO2 and VO2 Max, and calorie burn should make it easier for other companies to build in those sportier features to their own hardware. So you can fully expect to see more hearables delivering hardcore fitness metrics.
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Check out the meatier stories of the week on our dedicated news page.