And finally: Samsung Gear Fit 2 Plus name surfaces, fitness tracker tipped to live on

All the other news stories from the week
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Welcome to another fine instalment of And finally, the only place to find out about the smaller stories from the wearable tech world you may have missed.

Missed the headline-grabbing stories? Don't worry, we'll catch you up. First up, details of the Huawei Watch 2 2018 emerged as Wear OS got some handy new features. Google brought new smarts to its connected jacket and Asteroid 1.0 launched as a rival for Google's own smartwatch operating system.

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.

Samsung Gear Fit Plus name surfaces

And finally: Samsung Gear Fit 2 Plus name surfaces, fitness tracker tipped to live on

Another week, another new name for a Samsung wearable emerges. This time, it's the Samsung Gear Fit Plus, which the company has filed a trademark for at the KIPRIS (Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service).

Other than the name there's no other information to expect what features or specs we can expect from what sounds like could be a follow-up to the Gear Fit 2 Pro, which launched in 2017. Samsung's fitness tracker has improved dramatically since the first version arrived on the scene and Samsung has topped up its features with regular software updates too.

Samsung recently received patents for the name Samsung Galaxy Watch indicating that it could be readying a couple of new wearables to drop before the end of 2018. It brought swim tracking to the fore for the Fit 2 Pro, so we are intrigued to find out could lie in store for the Fitbit Charge 2 rival.

And finally: Samsung Gear Fit 2 Plus name surfaces, fitness tracker tipped to live on

A team of students at the University of Bremen have a built a wearable camera that takes pictures when you blink. So you really don't miss a thing.

The Augenblick is made up of a headset that uses a Raspberry Pi Camera V2 and is able to measure muscle activity and electrical signals underneath the skin using electromyography sensors that trip the camera into action to take the snap shot images. Images are taken and strung together to create video montages.

Whether people will want a blink-controlled wearable camera is another thing. But it's pretty impressive that those Bremen students actually managed to make it work.

Xiaomi Mi Band 3 will land in May (maybe)

And finally: Samsung Gear Fit 2 Plus name surfaces, fitness tracker tipped to live on

Xiaomi is hosting an event at the end of May in Shenzen and it's expected that the tech company that makes seemingly everything under the sun is going to launch a variety of new products. Well, so says Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun via social network Weibo, and one of those new products could be the Mi Band 3.

Yes, we know. It feels like we've been talking about the Mi Band 2 successor for a while, but after multiple teasings, surely now is the time. Come on Xiaomi, enough of the waiting already, give us that budget tracker.

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Check out the meatier stories of the week on our dedicated news page.




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Michael Sawh

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Michael Sawh has been covering the wearable tech industry since the very first Fitbit landed back in 2011. Previously the resident wearable tech expert at Trusted Reviews, he also marshaled the features section of T3.com.

He also regularly contributed to T3 magazine when they needed someone to talk about fitness trackers, running watches, headphones, tablets, and phones.

Michael writes for GQ, Wired, Coach Mag, Metro, MSN, BBC Focus, Stuff, TechRadar and has made several appearances on the BBC Travel Show to talk all things tech. 

Michael is a lover of all things sports and fitness-tech related, clocking up over 15 marathons and has put in serious hours in the pool all in the name of testing every fitness wearable going. Expect to see him with a minimum of two wearables at any given time.


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