All the other news stories from the week
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
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.
Take a picture with your blinks
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)
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.
