smartwatch

Last week, Garmin made a round of updates to its Vivoactive 3 fitness tracker, and today, it's taking a pass at the Vivoactive's big brother. The Fenix 5 series is the next in line to get some updates, with Garmin today announcing three new watches that will comprise the Fenix 5 Plus line. The watches boast some significant upgrades over their predecessors, but be prepared to shell out a lot of cash if you want to own one.

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Apple plans to change the Apple Watch buttons to touch-sensitive controls, insiders claim, cutting out moving parts and potentially improving battery life of future versions of the smartwatch. The Apple Watch currently has two physical controls: a large button on the side, and the so-called Digital Crown, which both rotates and presses in.

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This year might be one filled with red herrings and misleading leaks. Lenovo is receiving some flak over its seemingly intentional attempts to throw people off track when it came to its not so notch-less and still very bezeleed Lenovo Z5 smartphone. Google seems to also be sending mixed signals over the Pixel 3 XL, at least if the leaks are correct. Of course, we can never be sure about leaks, because they are unofficial by nature. So when it turns out that Samsung might not be moving the Gear S4 to Wear OS after all, we can really do nothing but shrug and wait for the moment of truth.

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Smartwatches have become more than just smaller smartphones. Many of them are smaller clinical labs as well. Health and fitness have become the focus of many smartwatch makers, especially Apple. Despite having countless sensors, almost all of them are missing one important functionality: measuring the user’s blood pressure. At Computex 2018, ASUS, following Omron’s footsteps at the start of this year, is addressing that problem with the new VivoWatch BP that brings a blood pressure monitor to the consumer wearable market.

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The original Apple Watch is officially in its final days. During its WWDC 2018 keynote today, Apple took the wraps off watchOS 5 and all the great features customers can expect. There's a lot to be excited about -- robust fitness and health tracking, podcasts, and more. However, none of these things will be available on the original Apple Watch, which isn't in the pipeline to get watchOS 5.

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Matrix Industries has started shipping its PowerWatch X, a smartwatch powered by body heat. The smartwatch uses Matrix's proprietary thermoelectric technology, enabling it to harvest energy from the wearer's body heat. This is the only body-heat powered smartwatch currently available that is able to provide notifications, track activity, and more.

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Chinese company Blu, best known for its inexpensive smartphones, has quietly launched a new smartwatch for iOS and Android users. Called Blu X Link, the new model sports a 1.1-inch display and 2G network connectivity, as well as basic features like activity tracking and heart rate monitoring. Unlike most competing devices, though, Blu's X Link only costs $60.

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Smartwatch maker Mobvoi has come up with a new twist on the wearable battery dilemma, with the TicWatch Pro doubling the number of displays to cut power consumption. The new Wear OS smartwatch has a circular OLED touchscreen as we've seen from plenty of other wearables, but when that's idle a whole second panel comes into play.

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Although they have never really disappeared, traditional smartphone manufacturers have more or less backed out of the smartwatch market. It has become the territory of accessory makers and luxury brands like Fossil or TAG Heuer. One OEM (aside from Apple) that has remained consistent is Samsung with its Gear line of smartwatches and fitness trackers. But while a new smartwatch is still expected to debut in a few months, change is reportedly afoot. Samsung might be switching back to Wear OS, formerly Android Wear, and it might actually start with this year's Gear S4.

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Is Samsung really turning over a new leaf and becoming a better-behaved Android manufacturer? Once the biggest cause of fragmentation, Samsung has admittedly been trying to better conform with standards and expectations while still remaining uniquely Samsung. Now that might extend even to its wearables with rumors of a new "Galaxy Watch" looming over the horizon. This, according to some speculation could be Samsung's return to the smartwatch fold by being its first Wear OS, but second Android Wear, smartwatch.

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Wear OS by Google, the wearable platform formerly known as Android Wear, is based on Android and, therefore, technically and legally open source. But just like Android itself, development doesn't exactly happen in the open completely and there are some parts that are proprietary to Google. That is especially frustrating for smartwatch believers, especially when their wearables get abandoned and outdated. Now they might have a choice with the first stable release of AsteroidOS, a completely open source operating system designed not just to run on Wear OS smartwatches but also to give the community a hand in its development.

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Google Pixel 3 will likely appear at a similar time as last year's devices - but a few extra devices were tipped this afternoon, too. Included in the mix are three models: Ling, Triton, and Sardine - that's according to Roland Quandt, who also suggests the devices will run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 mobile processor. There might be three, there might be two, or there might just be one.

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