The folks at Proxy run a system that turns your iPhone into a secure wireless key to open doors with special digital locks. Now they've acquired the company Motiv, a company you might remember from their smart rings. They've decided to join forces to bring a more interesting future to the world, complete with a slightly more magical - and slightly more intuitive - digital means for opening doors and locks of all sorts.
Verizon today announced that it's launching a new smartwatch, but unlike most smartwatches we see, this one has a fairly limited target audience. Dubbed the Care Smart Watch, this new wearable is meant primarily for elderly customers. That, of course, means that it's being positioned as a device that can give families peace of mind when it comes to elderly relatives who live alone.
The Polar Grit X was revealed today in a world where any that's not bad news is good news, and here the good news is a smartwatch. The Polar Grit X works with a circular full color display, and several hardware buttons (so you'll not be worrying about difficult-to-control touchscreen business when you're wearing gloves, and such.) Unlike some competitors, this watch is focused largely on Smart Coaching, wellness, and exercise.
Smartwatches have become loaded with all kinds of sensors measuring biometrics but the one thing that escapes even the renowned Apple Watch is measuring the wearer's blood pressure. Traditional methods involve using cuffs that constrict arms or at least wrists, something that's impractical and unusable for regular smartwatches. That's what makes the Samsung Galaxy Active 2's blood pressure monitoring feature such big news, especially now that it's promised to launch to the public in a few months.
The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus has sent many researchers from various fields looking for ways to quickly detect health conditions. Not meant to replace health care professionals, these tools and methods would at least help triage potential candidates for further testing and keep the health care system from getting too overwhelmed. One problem with detecting illnesses is that not all of them show visible symptoms until it's too late. That's why Stanford University and Fitbit are looking for ways to detect potential sickness by looking at the same health cues that smartwatches already track.
We are now living in times when connecting with friends, sometimes even family, has to happen virtually over the Internet. At the same time, we are also living in times when we have to be careful about the things we touch and put to our faces. In other words, smartphones are both tools for communication as well as health liabilities. Facebook's internal R&D team might have the answer and it involves an Apple Watch and a new experimental app called Kit.
After almost a decade in service, or rather a decade of not being used that extensively, Samsung has finally decided to retire the not-so-smart S Voice. It's really not a big deal for Samsung phones from the past three or so years as those have already moved over to Bixby. It's not the same case for some of Samsung's still supported smartwatches like the 2016 Gear S3. Fortunately, those, too, may have some hope in the very near future.
For nearly the past year, on and off, the future has been balanced on my face. Smart glasses have long been the lodestar of wearables, and North's Focals promised a taste of that before the tech heavyweights had shown their hand. It hasn't been an easy path here, though, shaped by sci-fi movies and soured by projects like Google Glass along the way.
Fitbit has officially revealed the new Charge 4 fitness band, and as expected it's a case of new tech hiding inside a familiar wearable. While it may look like the old Charge, the new version adds onboard GPS along with other sensors, and introduces an Active Zone Minutes feature that promises to better track your health.
For all the Apple Watch's popularity, the company hasn't made any effort to appeal to a wider audience, specifically kids. That doesn't stop the young ones from wanting an Apple Watch, of course, but the systems Apple has built up around the wearable aren't exactly conducive to that use case. That may finally be changing when iOS 14 comes around along with a watchOS 7 with a few new features designed to address exactly that.
Facebook has locked up an exclusive supply of smart glasses displays, inking a deal with a microLED specialist that could one day put digital lenses in wearable computers. The agreement with UK display-maker Plessey boxes out rivals like Apple, Google, and others from an augmented reality display-maker, a move that could be pivotal when AR wearables become market-ready in the coming years.
It has been months since Google bought Fitbit and fans from both sides of the have hoped that the union would bear fruit sooner rather than later. Some expected that Google would integrate more health features into Wear OS or even release its own fitness trackers. Others have hoped Fitbit would also get more smart features and maybe even have a Wear OS smartwatch. Neither of those happened and, instead, we're getting a new Fitbit Charge 4 that adds just one new feature to the mix.