wearables - page 6

Cupertino has its chic Apple Watch, Redmond has its Microsoft Band, and now Intel has unveiled its own female-friendly take on the wearable phenomenon with a $495 smart bracelet — which will allow users to receive and respond to text messages, emails and other notifications.

Called the MICA, the fashion-conscious bracelet boasts a sapphire 1.6-inch, 256 x 160 OLED curved screen on the inside of the wrist. As with the Apple Watch there are multiple styles available — ranging from black and white water snake skin, Chinese pearls, Madagascan lapis stones, South African tiger’s eye, and Russian obsidian.

Apple’s great at hopping into new markets just as they’re set to explode, and it seems that the upcoming Apple Watch is no different.

Despite mixed reports about consumer interest, research firm IHS thinks demand for sensor-equipped wearable tech devices is going to see a major acceleration starting next year — largely thanks to Cupertino. Just how much of an increase are we talking about? Try 7x the size of the existing market by 2019, according to analysts.

“Similar to the iPhone and iPad, IHS expects the Apple Watch will set a de facto standard for sensor specifications in smartwatches,” says Jeremie Bouchaud, director and senior principal analyst, MEMS & Sensors. “Most other wearable [original equipment manufacturers] will follow Apple’s lead in [incorporating multiple sensors into devices] — or will add even more sensors to differentiate.”

Although we’ve yet to see a truly mass-market wearable device sweep the world, most people working in high tech believe that devices like smartwatches represent the next big frontier.

With that in mind, Samsung has debuted a potentially transformative creation at the ongoing InterBattery 2014 exhibition being held in Seoul, Korea: a rollable, flexible battery.

Although not too many details are known yet about the exact materials and structural design advances used to create it, it is reported that the battery can function even when bent in half, or rolled up into the shape of a paper cup.

Apple is still trying to work out the last few details of its first wearable, but with an early 2015 launch just months away, plans to manufacture and assemble the Apple Watch are being finalized. But AppleDaily reports production isn’t scheduled to ramp into high gear until January 2015.

To manufacture its first wearable, Apple has turned to its old partner Quanta Computer to churn out the first units, and they’re already hiring an army of assemblers for the hyped release.

In the business world, Apple entering your product category is a little bit like a tsunami crashing into a home aquarium. What had previously seemed like a nice, small and self-contained ecosystem suddenly runs the risk of being obliterated by a giant wave-maker.

When Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch at Apple’s recent media event, the crowd went wild. But exciting as it was for consumers, it represents a seismic shift for the currently $330 million wearable tech industry.

Devices that can serve up smartphone notifications, track fitness goals and even advise us on health matters have the potential to be huge — but they’re not yet. That’s about to change, according to Juniper Research, which forecasts that wearable devices like smartwatches could hit sales of $19 billion by 2018.

What happens to Apple’s marketplace rivals as this sea change takes place? Cult of Mac did some digging to find out how companies like Jawbone and Fitbit plan to survive Apple’s smartwatch revolution.

Particularly on the back of the recent iCloud account hacking scandal, smartphone security is something a lot of people are paying more attention to.

With that in mind, a London-based designer recently launched an intriguing Kickstarter campaign, to create a clothing label aimed at raising awareness about high-tech security.

The clothes are all cleverly constructed around a removable waterproof stealth pocket, made from police-grade shielding fabrics, designed to securely block all Cell, WiFi, GPS and RFID signals to ~100 dB.

With just under five hours to go before Apple kicks off its iPhone event, the Apple Online Store is now offline in preparation for new products. When it returns, you can expect to see two new iPhones and a brand new wearable decorating its pages.

For a company as secretive as Apple, one of the few ways you can learn anything about what it has planned next is to see who it has been hiring. High-profile hires say a lot about where Apple’s priorities are for the future.

Looking back at the hires Apple has brought on over the last year reveals something pretty obvious: it’s assembling a wearables and fashion dream team.

Jose Torres, CEO of Boogio, wants you to track your fitness with the most obvious part of your body: your feet.

“We’ve got 60,000 layers of sensitivity in the Boogio,” he told Cult of Mac at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, “so we can track gravitational force, inner balance, and three different acceleration forces of your feet.”

SAN FRANCISCO —  Brendan Nee is a walking contradiction. He’s car guru who doesn’t own one, a 21st-century geek with an 18th-century mustache who has come up with a novel bit of nagware that could help Americans get off their spreading behinds.

An engineer working on “smart car assistant” Automatic, he spends many of his weekends at hackathons and has a coder’s physique to show for it. In January, he won the Clinton Foundation Code4Health Codeathon by developing a working prototype of an app called Walkoff in just a weekend. A few months later, Nee and team rolled out a more polished version that mashes up the data Automatic pulls from cars with info gathered by a Jawbone Up fitness tracker, showing a user how much time they’re spending behind the wheel versus walking.

“Clearly, without an actual car, I’m not the ideal tester,” admits Nee. The closest he comes to owning a set of wheels is a retired public bus dubbed the PlayaPillar that he only rolls out for Burning Man.

If the reports ring true, Apple is about to embark on their largest acquisition ever, and the ramifications could be massive. On this episode of The CultCast, we dissect the Apple/Beats merger, and ask the questions: what could Apple possibly have planned for the world’s most popular headphone brand? Is new wearable headphone tech a part of Apple’s future? And most importantly, could the Doctor D-R-E be Apple’s next CEO? Strap on ya gats, ya’ll…

Have a few chuckles whilst we catch you up on each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!

And thanks to Lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

As the nation grows more obese yet car culture still rules, here’s the nudge of the hour: your car and your fitness app talking to each other, reminding you that you’re not moving enough.

Automatic’s smart driving assistant can turn your old hunk of junk into a smart car, but the company announced today that it’s teamed up with Jawbone to whip your belly rolls into shape by giving drivers more insight into how your physical activity and driving patterns are connected.

If the rumors are true, Apple’s forthcoming purchase of Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion is all about one thing — making wearable technology fashionable.

Apple is poised to introduce a line of wearables that likely goes beyond the long-rumored iWatch. While the technology Tim Cook’s team is cooking up might be amazing, getting people to wear it — especially cracking the crucial mass market — will be one of the biggest challenges Cupertino has ever faced.

Injecting style into wearable tech notoriously difficult. Even Nike got flustered and discontinued its FuelBand fitness tracker. So far, no company has really cracked the code and turned gear into a fashion statement for the cool kids, with one giant exception: Beats, a phenomenally successful wearable technology brand that dwarfs the rest of the industry because it’s pulled off the hardest trick in the book.

In a blatant attempt to steal Apple’s thunder, Samsung has announced a conference to take place on May 28 — promising to kick start “a new conversation around health.”

Why is this stepping on Apple’s toes?

Because the very next week is Apple’s eagerly-anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — where Apple is expected to introduce the first stages of its new health-tracking family of innovations, beginning with the Healthbook feature for iOS 8, and likely to later expand to include the iWatch.

Until Apple finally comes out with its eagerly anticipated iWatch, Nike — at least in terms of style — is perhaps the closest thing to Apple in the wearable computing space (Tim Cook does, after all, sit on its board). I resisted picking up the original 2012 Fuelband but, motivated by a desire to get fit for the new year, bought its sequel, the Fuelband SE, earlier this year. Having had a bit of time to try it out, here’s what I make of it. (Thoughts registered between exercise-related wheezes.)

CES 2014 has been an orgy of “wearable” crap. Smartwatches, life-logging cameras, even 50-inch TVs can now be worn on your body. But if you’re looking for the future of personal tech, then look at the Speaker Band from Bem Wireless. If you thought teens were annoying now, with their mobile phones and tinny music, then wait until they get hold of this wrist-mounted speaker.

LAS VEGAS — Rather than come out with a more casual-oriented wearable fitness tracker like everyone (and we mean everyone) else, Wahoo stuck to its athletic roots and took the more serious route of improving the heart-rate monitor strap and accompanying training software the company introduced a few years ago.

In fact, Wahoo has created three new versions of its Bluetooth HR strap. The company even tried to restructure the way athletes think about training with the new “burn or burst” approach for the Wahoo iOS app.

LAS VEGAS — It was only a matter of time before the behemoths of the fitness world jumped into the fitness-band fight; although considering Garmin has been making wrist-borne fitness gadgets for ages (in the guise of their Forerunner line) one might have expected their new Vivofit to have arrived much sooner.

A new book called Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein revealed the mechanism by which Apple influenced the direction of Android — shock and awe.

Yes, the introduction of the iPhone changed the direction of smartphones. But I don’t think it’s going to happen again in the wearables market. Here’s why.

Helped along by a sci-fi-style concept video, a new Google Glass competitor called the Atheer One shot halfway to its $100,000 crowd-funding goal in just a day.

“In a few years, the digital world with all its rich information will be completely merged with the real one,” says Atheer Labs in its Indiegogo campaign for the Atheer One, which has already raised more than $54,000. “Let’s get the future started today!”

What does that future look like, according to Atheer? Take a look at the video below and see for yourself.

We posted all about NASA engineer Mark Roper’s gruesome, iPhone-augmented Halloween shirts last year. Since then, Mark has quit his job at NASA to focus on Halloween. The result is more designs and, even better, both an improved t-shirt and a horribly gruesome effect worthy of being designed by someone who worked on the Mars Curiosity rover.

Apple is expected to launch a new smartwatch called the “iWatch” as early as this fall, and we already know that it could face competition from Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and LG. But there’s another competitor that may want a piece of the pie: Dell.

What can Apple bring to the table, er, wrist, that Timex and any one of hundreds of cheap watches don’t already provide consumers?

That’s the question Harvard Business Review’s H. James Wilson asks today, and he comes up with a fascinating answer.

The iWatch, he says, won’t actually be a watch at all.

Rumors have started to pick up regarding Apple’s foray into wearable technology. Over the weekend, both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is working on an ‘iWatch’ product.

Now a third report on the mysterious device has surfaced, and it speaks to the level of focus Apple is giving the top secret project.