The Cogito Fit is a fashion watch that doubles as a fitness tracker and “seamlessly connects” to an iPhone or Android smartphone, says a kickstarter.com campaign that seeks to raise $100,000 in commercialization funding. “You can receive essential notifications, visible at a glance on your wrist and never have to worry about recharging,” the campaign says. It’s “just a normal watch with extra connectivity,” it says. The campaign bills the Cogito as “not a smartwatch, but a watch with some smart!”
While early adopters continue to opine on the virtues, weaknesses and oversights of the Apple Watch, home control companies are wasting little time releasing apps to give customers another way to turn down the temperature without having to buy an expensive touch-screen remote. Savant, whose system is built on a Mac mini, launched its Watch version of the Savant app Wednesday. Savant system users can see which services in their home are in use or activate scenes such as “Away” that they’ve created using their smartphone or tablet apps, the company said. Before the end of the month, Savant will release an updated version of the Savant app that has new features, including notifications delivered via Savant’s Plus secure cloud service, Savant said. Users will be able to let homeowners create system notifications and receive alerts while they’re away to monitor temperature or lighting changes via their Watch, for example, it said. Crestron’s Precision control is also now available for Apple Watch, the company said. Crestron users can access common commands and scenes such as unlocking a door or changing a music playlist, and other control options cover lighting and temperature adjustments, it said. Meanwhile, 9 percent of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a smart watch in the next 12 months, said a Parks Research report. Fitness tracking led the list of planned or preferred activities that prospective smart watch owners intended to undertake with their smart watch, followed by checking weather, listening to music, making and receiving phone calls, paying by phone and controlling smart home devices, said Parks.
Some 9 percent of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a smart watch in the next 12 months, and just over half will use their watches to track fitness activities, said Parks Associates. That won’t have a big impact on the dedicated fitness tracker device market near term, but it will “become more material” down the road, a Parks spokeswoman emailed us. The researcher expects standalone connected fitness trackers to grow from roughly 22 million units worldwide in 2014 to 75 million units in 2019, factoring in the impact of the smart watch, she said. "Smart watches will not immediately cannibalize the market for digital fitness trackers because fitness trackers are generally cheaper and can be used as a companion device with smart watches," said Tejas Mehta, Parks analyst. In the long run, "the smart watch category will increasingly cut into fitness tracker sales as the fitness capabilities of smart watches grow," he said. Smart watch and wearable use will be part of the discussion at Parks’ Connected Health Summit Sept. 9-10 in San Diego. The Apple Watch “has added some urgency for traditional and luxury watch manufacturers to enter this market," said Harry Wang, director-Parks health and mobile product research. Smart watches and wearables are creating new avenues for connected health solutions to engage consumers, said Wang, and “early design and partnership decisions will have a significant impact on the success of these offerings.”
Roughly only two in every 10 Americans between 18 and 65 have any interest in owning an Apple Watch, said Horizon Media’s online survey of a sample of 3,000 people reflective of the U.S. population, the advertising agency said in a report. Earlier Horizon research found about half of smartphone users expressed interest in using Apple Pay when it launched, more than twice as many as are interested in Apple Watch now, it said. “The high level of negativity is a clear signal consumers are questioning the value of yet another connected device, even if it is from Apple." Apple Watch’s $349-and-up price tag was a deterrent for 73 percent of those surveyed, and 53 percent expressed displeasure at owning another connected device, said Horizon.
Friday’s release of the Apple Watch prompted the National Safety Council to issue an advisory warning consumers that smart watches and driving don’t mix. “Numerous studies have shown that drivers using cell phones significantly increase their risk of being involved in a crash,” the council said in a statement. Smart watches, “which have capabilities similar to smart phones, could be even riskier,” the council said, citing a study by the U.K.’s Transport Research Lab. “Drivers wearing smart watches can call, text, email and surf the web, but the watch also vibrates when it receives a notification,” the council said. “That vibration could be very difficult to ignore,” as human “impulse” will be to look at one’s wrist, it said. “This could take a driver’s eyes off the road and mind off the drive -- a recipe for disaster.” Anyone who buys a smart watch should turn it off or remove it before getting behind the wheel, the council said. “All calls can kill, and no text, email or social media update is worth a life.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.
With Friday's U.S. release of the Apple Watch came an abundance of apps for the device that also made their debut Friday. In one case in point, PBS released a version of its Super Vision app, which allows parents to be involved in the time their children spend with digital media, PBS said. The free app lets parents limit their children’s screen time on pbskids.org by setting a simple play timer on Apple Watch, PBS said. IHeartRadio also introduced an app, making it one of the first streaming music and digital radio apps available on the Apple Watch, the company said Friday. The iHeartRadio for Apple Watch integration lets listeners have access to all the same features as the other app, including instant access to live radio from across the country, custom stations based on a catalog of more than 800,000 artists and 20 million songs, plus thousands of on-demand news, talk and entertainment podcasts, the company said.
Activity was brisk on eBay Friday as Apple Watch opportunists looked to recoup their investments several times over, we found. Some 1,170 items came up in an Apple Watch search Friday afternoon, although we watched an Apple Watch Sport with 42mm silver aluminum case and white sport band time out without a buyer. The seller started the bidding at $699 and had a Buy It Now price of $999 but came away with no takers. A space gray version of the same watch began with a 1 cent bid, and price leapfrogged after 37 bids to $1,250 with more than an hour to go, we found. A 38mm sport watch in space gray had no bids on a $475 price tag with 32 minutes to go. Sellers used “Confirmed Delivery” to indicate they had preordered the product. Amazon, meanwhile, took advantage of the Watch by announcing that the Amazon shopping app for the Apple wearable offers one-click purchasing and save-to-wish list functions. The shopping app will be available on Apple Watch in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., Amazon said. Calling the first day of Apple Watch availability “day-one for wearable devices,” Amazon Director-Mobile Shopping Paul Cousineau said Amazon worked to distill the best parts of the Amazon shopping experience into fast and simple access points from users' wrists. Users can search the Amazon catalog and find “glanceable” product information including name, price, shipping information, product images and star ratings, he said. When we typed “Apple Watch” into the Amazon search box, we were fed 114 pages of related products but not the Apple Watch. The search produced the Samsung Gear S ($199), the Motorola Moto 360 ($219), the LG G Watch R ($310), the Pebble Beach Smart Watch for iPhone ($181), the Sony SmartWatch ($70) and the Martian Watches Notifier ($70), along with accessories.
Even before Friday’s release of the Apple Watch, it had become increasingly commonplace for tech and fashion watch suppliers to refer cryptically to collaborations taking place behind the scenes to devise wearable devices that are so compelling they’ll leave competitors in the dust. Movado did so earlier this month when it said it has “a number of projects” in the works “in close collaboration with several tech companies to develop smart watches for Movado that will celebrate a point of difference” from other smart watches introduced, including the Apple Watch (see 1504010022). Acer executive S.T. Liew, president of the company’s Smartphone Business Group, read pretty much from that same script Thursday at his company’s global news conference in New York (see 1504230052) when he said the “wearables space is, in my mind, a focused area” for Acer and that Acer is in “some deep exploration with other companies” that share “the same interest.” For now, Acer’s introduction in the wearables space is a new fitness tracker called the Liquid Leap Fit. It comes equipped with a heart rate detector that averages about 150 “scans” a day, Liew said. But its differentiator will be two “curious” 24-karat gold plates on the back of its housing for tracking the body’s “galvanic skin response” as a measure of stress, Liew said. All the tracking data from the Leap Fit will be fed into a “report card” app for Acer smartphones that the company calls Acer Age, Liew said. Acer America spokeswoman Erin Davern emailed us to say her subsidiary has no “information available” yet on U.S. pricing or delivery of the Leap Fit.
IHS announced the final schedule of topics and speakers for the Display Week 2015 Market Focus Conference on Wearable-Flexible to be held June 4 in San Jose, California. The conference theme is challenges and opportunities for new form factors and applications and will include addresses by Fossil Group and eMagin speakers. Fossil Group Chief Technology Officer Philip Thompson will discuss why he believes wearables won't succeed with today’s display companies, IHS said. Thompson didn’t immediately respond to a request for elaboration. Andrew Sculley, CEO at eMagin, will discuss trends for head-mounted displays for a range of applications including avionics and consumer products, IHS said. Other companies confirmed to have speakers at the conference include ARM, Ascent Batteries, Basis, Corning, E Ink, FlexEnable, Futaba, Imagination Technologies, Intel, InvenSense, Kateeva, Kopin, Mozilla, Pebble, QuickLogic and Runtastic.
Nearly eight of 10 business professionals whose companies have adopted wearables in the enterprise believe wearables will be “strategic” to their companies’ future success, a Salesforce Research study found. More than three-quarters report improvements in business performance “since implementing wearable devices in the enterprise,” its report found. “It’s evident that these users see huge value in their wearables programs, as 86 percent plan to increase wearable technology spend over the next 12 months.” The research firm polled 1,455 full-time business professionals in the U.S. online in late February, and found about 500 of them currently using or planning to implement wearable technology in the workplace, the report said. Smart watches “lead the pack” in terms of wearables adoption in the enterprise, the report said. Of the wearables adopters polled, 49 percent said they expect smart watches “to have the biggest impact on the enterprise,” it said. With the next generation of wearables like Apple Watch hitting the market, there’s a “flurry” of business apps about to emerge for the smart watch, the report said. “This ecosystem of enterprise-focused apps -- whether they provide real-time notifications or at-a-glance business insights -- bring another layer of data to the table, making it more important than ever for businesses to develop action-oriented strategies.”