fitness watch
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OnePlus' first smartwatch promises a two-week battery and speedy charging
OnePlus is ready to fully unveil its first smartwatch, which costs $159. The most interesting feature is its charging speed, which promises to get you a full day's juice in 5 minutes.
Garmin's Venu Sq is another Apple Watch lookalike
Still, for $200, the Venu Sq offers plenty of features that you’ll find on pricier competitors like the Fitbit Sense, Apple Watch and Galaxy Watch.
Polar's Vantage fitness watches now offer daily training guides (updated)
If you're planning to counter all those holiday dinners with rigorous exercise, Polar might have your back. It's updating its Vantage V and Vantage M watches with some particularly useful coaching features, most notably the FitSpark personalized training tool. As on earlier hardware, it provides a daily training guide that suggests exercises based on your history, fitness level and sleep quantities. You'll have a better sense of whether you should be burning calories with cardio workouts or hitting the weights instead.
Garmin's adventure-based smartwatch line starts at $1,500
Garmin is hoping its new line of smartwatches will strike a chord with the kind of thrill seekers you might find flying planes and racing cars -- and we might assume they're expensive planes and cars, given the high asking prices. The new MARQ collection, as it's called, is geared toward pilots, ship captains, explorers and athletes. The smartwatches range from $1,500 to $2,500 and can supposedly do everything from calculate your performance vehicle's average speed to send email notifications while you zip around a racetrack.
Wellograph 2.0 adds sleep tracking to its stylish activity tracker
Wellograph's stylish, yet flawed activity tracker was one of the first wearables with a sapphire crystal display. Not one to rest upon its laurels, however, the company has spent the last few months revamping both the Wellograph's operating system and companion app for 2015. New features include sleep tracking, body readiness analysis and the unit will even identify how stressed you feel when your boss demands some TPS reports. In addition, there's a new social aspect that'll let you compete with your friends and enemies.
Review: Magellan Echo Smart Running Watch
There is a lot of activity in Smart Watches these days. There's the Pebble, another from Martian, the Galaxy Gear and a host of others. There is also a great deal of buzz around lifestyle or fitness watches, like the Fitbit, and the Garmin Forerunner. Magellan, maker of GPS navigation software and hardware, has jumped into the pool with the Magellan Echo Smart running Watch. It's US$149.95 Design The Echo is a pretty basic-looking, rubberized watch. In normal mode it displays the time and date, and the display is visible in sunlight. There is also a handy backlight. The watch runs on a CR2032 battery, which is claimed to last for about 6 months. The watch is water resistant, and should survive rain or a shower. It is not a diving watch, and should not be used while swimming. Think of the Echo as a display for information from your iPhone. What you see will depend on the apps you are running. More about that later. Getting Started When you first open the packaging you'll see a card that directs you to the Magellan Echo website, and that will walk you through setting the watch up. From there you pick a fitness app. Magellan has been smart here, and made the watch an open platform, so any developer who chooses to link with the Echo can. As of today Magellan says that Wahoo Fitness, Strava, MapMyRun and iSmoothRun talk to the watch. Using the Echo I took my usual morning run after pairing the watch to one of the suggested apps. I tried the Wahoo Fitness app, which is free. Pairing worked fine. I entered my height, weight, age and was ready to start. I started the timers and GPS functions from the app itself and put it away. The distance and time displays were on the watch and were easy to read. One problem was I could not figure out how to switch back to the current time of day. My review copy of the watch had only a sheet to link me to the Echo website. There's no diagram of what the 4 buttons do, and I couldn't easily find that information on the Echo site, even in the FAQs. One button started the music playing on my iPhone, which I knew was a function the watch had. You can also pause and skip tracks. But overall I found documentation lacking. There are some recessed, hard-to-see icons on watch's buttons, but they don't clearly convey each button's function. Conclusions The Magellan Echo's features are largely determined by the app you want to use with it. There are settings for cycling and running and calories burned. Some of the apps present a map of where you ran on the iPhone screen. There is also the ability to set up communications with others wearing an Echo, but I did not test those features. As a watch, the Echo is OK. No alarms for wake up, and it doesn't vibrate for incoming mail or texts. That's not its purpose, but it will be interesting to see if the Apple watch, if it ever appears, will be more complete. As a fitness watch, the Magellan Echo is quite competent. The open architecture of the watch means it will continue to grow and add features. The Echo requires an iPhone 4S or above because it needs Bluetooth 4.0. The app also works with the 5th generation iPod touch and the iPad mini, iPad (3rd and 4th generation). I don't think the iPad is a very practical thing to carry on a run, however. The app/watch combo has many other features, like getting notifications from your fitness app, and saving data for later analysis and comparison. You can get details on the Echo website. The Magellan Echo will please many fitness buffs, and is certainly competitive in the field. Unlike the Fitbit, it doesn't require recharging several times a week, and the display is large and readable. On the other hand, the FitBit includes options like sleep monitoring which are absent in the Echo. The watch comes in black, blue or orange. Magellan can also provide a heart rate monitor that works with the watch for an extra charge. Better documentation is the only real missing item from this watch, and that's pretty easy for Magellan to fix.
Garmin Forerunner 10 is a GPS watch designed for outdoor fitness, we go hands-on
Having a svelte design is paramount to the success of any fitness accessory -- a desire to avoid hassle often prompts those of us who opt for purging calories without the convenience of a climate-controlled gym to leave smartphones, and even watches at home. That means nifty contraptions like Garmin's new Fenix all-in-one wearable don't make it to the jogging path, making a compact dedicated running watch a more desirable pick instead. That's the idea behind the Forerunner 10, which Garmin is pushing as a dead-simple GPS-equipped wristwatch for runners, joggers and walkers. Water resistant to 50 meters (for ocean-floor sprints?), the gadget tracks essentials like pace and calories burned, while also keeping tabs on your coordinates, letting you download stats like distance and speed through a USB adapter and Garmin Connect. We weren't able to go for a jog, sadly, though we did spend some time with the Forerunner 10 in an office setting. The watch seemed very straightforward, which you'll find to be quite helpful as you push to match a pre-set pace, without worrying about distractions. It comes in black, green or pink, and while the company suggests that you can wear the watch for non-exercise purposes as well, both colored designs seemed a bit too bright and flashy for regular use. The Forerunner 10 is rated for up to five hours of battery life in training mode, or five weeks in power-save mode (for regular time-keeping purposes), and is available to purchase for $130. You can check one out for yourself at Garmin's Chicago retail location, or you can take a peek in our hands-on photos just below.%Gallery-163499%
Garmin Swim watch tracks your water workouts, we hit the pool (hands-on)
Garmin is adding a new product to its line-up of fitness watches, and this one is dedicated to workouts of the aquatic variety. The $150 Garmin Swim tracks your distance swum, average pace, workout time and more, and it uploads those stats to the web to help monitor your progress. Though it's meant to be a part of your exercise routine, the Garmin Swim watch looks like your average plastic digi-timepiece. The watch has six buttons with functions for viewing the time of day, scrolling through the menu options, controlling the timer, viewing the menu and entering workout mode. The setup takes some getting used to, but the illustrative icons on the watch helped us get into the rhythm quickly. Getting started with the Swim simply entails entering the size of your pool, with options to measure in yards or meters. Once that info is uploaded, you press the swim button and are ready to get splashing. We spent a solid half-hour doing laps, and the Swim duly recognized and recorded that we varied our strokes. Stopping the timer each time we took a break created a new interval for our workout, with a rundown of the elapsed time, distance in meters, number of strokes, type of stroke, total laps, average speed and calories burned. That's a lot of data to pore over, and Garmin lets you wirelessly upload it all to the Garmin Connect site. To do this, you have to pair the watch with your computer using a USB ANT stick: once it works, it's an efficient, easy way to review your workout, but it took us a few tries before our laptop recognized the watch. Garmin says the watch's battery will last a full year, which is plenty of time to log some serious laps. For more about the Swim, check out the press info past the break. %Gallery-159003%
Garmin announces FR70 fitness watches to keep you on track
Looking to keep those New Year's resolutions past the first week of January in 2012? Garmin's out to help you stay the course with its FR70 fitness watches for both guy and gals. Using this trainer's timepiece, you'll be able to track your workout time, heart rate and calories burned right on your wrist. Powered by ANT+ technology, the FR70 can connect to compatible devices like treadmills, bikes, elliptical machines, your boyfriend's Segway, etc. For avid runners, pairing the watch with a wireless foot pod will clue you in on speed, distance and cadence during your training sessions. If biking is more your style, a pace sensor is available for you as well. Combine an FR70 with the Tanita BC-1000 system and you can track weight, water levels, body fat and a handful of other measurements that will be stored right on the device. Once all the data is collected, it can be sent to Garmin Connect whenever you return with range of your PC. The pair will be available in the UK, starting in November, for £129 / €139 ($197). If you need some reading while you're lacing up those Nikes, hit the PR button for the full skinny.
Polar RCX5 training computer feels your multi-sport pain
The French didn't only invent the guillotine. They also bequeathed us something even more painful (though that's hard to prove): "Les trois sports", aka the Triathlon. A swimming-cycling-running succession of pure hurt, which Polar's latest RCX5 training computer seeks to measure using an array of sensors -- much like its rivals the Garmin Forerunner 610 and Timex Ironman Global Trainer. You can buy the RCX5 now for $350 in a basic pack, which includes the watch plus the WearLink+ Hybrid, an amphibious chest-strapped heart rate monitor. Alternatively, you can pick up a pricier bundle containing an extra sensor of your choice. The Bike bundle ($390) includes Polar's CS W.I.N.D. speed sensor that installs on a fork and spoke. The Run bundle ($420) comes with a s3+ stride sensor that clips to your laces. Finally, the top-of-the-range Multi bundle ($480) replaces both those options with a G5 GPS sensor, which ought to work equally well for both both runners and cyclists thanks to our shiny friends out in orbit. Hit the PR after the break for further details or the extra coverage link for triathlete DC Rainmaker's seriously in-depth review.
Tanita's BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor wirelessly sends embarrassing weight details
Remember all those ANT+ wireless peripherals that were supposed to come flooding out after the introduction of Garmin's FR60 Fitness Watch? We suppose said flood has to start somewhere, and this is it. Tanita's BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor is hardly more than a sophisticated scale, designed to hold humans for just moments at a time while collecting measurements on muscle mass, overall physique, daily caloric intake, metabolic age, bone mass and visceral fat. From there, the unit can either send those details wireless to the aforesaid watch, or it can beam them to any PC with an appropriate dongle. The device is slated to ship this summer for $279.99 with a USB stick or $399.99 with an FR60 watch.
