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TomTom's Golfer 2 GPS watch tracks your swing
TomTom's original Golfer GPS watch can give your distance and score, but the latest golf devices from Piq and Game Golf also track your swing and distance stats. To keep up, TomTom has launched the Golfer 2, a watch that measures your swing using a built-in motion sensor and gyroscope. That lets you "see at a glance glance how far you've hit each ball, show your distance potential, and create a detailed post-round analysis" on the MySports app, according to the company. It only counts one shot in a 10-foot area, letting you take as many practice swings as you need.
Garmin's latest wearables know what sport you're playing
Garmin has revealed the Vivoactive HR sports watch and Vivofit 3 activity tracker, which look like solid improvements over the previous models in both design and features. For the Vivoactive HR smartwatch, the biggest updatel is the built-in heart rate monitor that obviates the need for a chest strap. It's also received a complete style makeover and looks significantly nicer than the chunky square design of the original Vivoactive. Using the built-in GPS, it can track running, cycling, swimming, golfing, rowing and skiing/snowboarding, with custom settings for each sport.
Garmin's latest sports watch gets a new heart rate sensor
Garmin has launched a trio of GPS running watches, including the first equipped with the company's new wrist-based heart rate sensor. The Forerunner 235 uses the "Garmin Elevate" optical sensor that displays heart rate and training zone directly on the wearable. (Its last model, the Forerunner 225 also has an optical sensor, but it was designed by Mio.) That means you'll be able to ditch the chest strap, though you'll pay a considerable $329/£270 for that luxury. If that's too much, Garmin is also offering the similar Forerunner 230 that's bundled with an ANT+ heart rate strap for $299/£240.
Garmin intros three smartwatches, all of them aimed at sports junkies
Credit where it's due: Garmin has managed to basically reinvent itself. Once the king of in-car GPS navigation, the company is now equally known for its sports watches and fitness trackers. Indeed, with the exception of a few low-end navigators no one cares about, Garmin is pretty much only showing wearable devices here at CES. In brief, this year's lineup runs the gamut, with prices starting at $250 and going all the way up to $600. Still, they all have this in common: They're equal parts smartwatch and fitness tracker.
Two weeks with PulseOn's heart-rate monitoring wearable
Heart-rate monitoring chest straps won't be with us for much longer, as wrist-worn devices are offering optical sensors that do exactly the same job. PulseOn is the latest, and having spun out of Nokia back in 2012, is now offering its first entry into the market, the, uh, PulseOn. Confusing nomenclature aside, the company is now accepting pre-orders through Indiegogo, which was used to help raise awareness as well as cash for the small outfit. We've spent some time with the first model to roll off the production line, so if you're curious if it's worth splashing $170 out on one, read on.
Engadget's back to school guide 2012: accessories
Welcome to Engadget's back to school guide! The end of summer vacation isn't nearly as much fun as the weeks that come before, but a chance to update your tech tools likely helps to ease the pain. Today, we've got a slew of accessories -- and you can head to the back to school hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back -- at the end of the month we'll be giving away a ton of the gear featured in our guides -- and hit up the hub page right here! Sure, you may need ultraportables and such to get the bulk of your work done, but you also need a few add-ons to make tasks just a bit easier. In this installment of the back to school guide, we'll offer a collection of accessories that will do just that. From extra batteries to external hard drives and peripherals, what you'll find here should help you get through a day of back-to-back classes, without the need to worry about losing all those term papers if something goes wrong with the SSD. Of course, not all of these are meant to aid in serious, head-down studies. We also tackle a few options for keeping fit and iPad-powered study breaks, too. So head on past the break for the rundown on a gadget stash that'll help you ease back into the flow of things this fall.
Fitter, Happier: an eight-week exercise in using technology to help lose weight
For 27 years he ate what he wanted and avoided exercise like the plague. Can an arsenal of fitness gadgets make this human healthier in just eight weeks? From the snake oil salesman to the Thighmaster(TM), science and technology have promised the end of obesity, ill health and lethargy for centuries. Today, weight loss gadgetry is all around us, with affordable commercial systems available from Nintendo, Nike, Adidas and countless other manufacturers, all promising their technology will turn us into paragons of healthy virtue. How is it then, that for all of this, we live in an age where a quarter of the American population is obese? Do any of these seemingly endless health aids actually work? Will a $200 wristband or a $100 pedometer cause you to banish microwave dinners and saturated fats, take up regular exercise at the gym at least three days a week and sleep well with no bad dreams? Or has the health industry made technology another ineffective distraction that only provides you with a vague sense that you're doing something positive? Is the real answer what it's always been: go for a walk in the trees and eat your greens?
MOTOACTV torn down and rooted, turned into a tablet for ants
Chris Wade, the intrepid dev behind the DingleBerry PlayBook hack, has turned his attention to new device. One that occupies the exact opposite end of the size spectrum -- the MOTOACTV. The man started poking around inside the Android-powered sports watch, actually tearing it open and splaying its innards across his palm for all of us to see. Under the hood he discovered an OMAP 3630 clocked at 600MHz and 256MB of RAM. Then he put the whole thing back together and the real fun began. Wade managed root the underlying Gingerbread platform and turn it from a GPS tracker to 1.6-inch tablet by sideloading the stock Honeycomb launcher. Wade even managed to bless the tiny device with Market access, allowing him to install a certain title featuring a flock of furious fowl. You'll find a few more photos in the gallery below and a video of the hacked up sports watch cum micro-tablet after the break. If you're looking to create your own super-charge Android wristwear hit up the source link for instructions from the so-called "bad boy of IT." %Gallery-142427%
WIMM One Android wearable gets developer release
A few months back we got hands-on with a new wearable Android device called the WIMM One. You may remember the one-inch square touchscreen device packed a silly amount of tech -- Bluetooth, accelerometer, WiFi, etc -- into its diminutive form. Well now it's back, and is available to any developer willing to drop $299 on it. Since we last strapped it to our wrists, WIMM has created a dev community with forums for those keen to build, create and share micro apps for the device. Dedicated apps for Android and Blackberry devices are imminent, and iOS is in the post. A few dedicated apps are already surfacing, including a port of the popular SportyPal app, but we expect this number to grow pretty quickly from today. We've got one here ready to go, so we'll be putting it through its paces -- or the other way around -- real soon.
TI introduces the eZ430-Chronos development platform... and sports watch
If there's one thing wireless networking developers have been clamoring for, it's the ability to take their reference platform mobile. Extremely mobile. TI's apparently heard this cry, as it's just introduced the eZ430-Chronos, a fully-capable wireless dev platform contained entirely within a sports watch. Yeah, it's just about the geekiest thing we've ever seen, and at $49 it's even kind of a steal -- especially since it doubles as a heart monitor out of the box. Looks like we've got a new super-nerd stocking-stuffer of choice.
