smart watches
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The future of NFC includes wireless charging for earbuds and smartwatches
t might soon be much easier to buy a smartphone that can charge small devices like earbuds or smartwatches. The NFC Forum, responsible for near-field communications tech, has unveiled the Wireless Charging Specification (WLC).
Smartwatches are dumb, but they don't have to be
If recent trends are any indication, there are two roads that lie ahead for smartwatches and the companies foisting them upon us: the all-you-can-eat, tracker + smartphone approach and the single-minded focus on health and wellness bands. One meanders off to a fuzzy horizon laden with disregarded Dead End signs, a jumble of features and an overload of quantified-self data. And the other... well, that narrowly focused path to wellness simply falls off a cliff. It's not because dedicated health and wellness devices have no place in the wearables market -- right now, they do. It's because that area of lifestyle tracking will inevitably be consumed by the smartwatch borg as a subset of ancillary features. And yet, here we are -- about to enter into the irrevocable phase of mobile technologies as wrist-worn wearables with questionable (for now) benefits. A future we'll preview more intensely at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as some big-name manufacturers unveil their in-development takes on what can currently be described as redundant lifestyle tech.
