Welcome to this week’s PULSE by Wareable newsletter.
PULSE (and Wareable) have spent this week out at MWC 2024 in Barcelona – tracking down the hottest wearables at the show.
MWC is rarely a good hunting ground for wearables. Despite most of the big manufacturers being at the show, it still has a big telecoms vibe.
But this year was fairly busy for wearable announcements.
Read on for the best announcements from the show – and the rest of the week’s news:
MWC wearables report
First up was the Samsung Galaxy Ring, which was shown off physically for the first time after being teased at Galaxy Unpacked in January.
It features a concave design that comes in three colors – and certainly looks like a worthy competitor to Oura.
Like Oura, it focuses on sleep, as well as a new Vitality Score – which seems to be a rehashed version of the readiness/recovery scores we’ve seen on leading wearables.
Xiaomi hogged the lion’s share of the MWC limelight, announcing three devices.
While it had already released the Xiaomi Watch 2 Pro last year, the brand unveiled the standard Xiaomi Watch 2 at MWC. Packing Wear OS 3.5, the new Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ that enables 65 hours of battery life and dual-frequency GNSS, it certainly has a punchy spec sheet.
But the price is worth noting: it’s already on sale in the UK for just £169. That breaks new ground in terms of value for Wear OS watches, especially one boasting the latest Snapdragon chipset.
The company also announced the Xiaomi Watch S3, which runs on its own HyperOS. Naturally, it doesn’t have the bells, whistles, or apps that Wear OS does, but it makes up for these shortcomings with 15 days of battery life and a £119 price tag.
Finally, the Chinese company showed off the long-awaited global edition of the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro – the company’s supercharged fitness tracker.
OnePlus also brought its Watch 2 (can we PLEASE think of some more original names), which becomes the first watch not made by Samsung or Google to launch with support for Wear OS 4.
It harnesses a hybrid chipset interface to help eke out 100 hours of battery life, with this efficiency also bolstered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 featured in the Xiaomi Watch 2.
If that mammoth battery claim turns out to be credible, it represents another step forward for Wear OS - and full-fledged smartwatches in general.
At the very least, the OnePlus Watch 2 looks like it will make amends for the dumpster fire that was the original.
AI-powered wearables
Outside of smartwatches, I got eyes-on with the Oppo Glass Air 3, which actually impressed me. Last year, I went around MWC 2023 trying any AR headset I could find – and the results were sobering. Every headset was way behind the experience I’d expect as a consumer.
The Oppo Air Glass 3 might have just changed that. Full-color visuals, a generous field-of-view (FOV), and an AI assistant on board showed a future that was more consumer-friendly than anything I’ve seen before.
It’s only a prototype, sure, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Likewise, I managed to get a demo of the Humane AI Pin - a wearable that got a fair bit of attention around CES. The idea behind Humane is to free us from our smartphones via a clip-on camera. It can perform a wide range of tasks – be it translating voices, answering questions, or even taking pictures and memories and storing them in the cloud.
I was surprised to learn via the demo that it wasn’t tethered to the smartphone at all – and comes with a data plan subscription. It starts at $699 with $24 a month for the sub. It’s an interesting vision of the future that combines AI and personal wearables to free us from screens, and similar to AR glasses in many respects.
There’s certainly merit in the idea, vision, and product – but I’m not convinced this current Humane AI Pin is the answer. The demo was slow and clunky, and it took a long time to get the requested information. Interactions with the device felt fiddly.
Finally, the one demo everyone was talking about was the Motorola bendy wearable smartphone. The bendy phone features strips of separated batteries that enable it to flex back on itself “like the human spine,” according to Motorola.
It can then attach to a magnetic wristband to be worn as some kind of giant cuff. Why? No idea. But it perhaps shows that flexible screens could be the future of wearables and smartwatches – just not quite as thick as this.
Other news from the week
Honor confirms smart ring
Honor has announced it will launch its debut smart ring before the end of the year.
Speaking at the Barcelona tech expo, company CEO George Zhao indicated that it will launch a ring with a focus on health features and insights driven by AI.
"Internally, we have this kind of solution, now we are working on that part. So in the future, you can have the Honor ring,” Zhao told CNBC.
"This hardware capability will work together with AI-enabled apps and can help you make the professional training course tailored for you because they studied your habits and health data to give you professional suggestions."
There was very little detail offered other than the fact the Honor Ring exists, though Zhao did suggest the device will be released before the end of 2024.
Epicore Biosystems secures U.S anti-doping partnership
Hydration tracking wearable company Epicore Biosystems has struck a deal with the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to use its sensors as a drug detection method.
Athletes can use the company’s Discovery Patch during competitions, which will analyze sweat for drug markers – and they can also use it to analyze hydration, too.
It’s hoped that using continuous wearable sensors like this will take the pressure off in-person urine and blood testing during events when time is tight.
Fitbit opens up to allow stats from other wearables
The Fitbit app finally can show users their stats from other wearables and services, with Google announcing the expansion of the Health Connect platform at MWC 2024.
First announced nearly two years ago, Google Health Connect is effectively the company's interoperability platform; it gives users the choice of feeding specific bits of data into their app of choice to fill out the picture.
It works similarly to Google Fit integrations, except you don't have to use Google Fit. Fitbit never jumped on with Apple Health, which meant that interoperability has always been minimal.
Withings rolls out cycle tracking for ScanWatch 2
This week, the menstrual cycle tracking feature is activated globally on the ScanWatch 2 and ScanWatch Light smart hybrid watches.
Originally available in September 2023, the new capabilities allow women to add menstrual cycles straight on a smartwatch. Women can log their menstrual cycle stages, including symptoms, flow, and period dates, as well as record moods and emotions.
Aktiia gets funding boost
Aktiia has secured 27m CHF in funding from Redalpine for its wearable, cuffless blood pressure monitoring.
The company has also added former Uber and Google exec Daniel Graf as President and Board Member, as it looks to aggressively expand its reach.
Reacting to the appointment Graf wrote: “Since its commercial launch in 2021, Aktiia has gathered over 300 million cardiovascular data points from over 60,000 users. These data points serve as the foundation for our AI-driven insights for novel understanding and care of hypertension.”