Tim Cook opened the Apple Watch segment of the event last week by stating that Apple Watch wasn’t just the number one smart watch in the world (come on, that’s obvious), but that “it’s the number one watch, period”, standing in front of a slide with a big “#1” on it.
Number one by what measure, though? They didn’t say, which I find irksome. Presumably Cook meant number one by revenue. At last year’s event he noted revenue specifically, mentioning that Apple Watch had surpassed Rolex.
Apple has several products that lead their markets in revenue or profit. What makes Apple Watch different from every other product the company makes, though, is a measure near and dear to the company’s soul by which they cannot claim Apple Watch to be number one: nicest.
Nicest is inherently subjective, of course. But iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and iMac can all reasonably be argued to be the nicest products in their respective markets. You can definitely add Apple Watch to that list if you limit the comparison to other smart watches and fitness trackers. I would say hands-down, no question, Apple Watch is the nicest of those.
In a surprising turn, Withings founder Eric Careel bought his company back from Nokia, two years after selling it for $200 million. The circumstances were fortuitous: Nokia was looking to offload the digital health business, which it had apparently come to see as a failed experiment.
Less than four months after the deal, the company has launched its first device in this newest iteration of the brand: the Withings Steel HR Sport. The $199.95 device is an attempt to compromise between Withings’ stripped down but long-lived smartwatch Activité and devices like the Apple Watch that boast a wide variety of features and capabilities but last only a few days on a charge. The device offers offers heart rate monitoring, connected GPS tracking, and “fitness level assessments” based on VO2 max all with a 25-day battery life — which also allows the device to be more useful for sleep tracking than devices that need to be frequently charged at night.
After just shy of five years since Polar’s last multisport product was announced – the replacement for it is finally here: The Vantage series. This series actually breaks the product line into two models, the Vantage V being the higher end touchscreen edition, and the Vantage M being the mid-range non-touchscreen product. Feature wise, they are nearly very similar, both supporting full triathlon modes.
These new models completely revamp the underlying operating system of the watch, not to mention the hardware too. The company has changed GPS chipset vendors, alongside creating the mother of all optical heart rate sensors with 9 LED’s in it. Not to mention being the first company to introduce running power at the wrist on the Vantage V (no other sensors required).
At the same time, due to the complete revamp of the watch, there’s a number of past features that didn’t make the cut. Some permanently, and some temporarily. For example, there’s no more navigation/routing capabilities, nor smartphone notifications.
The newest Apple Watch can now flag potential problems with your heartbeat — a feature that has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration and that Apple is marking as a major achievement. But some doctors said that including heart-monitoring tools in such a popular consumer product could trigger unnecessary anxiety and medical visits.
The company touted its heart-tracking feature as proof that the watch can help people proactively manage their health. “The Apple Watch has become the intelligent guardian for your health,” Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the development of the Apple Watch, said in the company’s presentation of new Apple products this week.
Onstage at the event at Apple headquarters, American Heart Association president Ivor Benjamin said that products such as Apple Watch offer “deeper health insights” that can promote longer, healthier lives. The technology used to flag potential heart problems is more complex — and closer to what physicians use in diagnostic tests — than the heart rate trackers used now by Apple, Fitbit and other wearable device makers.
The sci-fi dream of wearable communication technology that enhances human perception is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a collaboration between Cambridge University and Nokia Bell Labs.
Launched yesterday (Tuesday), the new Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence will be based in Cambridge’s world-leading Department of Computer Science and Technology.
It will advance state-of-the-art mobile systems, security, new materials, and artificial intelligence (AI) to address one of the main human needs – the ability to communicate better with each other.
The market of pneumatic compression systems for sports recovery has grown and evolved over the last decade. While each system shares numerous design similarities, their pricing, claims, portability, muscle pressure, and compression patterns are all different. Nearly every professional team and top-tier college program uses compression in some form, whether wearable options, blood restriction bands, or pneumatic compression.
Recovery is of utmost importance to coaches and sports medicine professionals, and compression systems are one solution that may help athletes cope with heavy training or dense competition schedules. As of 2018, more than two dozen products have entered the market, but only about half of them have made enough traction to be included in our buyer’s guide. It features background on the medical history and theoretical benefits of pneumatic compression recovery systems, and a full explanation of how they function.
Hexoskin, one of the early players in the quest to bring smart clothing to the masses, is launching its Astroskin smart garment that can track a user’s vitals including heart rate and blood pressure.
The garment, which is made up of an upper body shirt and headband, has previously been used in a bunch of studies and evaluations to measure vitals like sleep activity. Built in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency, the Astroskin is based on the Bio-Monitor that Hexoskin built to monitor astroanuts’ health in space.
Google Fit is perfect for staying on top of your fitness goals, but it can be cumbersome to always have your phone with you while on a run. Thankfully, it’s easy to get Google Fit data straight from your fitness band. Here’s how to sync your fitness band to Google Fit!
Fitbit has unveiled Fitbit Care, a connected health platform designed to give healthcare providers, businesses and health plans a telehealth resource for managing remote monitoring and health and wellness programs.
It’s that time of year again. Like clockwork it’s the annual drop from GoPro of new action cameras. This year they’ve launched three new cameras – the Hero 7 Black, Silver, and White. These three new cameras will replace all existing cameras in their lineup with the exception of the GoPro Fusion 360° camera.
This review is all about the new Hero 7 Black, which is their top-end camera (the ‘Black’ naming/branding has historically always been their top model each year). Like most years, GoPro tends to be more evolutionary in updates than massive shifts. This year is no different. Which doesn’t mean these changes aren’t worthwhile. The Hero 7 Black gets a significant update to stabilization (which they call HyperSmooth), while also getting a new hyperlapse mode called TimeWarp. Atop that, the microphones no longer suck, and the photo mode handles colors and fast speeds better. But there is quite a bit more under the hood that is driving these changes.
At Brooks, we utilize a process called Run Signature to help you find your sole mate. We believe that the best shoe for you is a combination of your biomechanics and your preferred experience. Each footwear style that we offer lives within one of four experience categories – Cushion, Energize, Connect and Speed. There are some exciting new additions to the Energize footwear offerings for Fall 2018. We sat down with Jon Teipen, Brooks senior manager of footwear product line management, to learn more about Levitate 2, Bedlam and Ricochet.
The University of Oregon is educating the next generation of sports and outdoor product management professionals. We learned about this degree program directly from the source: students.
With its FUS3D technology, CIME Industries brings 3D printing to the mass production of snowboards. In our interview, founder and CEO Antoine Postaire explains why the synthetic core helps boarders and brands.
… With the sports drink having been born on the Gators’s playing field and invented by a University of Florida employee, it’s not hard to see why both [Robert] Cade’s estate (he died in 2007) and the school get a percentage of royalties from sales, an agreement that’s still in place today. But if they had their way, the university would be getting all of it.
After Cade and his co-researchers finalized Gatorade’s formula, Cade approached the school’s head of sponsored research to see if they wanted to come to an arrangement over the rights to the drink (Cade wanted $10,000) and determine if they wanted to try and sell it to a national distributor. According to Cade, University of Florida (UF) officials weren’t interested, so he struck a deal with beverage maker Stokely Van-Camp in 1967.
Stokely’s offer was for Cade and his cohorts—now known as the Gatorade Trust—to receive a $25,000 cash payment, a $5000 bonus, and a five-cent royalty on each gallon of Gatorade sold. When UF realized that they had been shortsighted in assessing the brand’s mass market appeal—and that they were missing out on profits—they allegedly told Cade that the drink belonged to them.
“Go to hell,” Cade responded, a statement that kicked off several years of litigation.
On September 5, the World Surf League announced a major milestone: equal prize money for male and female surfers at every WSL event in 2019 and beyond. It was a watershed moment for a sport with a history of treating women as second-class athletes.
“Bravo to the WSL for their commitment to equal pay,” says Bianca Valenti, a San Francisco–based pro who conquered 20-foot waves to win Latin America’s first big-wave surf competition this summer. There, she won $1,750—a quarter of the $7,000 men’s purse. “Maybe we’ll find we have created equity not just in surfing, but for all sports.”
A climate conference in California this week tried something different. The meeting, organized by the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, had far fewer national leaders present. Instead, an array of governors, mayors and business executives from around the globe met to promote their successes in cutting greenhouse gas emissions locally and to encourage one another to do more.
A key premise of the conference was that if a handful of leading-edge states, cities and businesses can demonstrate that it’s feasible — and even lucrative — to go green in their own backyards, they might inspire others to follow suit. That, in turn, could make it easier for national leaders to act more forcefully.
As bike traffic surges in cities across North America, the call for increased safety gets louder every year.
Most of the discussion centres on better infrastructure, including more dedicated bike paths, yet a large part of injury prevention is learning more about where and why cycling accidents happen.
The city of Boston did just that, inviting a team from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center to dive into bicycle accident data and create a map identifying areas in the city where accident rates are the highest.
The job was a big one and required a large number of volunteer university students with experience in statistics to quantify, code and interpret the data in police reports, including written statements by officers and ambulance technicians who were present at a crash. The result was a picture of how safe it is to cycle the streets of Boston, based on four years (2009-2012) of data collected from 1,797 bike crashes.
… Improved cycling performance in mechanics and bike fit can help you work toward riding longer and faster while preventing or managing injuries. In this video, Matt Tinkey, MS, ATC, PES, offers information on the latest technologies and tools used during bike fit assessments, available at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex. [video, 2:11]
Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge finished the Berlin Marathon in 2hr 1min 39sec on Sunday but advances in shoe technology, carbohydrate drinks and mindsets may close the gap further