Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Wearable Tech! (Early 2014)”.
We are at the beginning of a new era. Personal computing is being redefined, as the technology around us becomes. A part of who we are. This is the wearable revolution.
We put technology on our bodies to make ourselves better to find a way to kind of move through the world and extend ourselves looking around for a name. We came up with wearable computing, it’s a wearable tech revolution and one of the big talking points this year is wearable technology, wearable, electronics, their wearable technology offerings at this year’s consumer electronics show wearables 2014 is said to be the year of wearable tech, electronics that are Physically attached to your body, but what good is that? Why does anyone even want that well to put a super long story, super simple and short in 2007 apple, reinvented the smartphone, with the new iphone and made a lot of money off of that now everyone has a smartphone. So now companies are scrambling to find the next big thing.
The next big paradigm shift. That will make the first good one a lot of money and they all seem to think it’s going to be something wearable and i guess that seems kind of cool. You know having glanceable information without taking your phone out your pocket, not that it’s all that much effort to do that. But a watch is already perfect for that.
You can just glance and look at the time without having to unlock your phone. But what if it was something more what if it was something a little smarter than that something that could actually show information from your phone or your phone’s notifications or what? If it gets to the point where, in a couple months or years, you can take out your phone and say: okay, google now set a timer for 10 minutes and in 10 minutes the timer goes off on your wrist. So these first bits of wearable tech, we’re seeing here in 2014, it’s still january, are very beta they’re. The very first look at the attempt to be an iphone of this wearable realm and we’re seeing a lot of weird stuff. But hopefully this list will be very different by the end of 2014. Hence the title of this video.
So without any further ado here are the top five best wearable options. We have right now. Number five is a qualcomm talk, smart watch now this is a really interesting device for a lot of reasons, but number one is definitely its display. It’S called a mirasol display it’s a pretty new technology that qualcomm’s thrown into this. That gives it incredible outdoor viewing ability. It’S it’s got great viewing angles great brightness. It looks like basically paper and you can view it outside, no matter how the reflections are shining off of this thing. So the display is really interesting about it.
But the thing is, it’s not really a problem, but qualcomm isn’t a hardware manufacturer they don’t they don’t do the entire device, they do the insides and the guts of devices. So you can see that with the talk the design is not there. This is not an easy to use smart watch, it’s not intuitive the ui, isn’t good, there’s all sorts of confusing and redundant bits about it and uh. That would be the downside of owning this thing. There’S a big learning curve and it’s at the end of the day, not really that much faster than just taking your phone out. Your pocket number four is the samsung galaxy gear. Another take on the smartwatch, and this one, i have to say, is easily one of the classiest and best looking smart watches out there. It has a battery life that lasts about two days or so with regular use, and it’s got a whole bunch of different watch faces and it’s it’s overall, just really appealing. It’S probably the best looking accessory samsung makes to any of its stuff.
But that’s the thing. The huge downside is that this is an accessory to a samsung product. It only works with less than a dozen devices right now and if you don’t have one of those dozen, the samsung galaxy, note 3 or the galaxy s4 or one of their new tablets or something like that, it’s really just a watch, not a smart watch. It’S just the watch face. You can’t do anything and even if you do have one of those new samsung devices, a lot of the notifications aren’t really full featured it’ll. Only tell you that you have a new notification, you should probably check your phone now. What’S the point of that, if you’re gon na take your phone out your pocket anyway, overall, the gear is a very confined device.
It feels very throttled by the fact that samsung wants to have control over the entire experience. Number three: is the google glass explorer edition? One of the only ones on this list – that’s not on your wrist and honestly, it’s really interesting technology. It’S essentially a heads up display to real life. You constantly have a display and a camera across your face, and every time you wear it, you have that sort of instant access to actual notifications from your ios or android device. Now the fact that you’re wearing it on your face means they have to keep it lightweight, so it doesn’t have a very large battery.
But the real downside is that when you’re wearing it, you look like this, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable when you have a camera on your face, all the time and you’re looking around at people and some people just don’t like it at all. It makes them uncomfortable and also it’s 1500 bucks, which is another downside, but that will hopefully be changing very soon when this year 2014, we see the full consumer edition of google glass, because this explorer edition is a limited edition product, and you can see my video About that right below the like button, but essentially this is a beta test. Number two is fitbit and we’re going back to the wrist here, but the fitbit force is actually really cool.
It’S an awesome product, it’s essentially a fitness band and it does everything under the moon. It tracks a whole bunch of things about your daily activity and about your nightly activity works on any android or ios device with bluetooth, 4.0 and above and there are plenty of other fitness bands. There is a nike fuel band. There’S the lg lifeband touch the jawbone up a whole bunch of other things that do the similar things that this fitbit does, but in different combinations, but the fitbit really does everything it does all of the things during the day, your dieting, the amount of steps you Take a pedometer, an activity, tracker, calories, burned and even a sleep timer and the sleep activity tracker. So all these different things put together in one package that let you look back upon your day and see exactly what you did and try to beat the goals and beat your friends goals. You can sync up and accumulate points, there’s a whole bunch of awesome stuff that goes along with this wearable tech. It doesn’t necessarily deliver information to you. It doesn’t necessarily talk to your phone or give extra glanceable value, but when you take it off at the end of the day and plug it into your computer, there’s a whole bunch of awesome stuff that goes on and number one there’s one company, that’s taking a Very focused approach to it all it’s the only company on this list that only does wearable tech and that’s pebble. This company pebble started with a very successful kickstarter project where they did the first iteration of the pebble smartwatch and now recently at ces. They showed off the second iteration called pebble steel, but, more importantly, they also now have a very specific app store for pebble because of all the third-party sites that we’re doing this anyway and pebble has the advantage of being able to focus a hundred percent dedication on This smart watch concept, because that is all they do and then the pebble doesn’t necessarily do everything under the sun.
It won’t do every little function that the galaxy gear does with the camera or the taking and receiving voice calls, but the things that it does do it does very very well and that’s what pebble prides themselves in the new app store that they’re putting together will Allow even more functionality with the device because of all the things that people can build into the apps now to talk to your smartphone, so glanceable information will probably be at its best on a pebble. So there you go. Those are your top five wearable tech available right now. I do want to give some honorable mentions to some stuff that i saw at ces two smart bands, the jaybird rain and the razer nabu.
These are things that actually have some unique functionality that other fitness bands. Don’T have right now, so i want to see those come out this year and there’s also way more really interesting, wearable stuff, there’s something called optinvent aura, which is supposedly the next best. Google, glass competitor, it’s not a private product, so it’s public, so you can buy it and see what that’s like. I might want to try that out and also there is the neptune pine, which is a standalone smart watch. So you don’t need it to be connected to the phone. It’S actually just a mini android tablet, and it gives you all the information you need and there’s also stuff like oculus rift, which i also tried for the first time at ces.
Technically, this isn’t near the sort of wearable stuff we’re talking about with google glass or the smart watches, but technically it’s wearable and technically speaking, this is an incredible experience like totally objectively. This is one of the most immersive things you can have, even if you’re, not a huge gamer. Like me, it’s pretty cool to play with, and an interesting admission from all this is apple, which, again, is why the video title is what it is, because i think, by the end of this year, we’re going to see way more wearable stuff from big companies. Like apple like intel, maybe even google will make a smart watch with the same interface as google glass.
I think that would work out really well so keep an eye on all the stuff we make videos about here on the mkbhd channel, as well as, if you want to follow me on twitter i’ll, be sharing a whole bunch of the more awesome stuff that comes Out and appears on the market, but that’s been it. Thank you for watching this video and i will talk to you guys in the next one peace you .