The newest arrival for gym-keen Apple Watch-wearers is tremendous, smart glasses could be Alexa-powered, and there's a new, mystery update for Apple Watch wearers. This is the news in the world of wearable tech.
The Week in Wearables is a news digest, out each midweek, focused on some of the things that have happened in the world of tech you can wear on your wrist, perch on your head, stick in your ear, sling around your waist, tuck into the small of your back or, well, you get the idea.
Apple GymKit Tested
I tried the Technogym running machine and the system worked seamlessly. In fact, the only awkward part of the picture was me, huffing and puffing as I ran.
Apple told me the idea was to make the system gym-proof, which sounds like code for idiot-proof to me. It’s designed to be as simple to use as Apple Pay. And it is.
One of the coolest features is that if I forget to tap the NFC panel at the beginning of my workout, all is not lost. At any point in my run, right up to the last seconds, I can make the connection and the two machines work out the data for the entire session.
Read more on Forbes.
Alexa-Powered Smartglasses
Wareable reports that Indiegogo has a campaign for LET Glasses which look like a pair of stylish glasses and have bone conduction audio, gesture controls and Alexa on board.
Muller Sun, CEO of LET Labs, tells Wareable that the Alexa-infused smartglasses were actually inspired by Amazon itself, rather than the desire to simply make dumb glasses smart. Sun had started to play around with an Amazon Echo, but found that not being able to use it outdoors restricted its usability. He wanted to create a portable Echo, but not something like a speaker. Something like Google Glass.
To activate Alexa, all you have to do is double tap the right side of the glasses and then talk, no "Alexa" wake word required. Control your smart home products, order pizza, ask for the weather, buy things on Amazon and basically do everything else you already do on your Echo device.
Read more at Wareable.
Another watchOS Developers' Update
On Wednesday, Apple released the latest watchOS update to developers – there's no public beta for Apple Watch updates – and this one's called watchOS 4.2.2. Note that it has skipped a number since the release of 4.2 to the public last week, there's been no 4.2.1 update. Even so, don't expect big changes in this update. As MacRumors reports:
It's not yet clear what new features or improvements the watchOS 4.2.2 update might introduce, but we'll update this post once we've installed the update and have had time to dig into the new features.
The main difference seems to be that a bug which jammed during the reinstallation of previously installed apps has been solved. I'll report back when more is known though for now you can read more, though not that much more, at MacRumors.
Swimming With SmartWatches
Back to Wareable for a round-up of a specific kind of test: taking your smartwatch into the swimming pool.
This year we've seen fitness trackers and smartwatches broaden in scope to cover more types of sport and exercise, of which swimming has been a major one.
A handful of smartwatches have promised to go the depth when it's time to hit the pool, tracking everything from stroke type to SWOLF (which is essentially a measurement of your swimming efficiency). Question is, who does it best?
So with that question in mind, we took four of the biggest sports-focused smartwatches of the year into the pool to see how they compare on accuracy, data captured and general usefulness for swimming. Here are the results of our swimming smartwatch big test.
It's good stuff and is well worth a read. There's more at Wareable.
More on Forbes
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watchOS 4.2 Improves Apple Watch With One Great Benefit: How To Install And Should You Upgrade?
