Because you are not allowed to be a company anymore if you don’t make an activity tracker, Epson is getting in on the action with its first two entries into the product category. While most of these are a dime a dozen, Epson’s Pulsense products might actually have a leg up on their competition: Built-in heart-rate monitoring.
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There’s a plethora of devices out there that let athletes, amateur doctors, and even hypochondriacs constantly monitor their heart rates
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You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Let’s face it: the quantified-self movement is all about strapping gadgets to your body and letting them tell you things that you already know. Aside from marathon-running gym worshippers, we’re all keenly aware that we could be taking better care of ourselves. Of course, those fancy devices do offer a means to record your data in a way that makes it easy to track your progress, hopefully motivating you to concentrate on getting your activity graph to go up while your weight goes down. We’re two or three generations into the market now, and the crude pedometers of yore have been replaced with units packed with altimeters and accelerometers that promise to faithfully track everything from how many stairs you’ve climbed to how well you slept last night.
Withings is a French company that’s synonymous with the whole fitness tracker movement; it’s perhaps best known for its heart rate monitors and smart scales that push your weight, BMI, body fat percentage, heart rate and even local CO2 levels to the cloud. But until now, it’s had a glaring omission in its lineup: an activity tracker that informs you of your progress apart from your early morning weigh-ins. Worse still, both Wahoo Fitness and Fitbit have encroached on Withings’ home turf with their own weighing scales; more than ever, Withings needs an activity tracker to keep people locked into its ecosystem.
That’s where the Pulse comes in. Like the Fitbit One, this rubber brick packs a pedometer, altimeter and sleep tracker, but unlike its rivals, it includes an optical heart rate sensor as well. With both the Pulse and the Fitbit priced at $100, is this extra feature enough to establish the French business as the world heavyweight? I spent a month with this device strapped to my waistband, so follow me as I take you through what it’s like to have this as a constant companion. %Gallery-slideshow46970%
Filed under: Wearables
This year has produced a flood of fitness trackers and, as such, it takes more than it has in the past to stand out from the crowd. The unassuming Withings Pulse has a neat trick up its sleeve that just might do it: In addition to all the usual stuff, it can take your pulse.
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The smartphone is not a device that handles all of your calls properly while ensuring that your live is a whole lot more organized – with a slew of new apps rolling out as well as accessories that can connect to your smartphone directly via a physical cable or over a Bluetooth connection, you can be sure that the landscape of smartphone accessories is forever changed. Case in point, the Withings Pulse might be something that folks who emphasize a lot on fitness might want to check out, being a powerful and pocket-sized activity tracking tool which was specially designed from ground up in order to help users achieve personal health and fitness goals.
It can be said that for the first time ever seen on an activity tracker, the Withings Pulse would see the inclusion of heart rate measurement as well as automatic run detection in order to have it track the number of steps taken, distance covered, elevation, calories burned, and quality of sleep. Hmmm, I suppose quality of sleep can be measured by how much one moves, and chances are it would be at its most accurate when you happen to sleep alone without anyone else in the room messing up its readings with their snores and movement.
The Withings Pulse will synchronize with a smartphone using Bluetooth Smart, while there is the free Withings Health Mate App where all the data will be collected and displayed in real time. The Withings Pulse tips the scales at a mere 8 grams and measures a diminutive 1.69 inches, meaning it is unobtrusive and is small enough to be inserted into a pocket, bag, or even used with the included clip on a belt, shirt or bra. Right in front lies a fully functioning OLED touch display, letting you use your finger to navigate through the screens while browsing through the past fortnight’s worth of collected data. At the back lies a heart rate sensor which requires you to place your finger in order to take a reading.
The Withings Pulse will play nice with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad, iPod touch 4th gen, iPod touch 5th gen and Android devices 2.3.3 or higher.
Press Release
[ Withings Pulse is now available copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Just how many activity trackers can this emerging, but admittedly niche market support? We have no idea, but Withings is hoping that there’s room for at least one more. The company will be releasing the Pulse tomorrow for $99, and taking on veterans of the scene like Fitbit and relative newcomers like Jawbone. The tiny device counts steps, monitors your sleep patterns and can even measure your heart rate. Unfortunately, it can’t do the latter constantly and in real time, though, that might be a slightly unrealistic expectation of any tracker. Like some of Fitbit’s products it can also monitor your altitude, which is great for people who want to know how many steps they’ve climbed. The Pulse itself is quite small, about the size of standard issue pedometer and almost as light. The casing is made of a nice soft touch plastic that feels down right lovely in the hand, which is good since you’ll be manhandling the Pulse more than most other trackers. It’s a far cry from the glossy piano black finish it sported at CES.
Gallery: Withings Pulse hands-on
Filed under: Wearables
And the battle to build quantified self gadgets rages on. The newest entrant is one that isn’t exactly new to the space — Withings has been churning out smart scales and body analyzers since 2009, but it recently decided to set it sights on Fitbit and Jawbone with a new, $99 wearable fitness tracker called the Pulse.
The particulars should sound familiar: the Pulse is a tiny (it weighs in at 8 grams) thing with a touch-sensitive OLED display that’s worn on your person and measures the steps you’ve taken, calories you’ve burned, and how long you’ve slept. Oh, and to top it off, you can press your finger to the Pulse’s rear end to figure out your heart rate. Neat trick.
Familiar though that formula may be, Withings brings something rather neat to the table though: a hardware ecosystem (if a small one). The company’s background in smart scales means it’s capable of adding some crucial context to the activity data the Pulse is able to collect — a more accurate picture of a person’s fitness level and the effect it actually has on the body. Media darling Fitbit has so far struck to a similar strategy, albeit one that ran in reverse — the company spent years honing its Fitbit wearables before releasing the Aria scale in 2012.
That said, Withings is no stranger to cooperation with other quantified self players either. Companies like Fitbit and Jawbone have made it a point to partner with Withings so they can incorporate weight data into users’ accounts. It’s a natural fit considering that a person’s weight represents a crucial bit of information that those company’s respective gadgets can’t really figure out on their own.
Honestly though, for a company that’s been nothing if not eager to add value to other wearable gadgets, it’s a little strange to see Withings take a shot at the market themselves. These days it seems like nearly every fitness-focused company is trying reinvent to the pedometer, but it takes some serious expertise to turn a pint-sized selection of sensors and components into a product worth using. The development process may have been a bumpy one too — Withings first showed off that activity tracker (encased in Plexiglass no less) back in Las Vegas at CES 2013, and here we are about five months later with only the option to pre-order the thing.
For all the question marks that come with the Pulse, Withings may actually be onto something here. If the company can nail the experience of aggregating data across its hardware lineup and feeding it all into its accompanying app (not to mention the 100 or so partner apps floating around out there), Withings may just be able to pull ahead of a sizable pack.
To most people, Antec’s probably better known for its desktop-related products, but at Computex, the company made quite a big effort to pimp its A.M.P. (Antec Mobile Products) range of Bluetooth audio devices. You may have already come across the SP1 Bluetooth speaker (pictured above in several colors), but we’ve been told that an identical-looking SP1+ is coming this October. What’s new? Well, the refresh will come with NFC-enabled Bluetooth pairing, as well as CSR’s TrueWireless Stereo technology that will let you use one SP1+ as the left channel, and another SP1+ as the right channel (but both drivers in each SP1+ are still active in this case). Do read on to see what else Antec has up its sleeve later this year.
Gallery: Antec SP1 and SP1+ Bluetooth speaker
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Wearables, Wireless
Haswell-infused devices have been stepping out from behind curtains for the past few days, and now Maingear’s ready to unveil its latest gaming notebook with Intel’s fresh silicon: the Pulse 14. Each configuration of the rig comes decked out with a quad-core Core i7 processor clocked at 2.2GHz, a GeForce GTX 760M graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, 2.1-channel speakers and a 14-inch, 1,600×900 resolution display. As for connectivity, an SD card slot, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet and three USB 3.0 ports all come standard with the machine. Extracting $1,299 from your wallet will net you a respectable 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB hybrid drive. Ponying up $1,399 will nab you a 1TB HDD with a 32GB caching SSD, while shelling out $1,699 brings in 16GB of RAM and two 128GB solid state drives in Raid 0 backed by a 1TB hard drive. Take a gander at the laptop in the bordering gallery or hit the break for more details in the press release.
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