According to the latest device shipment estimates, the wearable band market grew 684% worldwide in the first half of 2014 compared with the first half of 2013. If true that’s impressive growth, writes Jeremy Cowan, but wearable technology could see even bigger growth if it wasn’t for key concerns around fashion and privacy.
The independent analysts at Canalys track wearable device shipments and segments the market into smart bands, which are capable of running third-party applications, and basic bands, which are not. Then company’s VP and principal analyst, Chris Jones, said: “Fitbit and Jawbone have very successfully grown and strengthened their relationships with channel partners internationally to grow global shipment volumes. They took first and second place respectively in the basic wearable band market in the first half 2014,” he said.
Nike’s market share has fallen as it cuts resources in this area, while new entrant Garmin had a successful launch of its vivofit device and is chasing third place. Jones added, “The challenge all vendors face is keeping consumers engaged with the devices, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Samsung again became the worldwide leader in the smart wearable band market in the first half of 2014 with the release of three new products in the second quarter: the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit. In July, Samsung released its fifth smart band in less than a year, the Gear Live, based on Android Wear. “But Samsung must improve device sell-through otherwise it will again have to resort to heavy discounting through promotions to move inventory,” said Jones. The Pebble Steel helped Pebble keep its momentum and its app store continues to grow, while Sony completes the top three.
As we’ve reported before at M2M Now (See: Analysts find wearable tech market is held back by poor business models and need for fashion collaboration) it’s seldom technology that’s holding back the wearable device sector, more often it’s a lack of viable business models and poor dialogue between the worlds of fashion and technology. That said, device manufacturers have caught on to the need to make their wearables, well, wearable. If you can overlook the ‘marketing speak’ that accompanied its latest launch, Sony is a case in point.
Life is a journey, apparently
Sony Mobile added two new products to its SmartWear Experience range last week, the Sony SmartBand Talk and SmartWatch 3. Both talk to Lifelog, the accompanying Android app designed “to help you understand more about the way to live and move, so you can improve and enrich your life.”
If Sony are to be believed, “Life is a journey, and journeys are made up of stories and experiences that define you – this is the underlying principle for Lifelog, the app at the heart of our SmartWear Experience. We’re going beyond mere fitness tracking and number crunching, to help you log and preserve those emotional moments that matter,” said Kunimasa Suzuki, president and CEO, Sony Mobile Communications.”
SmartBand Talk is described by the company as a “powerful, lifelogging wearable, with intuitive features.” With its built-in microphone and speaker, SmartBand Talk has a short call function so you can talk into it and hear your caller, with HD Voice support – for when you’re on the move or your phone is out of reach. Through Sony’s integrated Voice Control1 technology, you can also assign your own sounds to life bookmarks and use your voice to carry out specific smartphone operations.
SmartBand Talk has a curved, always-on 1.4 inch ‘e-paper display. It is low-power but designed to be highly visible and clear. New built-in accelerometer and altimeter sensor technology ‘feels’ how you move – and how much – to provide an accurate overview of your daily physical activity; whether it is walking, running or climbing. You can see how active you were and how you have been communicating, as it pulls all of your information from your smartphone and then enables you to view it on the display screen. Following Sony’s success with the waterproof Xperia Z2 phone, SmartBand Talk is, unsurprisingly, also waterproof (IP68 rated).
Android Wear shipments will appear in Canalys’ Q3 shipment tracking, with LG’s G Watch and Samsung’s Gear Live officially launching the platform. Motorola’s Moto 360 and others are also coming soon. These devices have used off-the-shelf smart phone components to get to market sooner. “Mobile operating systems and apps must be extensively pared back for smart wearable bands,” commented Canalys analyst, Daniel Matte. “Android Wear represents a first step by Google. It will undoubtedly continue to refine and improve the Wear platform as it has done with Android.”
What will Google Glass wearers know about you?
Privacy is becoming a regular topic for debate around wearable technologies such as Google Glass. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) has adapted its SHORE™ real-time face detection and analysis software to work with Google Glass, making it the first app of its kind. With the Glass’ integrated camera, the app detects people’s faces and determines their emotions by analysing their facial expressions. The Glassware (Google Glass app) simultaneously gauges the person’s age or detects their gender among other things, but it can’t determine their identity.
All calculations are performed in real-time by the CPU integrated in the eyewear. The image data never leaves the device.
The system can find a person’s face in Glass’s view with a 91.5% success rate. Fraunhofer Institute says it can correctly identify their gender 94.3% of the time, and will assess their age within a 12 year margin.
The new development from Fraunhofer IIS is the first “emotion recognition software” in the world to function in real-time with Google Glass. This opens up a spectrum of new smart eyewear applications, including communication aids for people with disorders such as autism, many of whom have difficulty interpreting emotions through facial expressions.
This missing information could be superimposed in the person’s field of vision with data glasses. Even the visually impaired can benefit from the new software by receiving supplementary audio information about people in their surroundings. By taking advantage of the additional capability to determine someone’s gender or estimate their age, the software could be used in other applications such as interactive games or market research analyses.
I don’t have any evidence to support this, but my hunch is that accuracy levels in gender, age and mood determination are still far lower than those of the human eye / intellect, but as with most such demos this should be viewed as a work in progress and a start point for discussion.
A wearable Apple too?
There is plenty of speculation that tomorrow’s product launch by the Cupertino, Californa-based innovator will include not just the iPhone 6 (probably in two sizes) but also a connected wearable band. Canalys expects that such a product would make extensive use of custom components. Its hardware design will require innovation related to wireless charging, waterproofing, and display and battery technologies. ‘Smart wearable bands need tremendous advances across the entire component ecosystem to achieve multiple days of battery life. Smart wearable bands should not necessarily resemble watches, but should instead adhere to their own unique design constraints,” added Matte.
While many technology companies are waiting to see what Apple does next, there’s no such reticence on the part of some fashion houses. With its new polo tech shirt (pictured below), Ralph Lauren is claiming to be “the first luxury lifestyle brand to offer apparel that tracks and streams real-time biometric data directly to your smartphone or tablet.” (Click here for the Ralph Lauren video).
