The Attack Of The Wearables

Via Techcrunch 
In the past week, both Huawei as well as Samsung have announced the launch of their own line of wearable technologies to hit the market soon. Read both the reports below.  

Huawei Announces A Fitness Band That’s Also A Bluetooth Headset

Your fitness band got into my bluetooth headset! No, your bluetooth headset got into my fitness band! Stop! You’re both right!

In what I suspect will be a minor blip in the interstitial wearable world, China’s Huawei has announced a Bluetooth sports band complete with pedometer and calorie counter called the TalkBand B1. Why is it called the TalkBand? You can remove the 1.4-inch flexible OLED-fronted lozenge of electronics on the top and stick it into your ear, making it a Bluetooth headset.

The B1 works like any standard fitness band and pairs via NFC. However, because it can also act as a headset you could feasibly go for a run and take a call simultaneously, a boon to cardio-aware machers on the go. I doubt we’ll ever see this thing stateside so you’ll simply have to savor the strange idea of something you sweat all over going directly into your earhole.

Samsung Announces The Galaxy Gear 2 Smart Watch With Better Battery And Tizen OS, Coming In April

Samsung has announced the availability of the Galaxy Gear 2 smart watch, a Tizen OS-powered wearable that will get up to three days of battery life and is promised to allow for a improved applications. There will be two models – the Galaxy Gear 2 with camera and the Gear 2 Neo without – and they will ship in April.

The Tizen OS, a new mobile operating system Samsung first tried to use in theNX300m camera, will allow for an “enriched application ecosystem.” The device has a 1.63-inch touchscreen, a 1GHz processor, and 4GB internal storage. Most important, however, the device will be compatible with more Samsung smartphones. Sorry iOS users.

Tizen is Samsung’s open source, multi-device OS that that the company hopes to take to ubiquity in multiple devices including in-car entertainment units and smart TVs. It uses web APIs to allow developers to build applications with a small footprint that can run on multiple screens – including watches.

No pricing yet but Samsung excepts to ship in April. You can read a bit more about the device at Engadget.