I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Apple Watch and what it means for the Swiss…
Everywhere you look, smart watches are cropping up. The incoming Android-powered watches (and the long-rumored iWatch) of course take the lion’s share of the attention. While those high-tech devices are attention-grabbers, for sure, to focus only on them ignores a whole other slice of the smart watch segment. Today, we’ll be taking a look at one of those, the MOTA SmartWatch G2.
OK, I am not all that enamored with Smartwatches. I carry my phone and love my iPad, but I don’t see where I really need to see who is calling or texting by glancing at my wrist. And I am plenty active, I don’t need a fitness monitor either, so that functionality does not excite me either. But I am also a golfer, albeit a terrible one, and the Garmin Approach S6 may finally be the smartwatch that I want to own.
I view a lot of crowd funded projects, and have backed a couple of watch projects myself, but every once in awhile a project just blows up on a crowd funding site, and that is what has happened to the Ritot Projection watch on Indiegog. With the project slated to end funding on August 21., the watch project has already garnered over $600,000 in pledges against a goal of $50,000. And it is a very cool concept. I just wonder if it will ever make it past the point of being a concept.
The other day I wrote about 2 new smart watches that are driven by a single purpose, one to give you the score for your favorite soccer team, and the other to help you track your fitness. Today’s watch goes in the other direction, a connected device that has the goal of being a complete interface with your smart phone. The Moment Smartwatch is more of a full screen smart bracelet that interacts with your phone, and also tells the time.
A lot of smart watches I see try to be everything. Email, facebook posts, texts, weather, and so on and so on. They are not watches in a traditional sense, but rather wearable computers that display the time. Today, I wanted to highlight two watches that are more “connected” watches than a do everything wearables. The HotBlack by Hoptroff.com and the Withings Activé, with the former connecting you to your favorite football (soccer) team and the latter tracking your daily fitness goals. Interestingly, both watches are coming out of the UK.
Love your Pebble Steel Smartwatch? Hate the fact that you are locked into the strap options that come with the device? Well, a new project on Kickstarter out of the UK, the Steel Connect, provides a simple adapter to let you use any standard 22mm strap or band.
Let’s keep the smart watch ball rolling, shall we? Yesterday we saw a smart watch merged with an analog quartz piece, and today we’ve got the same – albeit one with a much smaller display. As a matter of fact, this isn’t the first time we’ve taken a look at Martian – you can see our review of their first entry right here. Their latest, though, has a much more refined look, and has a notification trick up your sleeve.
Love ’em or leave ’em, the smart watch category is one that is certainly not one that is going to be going away any time soon. While many of the devices that have been coming out as of late really do seem to be miniature versions of your phone (sometimes literally, as seen here LINK). There is another type of watch in this genre, however, that skews more to the traditional end of things, and that’s what we have here from Cogito.