Second-gen Samsung Simband health tracker unveiled, developers can pre-order

Six months after unveiling the Simband and SAMI – a wearable with a rich biometric sensor array and its supporting cloud platform – Samsung has unveiled the second generation of Simband. It’s based on the Gear S but will not be sold commercially – instead it’s a development platform that developers can pre-order today.

They can reconfigure the sensor array as needed and even develop their own sensors and algorithms to plug into the system. Samsung has made the Simband and SAMI an open platform to draw in partners and developers.

The current generation of Simband has six sensors – step counter, heart rate (ECG), blood pressure, skin temperature and galvanic skin response (how much you’re sweating, a measurement of stress).

The health tracker has three main functions. The first is Spot, a quick check of your heart rate and blood pressure, then the more comprehensive Monitor, a real-time display of the sensor’s readings, and finally Trends, which shows all the data collected over time. Data is synced over Wi-Fi (the Simband doesn’t seem to have its own SIM slot like the Gear S).

One of Samsung’s partners, Babolat, demoed a tennis racket that has sensors built into it, which connects to the SAMI platform. You can find more info on both SAMI and Simband at VoiceOfTheBody.io.

The Simband announcement was part of the Samsung Developer Conference which also brought us Flowand US pricing info on the Gear VR headset.

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Lollipop for Android Wear will bring many new features, leak shows

Android Wear has gotten an update or two so far since its official unveiling a few months back, but those only brought with them minor new features. That said, it looks like the Lollipop update for Google’s wearable platform will come with many new things, and they’ve all been detailed in a comprehensive leak.

Now that Android 5.0 Lollipop for phones and tablets is ready to start appearing in over-the-air updates near you, we assume Android Wear will be the next focus for Google – namely, getting it updated to Lollipop.

And when that does happen, you’ll see a new Watch Battery section in the Android Wear app for mobile devices. This will act just like the Battery part of the Android Settings menu, showing you graphs and which apps ate the most of your battery capacity. Again similarly to what you can see in Android for phones and tablets, you’ll also get a Storage section, which will detail how much of your watch’s internal memory is occupied and how much is free, as well as which apps take up the most space.

Next up, watch faces will become even more customizable. You’ll change them from the Android Wear companion app, and an official watch face API will surface with the Lollipop release. This will allow for weather notifications to be displayed directly onto the watch face. Further, you’ll be able to recover dismissed cards on your smartwatch with a swipe up.

Theater mode and Sunlight mode will be new to the 5.0 Lollipop release for Android Wear. The former makes the wearable’s screen stay off until you double tap it or press the hardware button – even if you get notifications. It’s obviously meant for use in cinemas, and other such spaces where your watch lighting up all of a sudden would annoy the people around you. Sunlight mode, we assume, will instantly crank your watch’s brightness all the way up, so it becomes visible in broad daylight conditions. Until all smartwatches get ambient light sensors, this will prove to be a very useful feature undoubtedly.

The new version of Android Wear will also bring with it some improvements for the visually impaired, including large text, color inversion, and magnification gestures. Lollipop for Android Wear may become available sometime in early December.

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LG G Watch receives Android Wear update which enables offline music playback

Back in September, Google told us to expect an update to Android Wear that would bring support for offline music playback and GPS sensors. And now it looks like the first Android Wear device to get the new software is LG’s G Watch.

Some owners of this particular smartwatch have started receiving update notifications. After applying the new bits, they’re on software version 4.4W.2 and build KNX01Q. And sure enough, a new ‘Play Music’ option shows up in the watch’s menu. Furthermore, the G Watch is now capable of pairing itself with Bluetooth audio accessories.

That said, it’s still unclear how exactly you may get music onto the watch, to enable true offline playback as advertised. It’s also a mystery whether playback is only initiated from the phone, or if it will work (as you might expect) even if the watch isn’t connected to a handset. All of these things will undoubtedly get cleared up once more people start receiving the update. It’s a staged rollout, that’s for sure, so if you own a G Watch, you could still need to wait a few days for it.

Because the G Watch doesn’t have a built-in GPS, that functionality isn’t applicable here. In fact, the only Android Wear device that was announced so far and has a GPS sensor is Sony’s SmartWatch 3, which isn’t on sale yet.

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Firmware update for Moto 360 brings new features, squashes bugs

Motorola’s Moto 360 smartwatch received a major firmware update. The new Android Wear build brings a host of new features and improvements to the wearable timepiece.

The two most notable new features that the update brings are Smart Battery Saving and more frequent time checks. The former will automatically turn off ambient mode on the device when its battery reaches 15%, while the latter will ensure that the Moto 360 always shows accurate time.

User interface tweaks have also been included in the firmware update. Mood lighting has been added as well – it will adjust the screen brightness of the Moto 360 to match the environment.

On a side note, the Qi wireless charger of the smartwatch is now officially up for grabs in the Google Play store. The accessory is priced at $39.99.

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