New accessory tracks daily activities and shows ‘simple’ notifications
Samsung is betting big on mobile fitness gadgets this year. Exercise and health tracking a major focus of the Galaxy S5, as well as the new Gear 2 series smartwatches, and of course the Gear Fit. But the Korean company might have another trick up its sleeve, in the form of a competitor to traditional low-powered fitness accessories, as this morning Samsung fansite SamMobile has published images of a new Samsung “Activity Tracker.”
The device is referred to by the site as an “S Band,” though the slides themselves simply call it the “Samsung Activity Tracker.” Like similar products from Sony and othes, it looks like the components of the Activity Tracker will contained in a small pebble-like device, allowing it to fit into a wristband or clip.
A basic fitness accessory that’ll connect to ’14 flagship devices’
It appears to have a basic monochrome display — mainly occupied by a single icon — with buttons on the side. And as you’d expect, the device allows users to track various everyday activities — calories consumed, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep efficiency. Naturally, the accessory connects to Samsung smartphones (“14 flagship devices”) through the S Health 3.0 app and Bluetooth LE, and there’s also support for “simple” notifications for calls and messages from your paired Galaxy handset. A “loss protection” feature can also make the phone and tracker sound an alarm if they’re more than 10 meters away from each other, and this function can be manually activated at any time to locate a lost device.
There’s no word on prices or availability for the Samsung Activity Tracker just yet, but we’d expect it to emerge shortly after the Galaxy S5, with pricing somewhere below that of the Gear Fit.
Source: SamMobile