Items Tagged with 'watch'

Despite major GPS fitness device OEMs announcing new fitness products at CES 2014, it looks like an increasingly difficult battle between smart devices and wearables. Garmin launched its Vivofit fitness band and Vivoki/Vivahub corporate wellness solution. Magallen is one of the few companies in the GPS device OEM space that continues to show flashes of innovation, opening up its Echo watch platform to a range of third party smartphone application developers.

Smart watches have been around for the last decade. The wearable computing device has failed to take off for one reason or another: they looked ugly, were too bulky, had weak functionality, or the battery life was not good enough. However, over the last nine months a number of new smart watches have emerged that could change consumers’ perceptions. Market intelligence firm ABI Research projects more than 1.2 million smart watches will be shipped in 2013.

Whether the Apple smart watch rumor is true or not, the GPS fitness watch market is set to reach $1.07 billion in 2013, according to ABI Research’s latest quarterly “GPS & GNSS” Market Data which forecasts fitness watches split by price tier.