Today Sony announced their second generation SmartBand wearable, the SmartBand 2. Like its predecessor, the SmartBand 2 is a fitness wristband that incorporates an accelerometer to track your movement. The SmartBand 2 also incorporates a heart rate sensor to monitor your heart rate throughout the day, which was not present in the original model. Information relating to workouts is automatically tracked, and can be viewed in the Sony Lifelog application. Since the SmartBand 2 has a battery life of around 48 hours it can also be used for tracking health information during sleep, and can automatically trigger a vibration alarm to wake you up based on its understanding of your sleep cycle.
In addition to fitness and health tracking, the SmartBand 2 can notify you about calls, messages, and other notifications by pairing it with your Android or iOS device. The SmartBand 2 features both a vibrating motor and an RGB notification LED to ensure that you don't miss notifications. There's also support for controlling music playback on your paired smartphone, and if you have a Sony Xperia device the SmartBand 2 can warn you when you travel more than 10m from it.
As for its construction, the SmartBand 2 is made of silicone. It will come in black and white versions at launch, with pink and indigo options to follow. It has IP68 resistance to water and dust, and it will still be compatible with straps made for the previous Sony SmartBand. The Sony SmartBand 2 will be launching in 60 countries this September for a price of approximately 119 EUR.
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Valantar - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
The original SmartBand (and the Talk, for that matter) did not have heart rate monitors. That's a pretty big change, and a big oversight for this article.damianrobertjones - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
No windows Mobil support = no purchaseFlyBri - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
@damianroberjones Great thing about capitalism is that if you don't want to purchase something, you don't have to! Just being blunt, but from a business perspective, Sony could give a crap about supporting Windows Mobile at this moment -- it's like 2-3% of the market. It makes no sense to put resources into supporting something that has such a small market share at this point. If Android or iOS wasn't supported, that would be a different story. In any case, Windows 10 for phones will support Android apps in some way through an Android "subsystem" developed by Microsoft. What that unfortunately means is that the Android apps will only be available through the Windows Store. So, what you should be saying instead is "Microsoft, please make sure that as many Android apps are supported and are accessible to download via the Microsoft Store!" That way, you may very well be able to purchase this fitness band and use it on a Windows Mobile device.Michael Bay - Saturday, August 22, 2015 - link
Nobody wants Android crap ran through some kind of translator on WinMo, developers themselves included. Native applications are ridiculously better.nikon133 - Sunday, August 23, 2015 - link
Yeah, but... Win Phone market-share is not much lower than, say, Mac worldwide market-share in PC terms. Still you get quite a chunk of software being developed for Mac as well, in addition to Windows.In addition, porting between Android/iOS and WinPhone should be quite easy these days.
I understand that small devs are one man bands (or just a few men bands) and don't have resources, but apps developed by large companies? I looks to me more as if they simply don't want to risk helping competing platforms in any way, even if some of them are too away on ladder to be really considered competing.
Google is probably the most prominent example, not only refusing 1st party apps for WinPhone, but also going some distance to prevent MS from developing such apps, as it was the case with YouTube client.
Kepe - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Who cares, Windows Phone is almost dead anyways. Less than 3% of the smartphone market share.kspirit - Saturday, August 22, 2015 - link
That's still tens of millions of people tho...nikon133 - Sunday, August 23, 2015 - link
10 million per quarter at current pace. Since people usually don't replace phone in less than 2 years - I've seen a lot of older phones around as well - I'd estimate that there are around 100 million Win Phone users around the world. I'd think that it is not such a bad market, far from Android and Apple, but still. Good enough, if nothing else, to consider presence in order to build some reputation and become household name there, just in case situation can change down the path.Kepe - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Hey! The SmartBand 2 has a 5 day battery life, not 2 as mentioned in the article.Brandon Chester - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Sony's PR material specifically says 2 days of battery life, as does their white paper. It only lasts 5 days in stamina mode which disables the heart rate functions so it's misleading to advertise it as having a 5 day battery life.