November’s barely started, and “pre-Black Friday” sales are already upon us

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

Have you started your holiday shopping yet? Because if not, you’re already way behind schedule, and no one on your list has any shot of getting what they want. OK, OK, so the situation isn’t anywhere near so dire, but retail heavyweights aren’t about to let you off so easy. You may still have a few weeks to go before Black Friday (and Cyber Monday, and Just Buy Some More Stuff Please Tuesday), but holiday sales creep means that we’ll likely be seeing all sorts of deals landing ...

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5 reasons the Samsung Gear Fit doesn’t suck as much as your nerd friends say it does

Posted on by Michael Fisher

If there’s one thing about us geeks, it’s our capacity to be super-critical about every little thing you can imagine. Sometimes that’s a good thing: it prevents us from being bamboozled by every piece of techno-trash a company tries to shove down our throat, and it prompts the more vocal among us to shout out loud until those firms refine their offerings. Criticism, on the whole, can have a net positive effect.But sometimes it feels like we complain just for the sake of making noise. Publications like ours ...

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Smartwatch sales four times slower than activity trackers in Q1

Posted on by Anton D. Nagy

Wearable devices are increasingly popular among technology enthusiasts. However, the smartwatch is just one of the products in the wearables category, and, apparently, it is performing worse on the market than other wearable solutions.According to a Digitimes report based on numbers from ABI Research, the activity tracker is outselling the smartwatch. The ratio is four-to-one in the activity tracker’s favor. 2.35 million activity trackers were shipped in the first quarter of the year, meaning that those who bought a smartwatch were less than 600,000.“Activity Trackers are ...

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Samsung smartwatch market share rises to 71% following strong first quarter sales

Posted on by Rithvik Rao

Though many of us argue that Pebble tends to make better smartwatches than Samsung, the Korean company’s marketing prowess is doing its thing again. Thanks to Samsung’s incredible marketing of their smartwatches (by means of celebrity endorsement and otherwise), the company has reportedly sold 500,000 wrist-wearables in the first quarter of 2014. ...

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Samsung’s online store now houses “Swarovski for Samsung” fashion accessories

Posted on by Rithvik Rao

Got a new Samsung Galaxy S5 or Gear Fit? You may be on the hunt for accessories to go with it. Samsung has just announced a collection of crystal accessories from Swarovski for its Gear Fit and Galaxy S5. For the Galaxy S5, crystals are integrated right into the back cover, and there is an extra design feature where two crystal effects are merged — neat. Two colors will be made available of the new cover, Vibrant Blue and Mystic Black. Moving along to the Gear Fit, the Charm Sliders are positioned by Samsung to give users “ultimate versatility in their wearable technology ...

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Samsung Gear Fit review “pre-buttal” (Video)

Posted on by Michael Fisher

While Samsung’s fashionable Gear Fit smart watch/fitness accessory saw plenty of action in our recent exercise adventure with S Health, our coverage of the device itself has been limited to just an initial hands-on and an

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Pocketnow Weekly 094: Fitness, Photography, and Fidelity with Myriam Joire!

Posted on by Michael Fisher

Nimble hops between short subjects, or longform plumbing of deep depths? We don’t like to make you choose with our podcast, so we occasionally hop across formats between episodes. This here is one of the deeper variety. This week’s special guest is Myriam Joire (aka tnkgrl), Engadget alum and current product evangelist at Pebble. She brings her considerable expertise in optics and audio to a discussion ranging from the best high-end headphones ...

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S Health review: our fitness adventure with Samsung’s Gear Fit, Galaxy S5, and a kayak (Video)

Posted on by Michael Fisher

The desk. The keyboard. The chair. If you’re a technology blogger in 2014 (or really any kind of white collar employee) these are very likely the tools which dominate your workday. So when a company like Samsung decides to make fitness a priority with its new flagship smartphone, it can be tough to fully evaluate those features unless you get out from behind that desk. Today, that’s just what we’re doing. While we’ve already given you a glance at Samsung’s S Health suite in our

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iPhone 6 phablet delay, WP8.1 preview adoption, Amazon phone tilting & more – Pocketnow Daily

Posted on by Jaime Rivera

Watch today’s Pocketnow Daily as we talk about how the Samsung Gear Fit is now sold-out, despite its crazy price tag. LG follows the news as we find some official photos of the two variants the company plans to launch. Microsoft follows the news as the Windows Phone 8.1 developer preview has exceeded user install-base expectations. Amazon then takes over as we learn more about a new tilting feature in its probable smartphone. We end today’s show as we learn why the iPhone 6 phablet might be delayed. All this and more after the break. Stories: -

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Samsung Gear Fit sells out, despite $200 price tag

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

If you’re looking to pick up a fitness tracker, you probably have more options than you know what to do with: Fitbit, Jawbone, Nike, or even a general-purpose smartwatch like Pebble. This year, we saw Samsung introduce a couple new models to its Gear family, including the Gear Fit, a stripped-down wearable that sort of bridged the gap between display-less trackers and more flexible smartwatches. We weren’t sure if the band’s $200 price tag might scare a lot of shoppers away, either driving them to more affordable or more ...

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Samsung needs to open its Gear smartwatches to other phones

Posted on by Taylor Martin

Just under one month ago, Google turned the smartwatch and wearables industry on its head. As I was writing an editorial about the then-rumored Google smartwatch, Google pulled a fast one on us and announced something much more than just one smartwatch; it announced an entire, dedicated platform for smartwatches: Android Wear. I immediately changed the tone of my editorial and wrote what was on my mind that very moment. I

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Samsung Gear Fit unboxing (video)

Posted on by Anton D. Nagy

Welcome to our Samsung Gear Fit unboxing! You will have to wait however, until our Samsung Galaxy S 5 review unit lands on our doorstep. We’ll review the smartwatch, then, because we want to take advantage of the added features of the S5, we’ll also review this futuristic wearable. We also want to experience the complete 2014 line-up UX, as Samsung intended it at the Barcelona launch event. What about the Gear Fit? It’s a completely new product, it has nothing to do with last year’s Galaxy Gear or the Gear 2 line-up. It is also, according to Samsung, the first ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 091: brace yourselves – the reviews are coming

Posted on by Michael Fisher

When an avalanche of reviews is rumbling its way down your mountain, it’s rarely easy to assemble a podcast team – but as we frequently remind you, the Pocketnow Weekly has never missed a week, and we’ll be damned if it’ll do so now. So despite the forthcoming reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S 5, Gear Fit, Gear 2, Oppo Find 7a, Nokia X, and the just-completed reviews of the ZENS Qi line, BlackBerry 10.2.1, and the Verizon HTC One M8, we’re banding together behind microphones in three separate cities on two continents to bring you the news and editorials of a very ...

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Samsung Gear Fit gets new portrait-orientation screen mode

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

We just spent a few minutes touching base with LG and its upcoming G Watch, so let’s stay in this wearables lane for a little while longer and check in with Samsung and the Gear Fit. Compared to the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, the Fit is a bit of an underdog, but it’s not without its own stand-out features, including that curved OLED screen. While everything we’ve seen so far has depicted the Fit using that display in a landscape orientation, today we learn about a ...

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Samsung has fixed its Gear pricing … sort of

Posted on by Taylor Martin

The wearable space has greatly matured since this time last year. Pebble, for one, grew from the gauche, all-plastic smartwatch behind the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, to a finely machined luxury watch made of marine grade stainless steel with a blossoming ecosystem of applications and a dedicated development community and fan base. But that’s hardly the only wearables development of the past year. The idea of wearables and, more specifically, smartwatches became more mainstream; ...

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