Acer in ‘Some Deep Exploration’ With Others About Future Wearables
Even before Friday’s release of the Apple Watch, it had become increasingly commonplace for tech and fashion watch suppliers to refer cryptically to collaborations taking place behind the scenes to devise wearable devices that are so compelling they’ll leave competitors…
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in the dust. Movado did so earlier this month when it said it has “a number of projects” in the works “in close collaboration with several tech companies to develop smart watches for Movado that will celebrate a point of difference” from other smart watches introduced, including the Apple Watch (see 1504010022). Acer executive S.T. Liew, president of the company’s Smartphone Business Group, read pretty much from that same script Thursday at his company’s global news conference in New York (see 1504230052) when he said the “wearables space is, in my mind, a focused area” for Acer and that Acer is in “some deep exploration with other companies” that share “the same interest.” For now, Acer’s introduction in the wearables space is a new fitness tracker called the Liquid Leap Fit. It comes equipped with a heart rate detector that averages about 150 “scans” a day, Liew said. But its differentiator will be two “curious” 24-karat gold plates on the back of its housing for tracking the body’s “galvanic skin response” as a measure of stress, Liew said. All the tracking data from the Leap Fit will be fed into a “report card” app for Acer smartphones that the company calls Acer Age, Liew said. Acer America spokeswoman Erin Davern emailed us to say her subsidiary has no “information available” yet on U.S. pricing or delivery of the Leap Fit.