Apple ranks highest in customer satisfaction among suppliers of smartwatches, and Samsung holds the same distinction in fitness-band devices, J.D. Power said in two reports released Tuesday. They measure overall satisfaction with smartwatches and fitness trackers among a total canvass of about 6,000 consumers who bought one or both of those devices in the past 12 months, said the researcher. Overall customer satisfaction with smartwatches is 847 (on a scale of 1,000), it said. But nearly two in 10 indicated having experienced one or more problems with their smartwatch, with short battery life as the leading complaint, it said: “When customers experience one or more problems with their smartwatch, there is a significant 21-point drop in overall satisfaction.” Overall customer satisfaction with fitness band devices across all brands is 829 on a scale of 1,000, it said. Ease of use (cited by 48 percent of consumers) in the main purchase consideration in choosing a particular brand of fitness tracker, followed by price (40 percent), brand reputation (38 percent) and positive reviews (36 percent), it said.
Wearable devices of various types will be a $30 billion global market this year, with about a third of that “coming from newly popular products including smartwatches and fitness trackers,” IDTechEx said in a Thursday report. Though the research firm sees the market growing to more than $150 billion by 2026, such growth won’t come without “shake-ups in several prominent sectors, with commoditization hitting hard, and product form factors changing rapidly,” it said. “Fueled by a frenzy of hype, funding and global interest, wearable technology was catapulted to the top of the agenda for companies spanning the entire value chain and world.” Those investments “manifested” themselves in hundreds of new products, it said. “However, the fickle nature of hype is beginning to show, and many companies are now progressing beyond discussing ‘wearables’ to focus on the detailed and varied sub-sectors.”
The Patent and Trademark Office has acted to help inventors and entrepreneurs, including those who merge fashion with technology within the wearable industry, said PTO Chief of Staff Vikrum Aiyer at a Fashion Innovation Alliance event Wednesday evening. Other speakers included Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. Aiyer said PTO created a multilateral forum with other countries to specifically focus on design patents and keep pace with new inventions, implemented a new fast-track program to get patent applications fully resolved within 12 months and is developing an intellectual property assessment tool to help people better understand their strategy. He said the Department of Commerce, DOD and the White House launched a national research and development hub for "advanced textiles and revolutionary fabrics" in April. He said such wearables are "going to be quite game changing for our entire economy." Fashion Innovation Alliance CEO Kenya Wiley said the social and economic value of fashion tech is "increasing rapidly. By the end of 2019, the wearables market will be worth $25 billion." She said companies and entrepreneurs need strong intellectual property protections and policies to guard their brands and protect their inventions. DelBene said that "there's incredible opportunity [in the IoT industry] as we think about devices that can provide us with important information, are connected, but also can look good and are stylish and really make a statement."
Global shipments of wearable devices of all types are expected to reach 101.9 million units by the end of 2016, representing 29 percent growth over 2015, IDC said in a Wednesday report. IDC sees the market shipping 213.6 million devices in 2020, based on a 20.3 percent compound annual growth rate. Wrist-based activity trackers will be 50.5 percent of all wearables shipments this year, followed by smartwatches with 41 percent, IDC said. But those metrics will reverse themselves in 2020, when smartwatches will be 52.1 percent of all shipments, compared with only 28.5 percent for activity trackers, it said. “While smartwatches are in the spotlight today, future growth will come from basic watches that provide some sort of fitness/sleep tracking while not being sophisticated enough to run third party applications on the watch itself.” Through their simplicity, “fitness-focused wrist bands have dominated the market thus far,” it said. With big brands like Fitbit continuing to drive sales, “this category will remain influential and accessible,” it said. “However, that dominance will be challenged by watches as many watch vendors incorporate basic fitness features into their products.” Unit shipments of other forms of wearables through the end of the decade are expected to track well below those of smartwatches and fitness trackers, IDC said. For example, smart eyewear will account for fewer than one in every 10 wearable devices shipped in 2020, it said. "All eyes are on this lucrative category" because it will account for more than 40 percent of total wearables market revenue "due to the high prices for specialized commercial devices," it said.
A fragmented personal tracking market “with no obvious sales and distribution channels” is causing a shift away from traditional family and pet locator devices, said an ABI report Wednesday. GPS personal tracking device shipments will more than double by 2021 as the market moves instead to elderly/health, corporate and personal asset tracking devices using indoor and outdoor location technology, it said. Although traditional markets “still attract attention,” they’re “being forced to consider new areas to find future growth,” said analyst Patrick Connolly, citing the elderly, dementia patients and remote patient monitoring as target segments. ABI predicts location-based health devices will top 2 million shipments by 2021. Shipments of corporate, industrial and personal asset tracking devices are expected to top 25 million by 2021, said Connolly, led by Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, UWB (ultra wideband), sensor fusion, magnet field, proprietary Wi-Fi and LPWAN (low-power wide area networks).
Suggestions that the smartwatch would make the activity tracker obsolete “have so far proved unfounded,” said NPD analyst Eddie Hold, citing a recent wearables report. But the gap is beginning to narrow as the smartwatch adds more advanced capabilities, said Hold. Runners are the first user group to show a slightly higher number of smartwatch owners/users, with 22 percent saying they run on a regular basis vs. 21 percent of activity tracker users, Hold said. But of consumers who exercise several times a week, 47 percent are planning to buy an activity tracker “soon,” he said, citing longer battery life as the primary attraction. Tracker companies must continue to broaden their portfolios to satisfy more exercise-focused consumers, “combining specialist functions with generalist capabilities,” Hold said. Additional exercise/sports activities are creating a need for more smart sensors, said Hold, with one in four consumers saying they would be interested in buying active wear with built-in sensors -- at the right price. The report was based on consumer panel research conducted in April with 5,400 consumers 18 or over.
Medical Wearable Solutions launched a Kickstarter campaign Monday to combat poor posture in children due to hunching over electronic devices. The EyeForcer, which resembles a pair of glasses, is designed to prevent what has been termed "Game Boy Disease" or "Tech Neck," said the company. "As kids continue to bend their necks over devices, they are going to experience permanent damage" to their spines, said co-founder Vahid Sahiholnasab. The glasses, which connect to tablets or smartphones via an Android app, force kids to keep their necks in proper posture to play games, the company said. If users slouch, they get a warning, and more than five warnings results in a system shutdown, it said. The campaign had three backers Monday afternoon, putting up $12,559 toward a goal of $154,580.
Qualcomm launched an SoC for wearables Tuesday, one of several announcements at Computex 2016 in Taipei. The Snapdragon Wear 1100 is designed for targeted-purpose wearables requiring small size, extended battery life, smart sensing, secure location and an “always connected” experience, said the company. Features include a power-save mode, Cat 1 modem with LTE/3G global band support and integrated applications processor for Linux-based applications that can scale to support voice, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, said Qualcomm. The company’s iZat location engine provides multi-GNSS, cell-ID positioning and support for geo-fencing for safety monitoring, said Qualcomm. Target applications include watches for the “connected kid” and the elderly, said Qualcomm, which is collaborating with Borqs, Aricent, Infomark and SurfaceInk with Wear 1100. In another Computex announcement, Qualcomm unveiled the QCA4012 dual-band Wi-Fi chip, with low power, small size and security features designed for connected devices in interference-sensitive environments. Qualcomm’s QCA401x solutions feature software support for Apple's HomeKit, Google's Weave and the AllSeen Alliance's AllJoyn software framework to help address fragmentation in the IoT by allowing products to connect across different brands and communication platforms, Qualcomm said. The company also launched a family of tri-radio 802.11ac platforms aimed at boosting home network capacity and optimizing for better consumer Wi-Fi experiences. Features include multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) and Qualcomm Wi-Fi SON (Self-Organizing Networks), bringing premium technologies to mainstream routers and smart repeaters to help accelerate adoption of IoT devices in the home, said Qualcomm. As connected homes add more devices, “Wi-Fi is being stretched to the limit," said Gopi Sirineni, vice president-product management at Qualcomm Atheros. Qualcomm’s new radio solutions combine two 5 GHz radios and a 2.4 GHz radio to improve connectivity in a variety of network configurations where the 2.4 GHz radio can work with legacy devices to free up the 5 GHz radios for newer 802.11ac products, it said. Two new Qualcomm tri-radio platforms use the 802.11ac IPQ40x9 SoC, which integrates the Qualcomm Internet Processor with two-stream 802.11ac and Gigabit Ethernet, the company said. The platforms can boost speeds of premium routers and repeaters to up to 3.1 Gbps, it said.
Fitbit acquired the wearable payment assets of CE and financial tech company Coin, boosting its ability to develop an “active NFC [near-field communication] payment solution that could be embedded into future Fitbit devices,” and broadening its smart capabilities, the company said Wednesday. The inclusion of Coin’s payment technology into Fitbit products “will further our strategy of making Fitbit products an indispensable part of people's lives,” Fitbit CEO James Park said, but the company has no plans to integrate the payments technology into the 2016 product roadmap. Terms of the deal, completed May 12, weren’t disclosed. The acquisition excludes smart payment products, such as Coin 2.0, Fitbit said.
Building Fossil’s presence in the “connected accessories” market is “a strategic priority that extends across our entire portfolio of brands and is top-of-mind for all of us at the moment,” CEO Kosta Kartsotis said on an earnings call. Technology “is driving innovation in watches” and has become “the fashion trend of today,” because it adds “incremental functionality” to traditional watches, he said Tuesday. “Our ability to provide that functionality into great-looking accessories with various lifestyle brands that customers can identify with is clearly a strategic advantage for us.” Fossil is “uniquely positioned to lead the convergence of style and technology, given our design, production and global distribution capabilities,” he said. The additional “layering in” of the Misfit activity-tracker platform that Fossil acquired last year (see 1511130039) “provides an alternative to the customer, adding additional functionality that will make the category more relevant to consumers,” he said. Fossil's department stores have seen their traditional watch business decline, so the "stores are actually very excited" about wearables, he said in Q&A. That's because "there's so much consumer interest in wearables," and "it brings a younger customer in their store," he said. "There's a bunch of excitement around it. We think that there's an opportunity to change the entire watch department from a typical watch department to a wearable technology department."