Let’s start off NOT interesting and then get interesting towards the end.
The Xiaomi Mi Watch was announced a day or so ago. It starts at around $185 which is fairly interesting considering it’s an Apple Watch wannabe, with many similarities in looks. But, hey, China’s goodish at tech rather than original design. Let’s forget patents for a minute, or longer, and then consider that the Mi Watch is running Wear OS. That’s very interesting for me and probably marginally interesting for you guys.
Bear with me on this.
Couple that with the Fitbit acquisition by Google and then in the space of a few days, Wear OS’s future starts to look a little rosier as Fit OS apps will be forced to port to Wear OS. Happy Days.
The Happy Days continue and the folks at Firstbeat then get a little over-excited. Firstly they’ve dreamed up 3 new Firstbeat features…all sleep related (see what I did there?) and then they managed to sell/licence them to someone other than Garmin who might sell a shed-load of units. And then they’ve whacked those same features onto Wear OS. And it’s not just those 3 new features there are a total of 10 features all winging their way to Wear OS on the Mi Watch.
Or, as the Firstbeat sales director said “Ker…bloomin’..ching.”
Except in Finnish.
Of course, before you even know what these features are you’ll be asking me when they are being ported to the Fenix 6, Vivoactive 4 and 945. A: I don’t know but there will be a Kudos prize for the first person who asks that very question, below. Go on, you know you want to.
These are the 3 new features and a very brief explanation. Note that they are on board with 7 other regular FB features which you already know about and which Garmin use.
- Sleep Detection – Effortlessly document your sleeping, waking, and key sleep stages. (Effortlessly record your sleep time and structure – Create a resource for personal accountability – Provides a basis for analysis, interpretation and coaching)
- Sleep Analysis – Discover what sleep means to you and how well you are prepared for the day ahead. (Explore your sleep from the perspective of quality – Sleep quality and duration combine for Sleep Score – Find out what works for you, personally)
- Sleep Coach – Personalized insight from your own life designed to help you sleep better. (Sleep better with input from your daily life – Put your activity and lifestyle tracking to work – Create better routines that promote good sleep)
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It seems like they crossed the street and got the latest Polar metrics… It’s clear that sleep tracking is the new kid on the block. I wonder when Apple will realize it…
they know (Beddit etc)
Yep, they know but hasn’t realized it yet. Beddit can’t be substitute to what everyone else is doing. They need to up their game with battery life to at least 2,5 days
Boomm… Me first!
Nah, I’ll resist. Its a silly question.
Related tho – aren’t the first 2 in the 945 etc already??
Ah, gutted. Not first after all! 😭
Would be cool if FirstBeat sold individual features on the WaerOS Appstore or their website.
it would certainly be cool (but i don’t think it will happen for strategic and commercial reasons)
speculating:
say if there was just one FB app that in-app purchases where you chose which you wanted.
it could work off google fit data and that data might be collected by any wear os app. but i don’t know the inner workings sufficiently to know if that would be feasible
I will state that they will not provide it to the Forerunner 945. Its the ugly older sister of the Fenixes which Garmin seems to be ashamed of (if you look at the firmware release speed regarding big bugs like fukcde pu treadmill running).
Did Firstbeat state something about Naps? Garmin had a manual trigger for it, but deleted it when they introduced automatic detection and never ever got back to naps. Its purely impossible to track them now in Connect.