CES 2020 sportswatch recap – *BUT NOW* the real fun begins

Is it just me or is CES boring?

Like in other sectors, sports tech companies seem to have found that ‘full-blown exhibitions’ are generally ‘a bit rubbish’, as well as expensive when the full costs of staff and special materials are added to the cost of the show space.

On a much smaller scale, the Wearable Tech Show in London Docklands has followed a similar pattern and stopped being useful to me a couple of years ago.

NOTE WELL :: The real fun should start very soon with NEW PRODUCTS from Garmin as well as many of the other names you already know.

Withings ScanWatch

I like the pretty tech watches that Withings turn out and the ScanWatch was another of those.

The Withings Scanwatch claims to detect ECG and sleep apnea with a combined HR/SpO2sensor.

One of my old school friends has sleep apnea and I was on holiday with them a year or so ago. It was quite shocking to find that he had to be strapped up to a bedside air pump device to keep him alive at night in case his body forgot to breathe. I’m not sure that the ScanWatch will be able to replace something like that, I mean, if the watch battery ran out someone could die…easily.

Suunto 7

Suunto somewhat bucked the trend of ‘nothing happening’ with a VERY interesting announcement. In a peverse way this also probably gained much more media attention than it otherwise would have simply because of a relative lack of interesting sports tech news.

Suunto 7 – it’s here.

Amazfit T-Rex

This is a stupidly, childish name which shows the naivety of some companies’ marketing efforts.

The T-Rex is said by many commentators to be going after the Garmin Fenix market. That assertion too is also total rubbish.

At $140, the T-Rex is squarely targetting the Garmin Instinct end of the adventure smartwatch market. And that’s fine as there is still a big market there to be tapped. Whilst I dislike harping on about battery life, some more serious outdoors uses really do require more than an AAA battery-life to keep you safe and sound. Wear OS devices like the Casio WSD-F30 are going to face that issue, but the T-Rex claims a SWEET 20-day battery life – so all should be good there. And that battery life is even more impressive when you factor in a 1.3″ Amoled screen running at 360x360px. It’s got the toughness rating of MIL-STD-810G which puts it in line with others from Casio, Garmin and Coros.

I spoke recently with Mio Labs about their nice mioPOD . I didn’t realise until then that Mio had divested itself of the PAI activity scoring algorithm than they somewhat bungled in getting to market a few years back. It’s basically a repackaged TRIMP/INTENSITY-MINUTES and I just couldn’t see the point of it and I can’t see why Amazfit have decided to integrate PAI measure rather than those from Firstbeat. Heck, even the MioPOD uses Firstbeat which is a somewhat damming indictment of PAI.

Good luck with that one, Amazfit.

Amazfit Bip-S

Next up we have the Amazfit Bip S which is like an Apple Watch, but cheaper

Yes, at $70 it REALLY is much cheaper than the Apple Watch and at 40 days the battery life is a little longer too (22 hours continuous usage)

Of course at $70 you get what you pay for. Which can be summarised as ‘very little’ although ‘very little’ these days DOES NICELY include GPS, a PPG bio-tracking oHR sensor, swim compatibility, 10 sports modes, remote music control and all that in a 31g lightweight package.

Skagan Falster 3

Like the Suunto 7, this Fossil-made Skagen also uses the best Wear OS chip so far – the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip.

It’s not a sports watch…but it’s quite pretty and at £28 it should be

IEVA Time-C

This somewhat burdensome-looking $500 watch monitors environmental conditions and alerts you accordingly. Having just watched the interesting Chernobyl mini-series, there is definitely some scope to inform us of the dangers in the air that can’t be seen, yet I’m somewhat sceptical that this watch can do that much better than a good-old app that tells us of the forecasted pollution and UV index for our locale.