From the Editor’s Desk: Smartwatches, the zombie product category

Taking a quick break from vacation to get back up to speed with the mobile world.

I’ve used my fair share of smartwatches over the past few years, starting with Pebbles, then picking up with Android Wear and watching Samsung figure out its wearable strategy with the each iteration of the Gear line. In that time I’ve also spent plenty of time with fitness bands on my wrist, which in the past year have turned into mini smartwatches in their own right. Smartwatches have evolved quite a bit, but one thing has remained the same: sales are low, and no company seems to be able to consistently ship them in considerable numbers.

Samsung finally stuck with an idea for two generations of Gear.

I just spent a week with the Gear S3, which marks the first time Samsung released consecutive Gears with a consistent vision and feature set. The Gear S2 was easily the best smartwatch the company had ever made, and the Gear S3 is basically a bigger, better, more feature-packed version of it. The problem is it’s huge — too big for most people’s wrists, and it’s big because it has so many features … a majority of which most people don’t care about and will never touch. Again this is Samsung’s best smartwatch yet, but with some critical (and seemingly basic) flaws like its massive size, I’m not sure how Samsung can sell enough to matter. Particularly on the scale that a company like Samsung expects to sell products.

In the world of Android Wear, things are amazingly stagnant. ASUS finally rolled out its ZenWatch 3 last month to what seemed like little excitment, of course partially due to its launch without the new Android Wear 2.0 update that itself was pushed back by Google. Other manufacturers seem to be in a holding pattern, delaying (or shelving) products for that release of the new software in the first few months of 2017. Google, for its part, keeps on selling a somewhat-diverse set of rather expensive smartwatches on the Google Store. Moto, which has arguably made the most interesting mass-market Android Wear watches, has effectively called it quits with smartwatches this week, saying there just isn’t enough demand for a brand new smartwatch year after year.

Smartwatches are the walking dead … but at least fitness wearables are showing some progress.

It was fitting, then, to see this week that Fitbit seems poised to buy Pebble for some $40 million, a sliver of the price tag it reportedly commanded just a year ago. Pebble is of course a company that has smartwatches as its sole product, not supported by other lines like the likes of Samsung and Moto, and is selling fewer than half a million watches a year. The Pebble story contains many ups and downs, but even those of us who jumped right on the bandwagon with the first Pebble had given up on the idea of a small, independent smartwatch maker keeping its head above water … to say nothing of actually being profitable in the long term.

So where the heck are smartwatches going? Right now it doesn’t seem like they’re going much of anywhere. The big companies like Samsung (hey, and Apple) can afford to keep making them purely from an ecosystem point of view, but we have enough data at this point to show that nobody can really make any money selling smartwatches right now. For me, the growth seems to be coming from the lower end of the “smart wearable” spectrum: think fitness bands and activity trackers. Devices like the Samsung Gear Fit 2 and Fitbit Blaze are great because they’re small, comfortable and inexpensive when compared to “full” smartwatches, yet they have lots of the same functionality. That makes sense for a lot of people who don’t want to commit to a full smartwatch.

A few more weekend thoughts to wrap things up:

• I put together a list of my favorite tech of 2016, which kind of functions as a holiday gift guide of sorts. If I haven’t used it personally, it didn’t make it on the list — I think there are a ton of great picks in there, though.
• I’m using Samsung’s Nougat beta on the Galaxy S7, and aside from a few performance bugs it seems like a nice update.
• This is very much still Samsung’s software with Android 7.0 features underneath, though: don’t expect your Galaxy S7 to look like a Pixel when it gets the update.
• Now the question is, how long do we all have to wait for various regions and carriers to get the update out? As the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge get on in age a bit, it’d be great to get this update out.
• I’m spending a week in Costa Rica, and it’s my first time being any further south than northern Mexico. It’s a beautiful country, and I can already recommend that people consider visiting.
• I left my OnePlus 3 at home this week while I travel, but I’m excited to get back home and see how the Nougat update looks. Alex seems to like it already.

That’s it for now; I’ll be back in the U.S. and back at things on AC late next week.

GoPro sells the Karma’s stabilizer grip by itself for $300

No, you still can’t buy GoPro’s Karma drone in the wake of the recall, but you can get a taste of the technology that came in the box. GoPro has started selling the Karma Grip, the stabilization wand that takes the jitters out of your Hero5 Black or (with a $30 harness) Hero4 Black/Silver camera footage. Spend $300 and you can capture a bike ride or snowboarding adventure without making your friends motion sick. There’s a mounting ring to attach it to wearable accessories, too, so you don’t have to give up one of your hands while you use it.

The accessory is available now, but be prepared to wait if you have a Hero5 Session. Its harness won’t arrive until sometime in spring 2017, so you’ll have to make do when documenting your winter expeditions. Just remember that you’re not locked into the GoPro ecosystem if you want handheld stabilization, especially if you’re willing to use someone else’s cameras.

Source: GoPro

After Math: Weird science

It’s been a strange week for the scientific arts. The speed of light might not be as stable as we thought, carbon nanotubes have been used to freeze boiling water, a bunch of schoolkids recreated a $750 compound for $25 and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has decided that it doesn’t believe in climate change. Numbers, because how else will we know how fast the Earth is warming?

Trump defense secretary pick serves on Theranos’ board

President-elect Trump’s rapidly growing circle of advisers and cabinet members continues to raise eyebrows among the tech-savvy. The incoming leader has picked retired General James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense, and the Marine has been a devoted champion of Theranos — you know, the blood testing firm facing both a criminal investigation and a slew of lawsuits over its technology claims. He’s on the company’s board of directors, but email obtained by the Washington Post shows that Mattis bent over backwards to support Theranos in the years when he was leading US Central Command.

Mattis was determined to give the rapid blood testing a field test in Afghanistan, and told Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes that he was “kicking this [plan] into overdrive” back in 2012. He’s known to have personally called a Major General at the US Army’s medical research headquarters, as well. And when military regulations expert Lt. Col. David Shoemaker raised concerns that Theranos’ testing wasn’t FDA-compliant, Holmes appealed to Mattis to correct the “blatantly false information,” and he swung into action by telling Shoemaker and others that there needed to be a comparison study in Afghanistan “ASAP.”

There aren’t any indications that Mattis broke rules, but he came close. Near the end of 2012, Col. Kent Kester claimed there was an “intentional effort” to “short-cut” procedures and get Theranos on the battlefield. Shoemaker even got email from an unnamed military staffer who said the Navy Attorney General was annoyed by Theranos’ attempts to circumvent the rulebook.

This doesn’t mean that Mattis will start cheerleading for Theranos in his Defense Secretary role. An ethics official warned the General against representing the company in front of the military once he had retired, for one thing. Also, Theranos’ dream is rapidly falling apart between lab closures and intense legal scrutiny. However, Mattis may have to rethink his board role if he wants to avoid conflict-of-interest accusations, even if he has no intention of hawking Theranos as a defense chief.

Via: ProPublica (Twitter)

Source: Theranos, Washington Post (1), (2)