1 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
Skip to main content

Wearables Archive

Archives for January 2024

Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Oura says it’s chill about Samsung’s Galaxy Ring, but here’s a new stress tracking feature anyway.

The smart ring maker’s Resilience metric rolls out today. It measures how well you handle physiological stress based on your day time stress load — and how well you recover from it.

Oura also had stats to share from its Daytime Stress and Reflections features, which launched in October. Mainly, its users are more stressed on weekends, experience an average of 95.6 minutes of daily stress, and half of all users report about three stressful days a month.

1/2Image: Oura
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
You might want to be extra careful with your pre-ban Apple Watch.

If you got a Series 9 or Ultra 2 before Apple had to remove the blood oxygen feature from new ones on January 17th, congrats!

But if you break your watch doing parkour and replace it with AppleCare, will you lose the feature? That’s a “definite maybe,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. He wrote today in the subscriber version of Power On that Apple has told AppleCare reps that replacements might not have it.

Fossil is quitting smartwatchesFossil is quitting smartwatches
Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Samsung’s eyeing noninvasive blood glucose monitoring.

In a recent Bloomberg interview, Samsung executive Hon Pak says it’s actively pursuing noninvasive blood glucose monitoring and continuous blood pressure checks. Pak declined to give any concrete timeline but said he hopes to bring it to market in five years.

This is all part of a larger push toward health, as evidenced by the forthcoming Galaxy Ring. (Which Bloomberg says is unlikely to work with iOS.) Just take stories like this with a grain of salt. There’s a good reason why this tech is taking so long, and probably won’t end up in wearables the way we expect.

Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Huzzah! The Pixel Watch 3 might come in two sizes.

One of the biggest complaints that reviewers — myself included — had with the Pixel Watch 2 was that it only came in one size: 41mm. That’s fine if you’re petite-wristed like me, but it’s not great if you’ve got a larger frame. Well, 9to5 Google cites an unnamed Google source as saying the company is working on two sizes for the next Pixel Watch. That’s about all we know but if true, it’s a step in the right direction. After all, Apple, Samsung, and Garmin all offer their flagships in multiple sizes.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
“Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 no longer include the blood oxygen feature.”

Following yesterday’s news, that’s the text now shown at the top of Apple’s Series 9 and Ultra 2 websites.

A screenshot of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 website. A banner at the top says “Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 no longer include the blood oxygen feature.”
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Allison Johnson
Allison Johnson
We might see the Galaxy Ring later this year.

Analyst Avi Greengart got — in a very literal sense — some hands-on time with Samsung’s prototype health tracker. He has much more to say about it than Samsung did in its presentation, including that it may ship in 2024. Guess it really is the year of the smart ring.