Lauren Goode | The Verge

The battle of the basic wearables

2025-01-29T09:45:07-05:00

As long as I’ve been covering wearable tech, the category has always been on the cusp of something. But it’s also been hampered by a series of ifs that still make wearables impractical for a lot of people: if battery life was better; if it was smarter; if it was more accurate; if it looked nicer; if it offered enough value to wear it on my wrist / body / face all the time.

However, the upside of anything that feels not fully realized is that there’s always room for improvement, which means the companies that make wearable tech keep on trying. Like Fitbit: it starting selling wireless health trackers in 2009 (in the early days, they were basically techie pedometers), and more recently, it jumped on the smartwatch bandwagon. First, there was the Ionic smartwatch (it didn’t do all that well), and now, the company has just released the Versa, a $200 smartwatch with Fitbit-standard fitness features. In what is perhaps one of the biggest testaments to incrementalism across the whole smartwatch market, it looks a heck of a lot like an Apple Watch, and it performs a lot of the same functions, too.

So in the season finale of Versus, “we” compare the Fitbit Versa with the entry-level Apple Watch Series 1. Fitbit really makes a compelling case with the Versa, which undercuts the Apple Watch Series 1 in price; is compatible with multiple operating systems, not just iOS; and even tracks swimming, whereas the Apple Watch Series 1 is only “splash and water resistant.” But the Apple Watch — any Apple Watch, not just Series 1 — is integrated so tightly with iPhones that things like messages and notifications are just that much better on Apple’s smartwatch then they are on Fitbit’s.

Those might sound like small things, but when smartwatches are still in a position of having something to prove, every tiny ping and buzz and tap and micro-app matters. Otherwise, a smartwatch becomes an overpriced irritation on your wrist, one you can’t help but be aware of. It’s maybe the greatest irony of wearable tech: many of the products are rolled out in big splashes and bold claims, when, really, the whole point of well-designed wearable tech is that you should be able to forget about it entirely.

Apple CEO Tim Cook pounds the privacy drum in wake of Facebook scandal

2018-03-28T12:55:59-04:00

Apple chief executive Tim Cook spoke out on privacy during an MSNBC interview hosted by Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher earlier today, saying that services that “[traffic] in your personal lives” are invading peoples’ privacy and emphasizing that Apple sees privacy as a “human right” and a “civil liberty.” He also said that he finds it “creepy” when “all of a sudden something is chasing me around the web,” referring to sophisticated ad targeting.

Cook’s remarks come just as Facebook’s own chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is reportedly expected to testify before Congress around the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal. Facebook has been caught in a medial maelstrom over its lax approach to data sharing; specifically over the Cambridge Analytica issue, through which it was recently revealed that Facebook users’ data was being used by the firm with the intent to influence the 2016 US election.

MSNBC’s Hayes and Recode’s Swisher pressed Cook on the issue of privacy and regulation, which sparked the remarks from Cook.

“We’ve never believed that these detailed profiles of people, that have incredibly deep personal information that is patched together from several sources, should exist,” Cook said. Later, he added that those detailed profiles of consumers “can be abused against our democracy. It can be abused by advertisers as well.”

Apple has long touted privacy as one of the draws of being in the Apple ecosystem, and Cook underscored this again, claiming that Apple “could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers” but that the company has elected not to do it.

When asked specifically about the potential regulation of tech companies that are collecting and using consumer data, sometimes without a clear explanation of what that data is being used for, Cook said he’s “personally not a fan of regulation.”

“I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self regulation. Regulation can have unexpected consequences, right? However, I think we’re beyond that,” Cook continued. “I do think it’s time that a set of people think deeply about what can be done.” The remarks echoed what he said in China over the weekend, when Cook described Facebook’s current predicament as “dire” and suggested “some well-crafted regulation is necessary.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t necessarily seem opposed to that idea.

Despite what Cook said directly, and obliquely, about Facebook, the fact remains that Facebook is an app in Apple’s App Store. Apple has policies of what is and isn’t allowed there, and so Hayes and Swisher pressed him on whether Facebook’s privacy issues might lead Apple to do something with that power.

“The question for us is, [does Facebook] meet the requirements of the App Store and do they meet their policy,” Cook answered. “I think well-crafted regulation could change that. If that happened or if we raised the bar some … we would have to look at it.”

And when Cook was asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s shoes amid all this controversy, Apple’s chief executive was incredibly direct. “I wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said.

The full interview will air on MSNBC on April 6th.

Apple leans on multimedia to convince schools that iPads are better than Chromebooks

2018-03-28T09:14:30-04:00

Apple has a Google problem — in education, that is. Google has won over a large portion of the education market in the US, something that can be credited to both the cheapness of web-based Chromebooks and the accessibility of Google’s apps. Apple knows this, so yesterday, it hosted a “field trip” — that’s actually what it was called — for press, teachers, and student journalists at a magnet high school in Chicago.

The event may as well have been called “Sorry you can’t make a cool video with a Chromebook.”

That’s the point Apple seemed to want to underscore as it presented another iPad and a new and slightly updated suite of apps for teachers and students. The new, $329 9.7-inch iPad ($299 for students) supports Apple’s fancy Pencil, as well as a new stylus from Logitech called Crayon. Need to scribble some notes or use a fine point to edit a photo? You can do that on a cheap iPad now. The school iPad also supports ARKit, which means it can run sophisticated AR apps. One example is an app that lets you dissect a virtual frog. (You don’t even need to Google “formaldehyde.”) And there’s a new Apple-designed curriculum called Everyone Can Create, which joins Everyone Can Code as part of a suite of apps for, well, making things: music, art, videos.

Apple even cited examples of students using the Clips app to make videos. Remember Clips?

Apple even cited examples of students using the Clips app to make videos. Never mind that I haven’t seen many real people using Clips in the past year, outside of people at Apple.

“We’ve been at this for 40 years, and we care deeply about education,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said onstage at the event. “We believe that our place at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts makes it possible for us to create powerful products and tools that amplify … creativity.”

There’s no question that Apple has a long history of appealing to creative types with its technology. The bigger question is whether that approach will help it grab some of the education market back from Google, which partners with a variety of manufacturers for Chromebooks and has emphasized the utility of apps like Docs and Gmail.

Google’s occupation of classrooms has been a swift one. Last year, Chromebooks were estimated to have won half of the market share for personal computers and tablets in the US education market, up from a mere 9 percent in 2013.

The big question is whether Apple’s emphasis on multimedia can convince educators that the iPad is better than a utilitarian Chromebook

A large part of this is cost; Chromebooks sell for as low as $149. Another reason is device management. It’s pretty easy for teachers and students alike to sign in and out of web-based Chromebooks as needed, whereas Apple didn’t introduce multi-user features for iPads in classrooms until 2016. And Chromebooks run on Chrome OS, Google’s always-up-to-date operating system.

But another big factor is Google’s software-centric approach. “Apple is fundamentally a hardware company, so they want people to fall in love with their devices and their user interface,” says Trace Urdan, a managing director at Tyton Partners who follows the knowledge and education market. “Google has been playing the long game, which is to get all of these kids into the Google apps. They’ve created enough utility and made it easy enough so it’s become the defacto document-sharing, collaboration tool in schools.”

“Google’s goal is to get everyone into Google,” Urdan added.

And it’s working: more than half of the students in primary schools and secondary schools in the US use Google apps like Gmail and Docs, which means more than 30 million kids use them. This is a number that was first shared in a New York Times report last spring; a Google spokesperson told The Verge that data is still accurate.

Apple’s own collaboration apps and cloud-based features weren’t ignored at yesterday’s event. Apps like Pages, Keynote, Numbers, were all shown onstage and are getting fresh updates, along with Clips and GarageBand. A spokesperson confirmed that Apple’s new Schoolwork app, which lets teachers assign and manage homework and projects, will be easily accessible through the web at iCloud.com. And students will get 200GB of free iCloud storage.

Apple also said that Schoolwork will keep all student data private.

But the overall theme of the event was about making things, not just writing them. After the main stage event, press and other attendees — who were given “class schedules” at the start of the day — were guided through robot-programming, music-making, anatomy-sketching demos in large garage-like rooms. Ditch the fuddy-duddy clamshell, Apple seemed to say, and use touchscreens and high-resolution tablet cameras and stylus pens instead. And it’s obviously an appeal the company is making not just to administrators and teachers, but to students themselves.

“They are creators of content, rather than consumers of information,” Cassey Williams, a teacher from Woodberry Down Primary School in London, said about her students during the morning’s presentation. Williams was one of four teachers that Apple brought onstage to show how her students are using iPads in classrooms.

Of course, a lot of people still like laptops with keyboards. And when you’re a school district facing a giant deficit — as is the case for Chicago Public Schools, the district where the event was held — both upfront costs and operational costs for new technology are still a large consideration. Even with the student discount, Apple’s new iPad, keyboard, and stylus combo exceeds $400.

But, Urban says, the tide could also turn in Apple’s favor as younger kids, who are quite literally growing up with iPads, get further into the education system.

“When you get up into the older grades, that’s where Chromebook comes on strong because then they have the ability to use the keyboard. But that’s not as much of a barrier anymore,” he says. “When you’re talking about little kids and educational content, you’re talking about videos and gaming and a market that extends from the school world into the consumer world.”

Fitbit’s Versa is its best smartwatch yet

2018-03-26T09:00:07-04:00

Fitbit needs a win. For several years, it was the clear leader in wearables, but its transition to smartwatches has been bumpy: the Fitbit Ionic didn’t sell as well as expected, and Apple has now slid back into the top spot in the global wearables market. Fitbit has insisted that more advanced health tracking is coming — stuff that could potentially track sleep apnea or glucose levels — but in the meantime, it just needs something to sell.

That’s where the Fitbit Versa comes in. It’s a simplified, GPS-free, less expensive version of the Ionic watch, one that’s supposed to have mass-market appeal. It also looks nicer than the Ionic, and as I sit here wearing a rose gold Versa with a watermelon pink band, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this is the Fitbit smartwatch for women. But Fitbit has avoided explicitly marketing it this way, similar to the way Garmin describes the Fenix 5S as a fitness watch for smaller wrists.

The Versa also has a battery life of four days on one charge, something that must feel like a thumb in Apple’s eye.

Let’s just say this: I think the $200 Versa has a good chance of appealing to lots of people — but it’s still not perfect.

I’m going to get the bad stuff out of the way to save time for people who really care about smartwatch notifications. The way the Fitbit Versa handles notifications is bad, same as it was on the Ionic. Text message notifications from iOS, in particular, are frustrating. They’re not remotely actionable on the watch, meaning there’s no way to respond to them. (The Versa doesn’t have a speaker or microphone.) Fitbit says that eventually it will roll out quick replies for Android phone users, but that won’t happen until May.

Text message notifications from iOS, in particular, are frustrating on the Versa

But even if or when shortcut responses for Android roll out, there’s still the way message notifications are displayed on the watch. They roll down from the top, rather than briefly taking priority over the whole screen, and the actual text is tiny. Swiping left on any notification will expand it a bit, but the text size remains the same. Multimedia message notifications don’t display the actual media. I also found there was an annoying lag between when I first felt a notification vibration on my wrist, and when the notification would appear on the display; more times than not, I ended up having to tap the watchface just to see what the alert was.

Phone call notifications were more fluid. I could at least accept and reject phone calls from the watch. The Versa shows calendar notifications, too. But the overall notification experience on the Versa does make you wonder what smartwatches are actually for: are they for health and fitness? Are they supposed to do the things a phone does? Or are they notification devices? The Versa is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more of the former, and not so much the latter.

Another gripe I have about the Versa is that switching watch bands is unnecessarily complicated. Score one for the Apple Watch and any other watch with quick-release straps.

That brings me to the physical build of the watch. The Fitbit Ionic smartwatch was hard-angled and severe looking. The Fitbit Versa is still square-shaped, but with rounded edges and a touchscreen display that slopes into the watch’s anodized aluminum casing. You could even say — and many have already said it — that it looks like an Apple Watch. From afar, it really does.

If you peer at it, you’ll see differences, of course. The watch casing has a beveled edge. The Versa has three physical buttons on it; there’s no “digital crown.” And the LCD display is actually a square cutout, which means you can see bezels if you look closely enough. (That also means Fitbit had enough space to cram the word “fitbit” onto the watchface, a questionable design choice.) The watch comes in black, silver, and rose gold.

From afar, the Fitbit Versa looks a lot like an Apple Watch — but there are physical differences

One of the nicest aspects of the Versa’s design is how light it is and how flat it lies against the wrist. There’s no bulging underside, no aggressive lugs. In fact, the watch bands taper downward specifically to avoid wider-than-necessary dimensions. This is one of the reasons I think it will appeal to so many people. It’s really easy to wear the Versa 24/7 and forget that you’re wearing it, except for when you need it.

One of Fitbit’s selling points has always been that its devices are compatible with different operating systems, and the same is true with the Versa. It pairs with iPhones, Android phones, even Windows phones. (Those still exist!) It will sync across Windows desktops, too.

Another nice thing about Fitbits is that they’re easy to use. With the Versa, the watch’s UI has been redesigned a little bit to give wearers even easier access to their daily step count, heart rate data, and exercise logs.

The Versa tracks everything you’d expect a Fitbit to track, with built-in GPS being the main thing that’s missing. It measures steps, stairs climbed, calories burned, sleep, distance traveled throughout the day (relying on accelerometer data), heart rate, resting heart rate, cardio score (an approximation of VO2 max, based on cardio exercise data), and a variety of specific exercises. Right now on the loaner watch I’ve been wearing, I have my seven exercise shortcuts set to Run, Swim, Treadmill, Weights, Yoga, Spinning, and Bike. But there are more you can access in the mobile app.

Some of these metrics, like sleep tracking and heart rate tracking, require a leap of faith on the part of the user, which is to say you can expect a certain margin of error. It’s also difficult to say, as a reviewer, how well these work without comparing the Fitbit data to data that’s been rigorously recorded in testing labs.

I did notice that the heart rate readings during exercise sessions appeared to adjust a lot more quickly than it has in previous Fitbit versions. (So, if I wasn’t working out very hard but then suddenly sprinted during spin class, the heart rate reading would spike almost immediately. In the past, there’s been some latency there.) The Versa accurately tracked three distance workouts I did — one hike and two outdoor bike rides — though it was pulling GPS data from my phone for these.

Fitbit now claims it has more than 550 apps and watchfaces in its app gallery, which is what sets newer products like the Ionic and the Versa apart from the Blaze, the first touchscreen watch Fitbit ever made. There’s still something unsophisticated, something Pebble-y about the app gallery. Some of the apps are recognizable, like The New York Times app, Flipboard, Strava, or Surfline. Others are not especially useful (like a flashlight app). One of the watchfaces I installed eventually prompted me to pay for it, which would have been nice information to have before I downloaded it.

The basic version of the Versa that’s shipping in the US won’t have NFC, which means no tap-to-pay

There are other features that come with the Versa that I either haven’t used much in the past week or don’t find as appealing. One is Fitbit Coach, a freemium workout app that includes some complimentary exercise guides and costs $7.99 per month for the next level of workouts. I’ve never particularly liked having to look down at my watch in between each workout set, so something like this just isn’t my jam, but some people might like it. Also, the Fitbit Versa and Ionic will soon let female wearers track their menstrual cycles, though that hasn’t rolled out yet.

Another feature is access to Deezer, a streaming music service that lets users download offline playlists to the Versa so you can “stream” music from it. Deezer, which is based in France, is well-known in Europe, but not here in the US. I’m already subscribed to Apple Music and Spotify, so I’m not looking for another $10-per-month service.

Speaking of other markets, the basic, $200 Versa won’t have NFC in the US, which means you can’t pay for stuff with it (like you can with the Ionic). Fitbit cites relatively slow adoption rates in the US as the reason for this. A “special edition” version will include NFC, for $30 more.

There’s a natural comparison to be made with the entry-level, Series 1 Apple Watch. The Versa is less expensive, first off. It works with Android phones as well as iPhones. And its feature list is uncannily close to the Apple Watch’s; it even has a “Relax” app that’s similar to the Apple Watch’s “Breathe” app. Neither of these watches have built-in GPS. And, with the brightness set to auto, the Versa’s battery lasted from a Monday afternoon to a Friday morning before I had to charge it again. (Even then, it had 21 percent left. I just didn’t want it to die during the day.)

The Series 1 Apple Watch does let you pay for things from your wrist, though. And if you’re an iPhone user, the notification and overall app experience on the Apple Watch is far better than the experience on the Fitbit Versa. There are little things to consider, too, like how you can unlock your MacBook with an Apple Watch. Fitbit also doesn’t share data to Apple Health, another drawback for iPhone users.

So it all comes down to how much you want to pay, how tied into the Apple ecosystem you are, and how much you care about battery life. Fitbit may have a hard time luring hardcore Apple fans away, especially since the Versa is coming to market years after the original Apple Watch. On the flip side, it may be appealing to Android users, as Google’s Wear OS smartwatch platform has stagnated at this point.

Ultimately, I think the Versa has a chance to appeal to everyone other than those hardcore Apple users — and that’s saying something for Fitbit right now.

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We need to talk about tablets

2025-01-29T09:45:08-05:00

Late last year, Apple ran a video ad framing the iPad Pro as a Real Computer, a narrative it has pushed since it first launched the tablet and smart keyboard coupling — but it’s one that hasn’t stuck. Apple did this not by hitting viewers over the head with the specs of its big tablet or fancy pencil, but through a bit of reverse psychology: at the end of the ad, the young iPad Pro user asks innocently, “What’s a computer?”

Point being: the whole notion of a “computer” is being redefined for generations of people who are being raised on (or by) touchscreen devices with desktop-grade processing power.

The thing is, the tablet market is actually on the decline when you look at global shipments, and it has been for awhile. There are different ways to categorize tablets; research firm IDC differentiates “slate” tablets from “detachable tablets,” which means you can say that one of these categories has slowed but the other is on the up-and-up, and it would be true.

There’s a convergence happening, for sure. It’s a place where tablets now have very powerful processors and laptops now have touchscreen and stylus pens. But none of these things make it any easier to say definitively what a computer is in the modern age. People tend to hang on to their tablets longer, and replace them less frequently, which aligns them more with laptops; but slate tablets also run on mobile operating systems, which means few people are thinking “Let me edit my entire feature-length film” or “Let me work on that massive Excel spreadsheet” on them.

I can’t promise that we manage to come to a conclusive answer in the latest episode of Versus, but it’s a topic that’s at least worthy of a good debate. And isn’t that what Versus is all about?

AR company Avegant has replaced its CEO and laid off more than half its staff

2018-03-17T21:36:33-04:00

Light-field display and “mixed reality” startup Avegant laid off a significant portion of its staff in recent weeks, and also replaced its CEO with one of the company founders, according to people familiar with the company’s operations.

Avegant’s headcount was reduced last month to fewer than 20 people, and those who remain work largely in R&D or on the technology partnership side. Prior to the layoffs, there had been somewhere between 40 and 50 employees, one person said.

Former chief executive officer Jeorg Tewes was also replaced by company founder Ed Tang in February, these people said, a change that also appears in both executives’ LinkedIn profiles.

When reached by phone, Tang declined to comment on the company’s organizational changes, but did confirm the CEO appointment. He also said that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, and that it’s in the process of closing a $10 million funding round to work on the next generation of its technology.

Last year, The Verge profiled Avegant’s efforts in light-field display technology, which involved a reference design of a headset that projected digital objects in front of the person wearing the headset. The prototype we saw was tethered to a computer, but Avegant had actively been working on reducing the compute power needed for the technology, which would mean, in the future, making an AR headset that was not tethered and was therefore more mobile.

Avegant made clear at the time that it was not planning to sell its headsets directly to consumers – unlike its first product, the Avegant Glyph – and instead said it was partnering with larger hardware makers to sell its technology. The status of those partnerships is unclear.

Avegant’s social media accounts have also been notably quiet, with the last public-facing updates from the company shared in January.

The Bay Area-based company company was first founded in 2012 and has raised more than $50 million in funding.

In defense of real books

2025-01-29T09:45:09-05:00

The latest trend in tech appears to be hating tech, whether that means breaking up with our phones, taking breaks from online news (if that’s what you call a “break”), or disavowing Facebook. Some of this tech backlash is deserved and long overdue. In just the span of a decade, some of us have become unhealthily attached to our products and services while the tech companies that make them profit off our so-called addictions. But some of this desire to rage against the blue light of our screens feels like a futile attempt to keep tech out of our lives in places where it’s now inevitable.

One of the tactics I’ve used in recent months to force myself to take a break from screens is to buy more real books (something Recode’s Kara Swisher and I talked about in this two-part podcast series about tech addiction). I know, I know: real books, how obvious and twee. But there’s something to be said about having a stack of books lying around, aside from the guilt that may come with not finishing them. I’m now much more inclined to pick up one of these when I have a few free minutes instead of my phone. And there’s also something to be said for distraction-free reading; I have yet to receive a single text message or Slack notification directly on the paper book I’m reading.

Those kinds of notifications don’t pop up on Kindles, either, so that’s not to say that Kindles contribute to our distraction problems. Kindles are also wonderful for making books and all kinds of text immediately accessible to people, a digital consolidation of that stack of books sitting on your nightstand. But it’s also another screen, another thing to connect to the internet, and another thing to charge. So in this week’s Versus, we debate the value of having an entire digital library at your fingertips, versus dog-eared pages and siloed reading.

Fitbit will start tracking your period in an attempt to add more value to Fitbit

2018-03-13T09:38:12-04:00

Fitbit’s new smartwatch Versa isn’t being overtly marketed at women; doing that might alienate its male customers, who currently make up more than half of Fitbit’s user base. But today’s Versa launch coincides with plans for a new app feature that is very clearly aimed at women: period tracking. It’s yet another attempt by Fitbit to draw users into its ecosystem as the company struggles to maintain its lead in the wearable market.

Here’s how Fitbit’s period-tracking feature is supposed to work when it rolls out this spring: it’s free and will work not only on the Versa watch, but on the Fitbit Ionic watch and in the mobile app as well. If you indicate during the Fitbit onboarding process that you’re female, the app will ask if you want to opt in to tracking your menstrual cycle. Once you do that and begin telling the app when your period starts and ends, the app will show your predicted period week as pink, and your predicted fertile window as blue.

You won’t be able to manually annotate anything in the app, but it will ask you to tap on a series of icons describing premenstrual symptoms, the consistency of your bodily fluids, whether you have headaches or acne, your sexual activity, and more. If you happen to become pregnant or you take the morning-after pill — both period disruptors — the app will want to know that, too.

This is all supposed to help inform its users, who, Fitbit says, had been requesting period tracking as a “top five” feature for a while. And maybe in the not-so-far future, this could help people spot patterns around their periods and other health metrics (though Fitbit won’t account for things like heart rate data in the early versions of its period-tracking feature).

But Fitbit is also saying this isn’t meant to be a conception or contraception aid, and in a lot of ways it’s still not clear what its long-term goals are in gathering this data. Will this data eventually lead to more serious fertility tracking or feed into the company’s corporate health initiatives? Unclear. It’s all part of the “holistic picture” for health and fitness, the company says.

In the near-term, Fitbit thinks it can help users at least spot individual patterns over time. “The period can be the canary in the coalmine,” said Dr. Katharine White, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University’s School of Medicine. White teamed up with Fitbit to help design this portion of the app and create some of the medical content that will publish along with it.

“The app not only lets you record the days that you bleed but how heavy the flow is. So if your period is heavier for longer than it should be, it could be a fibroid,” White said, as an example of how period-tracking can add value. She later added that menstrual cycles are part of a category that is “underresearched at a large population level.”

For Fitbit, though, that value-add needs to come quick. Fitbit has found itself muddling through a transition period over the past year, just reported dismal holiday earnings, and is no longer the top wearable maker in the US. It now wants to get into more serious health tracking. Presumably, the stickier you make a digital health app, and the more stuff people start pouring into it, the more inclined they are to keep using your product. The question is whether a feature like menstrual cycle tracking is really going to add that much value to Fitbit or whether it’s a desperate attempt to catch up to apps — including Apple’s Health app — that have been doing this for years.

There’s no doubt that there is a market for these kinds of apps, despite how inaccurate some of the fertility-focused ones are. There are more than 2,000 OB-GYN-related apps available in app stores, and Fitbit says that 24 percent of US adult women use some kind of period-tracking app today. Again, this has been a top-requested feature from Fitbit’s user base. The company wanted to address the needs of female users. Thankfully, it went about it in a more thoughtful way than just pinking and shrinking a smartwatch.

More thoughtful than just pinking and shrinking a smartwatch

Aside from streamlining app features — Fitbit users now don’t have to open up a separate period-tracking app, if they’re into this sort of thing — Fitbit isn’t coming out with the kind of pitch that differentiates it from other period-tracking apps. Period-tracking app Clue has cultivated a loyal fan base, and with good reason: as The Cut points out, the app lets users track “up to 31 possible categories, including cravings, digestion, hair, skin, emotions, motivation, sex, and somewhat curiously, one called ‘party.’” When PayPal co-founder Max Levchin launched fertility-focused app Glow back in 2013, he launched with it a kind of mutual insurance fund that’s supposed to help pay for fertility treatments if a person didn’t get pregnant within 10 months of using the app.

Then there’s Apple. Apple launched menstruation tracking in its Health app back in 2015, and other apps (like Clue) can also share data to Apple’s HealthKit. Fitbit doesn’t share data with HealthKit.

If anything, it seems Fitbit is being careful not to define the feature’s purpose out of the gate because of the controversy surrounding fertility-tracking apps and gadgets. The Fitbit app will show users their period weeks and likely fertile windows, and yet, Conor Heneghan, Fitbit’s lead research scientist, said, “We’re definitely not trying to say we can predict ovulation or fertile periods at [launch] time.”

“The one area both patients and doctors really need to be careful on, is when [an app] is used for contraception, whether natural family planning or fertility awareness. Because that can literally affect a woman’s whole life,” said Nathaniel DeNicola, a member of the faculty at George Washington University Hospital and co-chair of the telehealth task force for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (DeNicola was not briefed on the Fitbit news.) “There have been some apps marketed solely as a contraceptive device, which could be misrepresenting their effectiveness.”

So, version one of this feature really just looks like it will be your basic period-tracking app. Fitbit almost certainly has grander plans in mind for what it intends to do with all of this info, but right now it’s all about “educating people simply on what ‘fertility’ means,” as White said. Maybe that’s all Fitbit needs if its users decide that it’s just easier to do all of this period logging in Fitbit’s app, right next to their steps and sleep and calories and everything else.

Or maybe this is really just another tactic for Fitbit to keep a large portion of its user base coming back to its app month after month, even if its hardware sales are dwindling.

Toshiba has made a completely unsexy pair of AR glasses

2025-01-29T09:45:09-05:00

Nascent technologies are sometimes described as solutions in search of a problem, and that’s certainly something that could be said for AR glasses right now. AR glasses have been positioned as everything from phone replacements to sports goggles to entertainment devices to work tools, but they are still far from mainstream in any one area.

That last value proposition is what Toshiba is going for with its new dynaEdge AR Smart Glasses, a new head-mounted display tethered to a PC pocket pack. The PC maker is launching the product today, starting at $1,899, and it’s aiming it straight at business users.

To call this product AR Glasses is a little bit of a misnomer; it’s not so much augmented reality as it is a heads-up display. Toshiba says it considers it more “assisted reality” than augmented. And the “glasses” part is really a single arm that can be attached to different form factors, whether that’s glasses, safety goggles, or a hard hat. All of the processing power happens on a Toshiba dynaEdge mini-PC that’s tethered to the display arm via USB-C. (Something like Microsoft HoloLens, on the other hand, is an entire Windows 10 PC sitting on your head.)

But Toshiba’s goal is to sell something that lets workers view documents and PDFs, record and send photos, and even launch remote video chats directly from the headset, all without having to use their hands.

The dynaEdge Mobile Mini PC actually launched last August, so that part isn’t new. The configuration I demoed briefly was running on Windows 10 and had an Intel Core M processor, 6GB of RAM, 512GB of internal storage, and is supposed to last up to six hours on a single charge. The mini PC also has a cluster of five physical buttons on it, but again, the whole idea is to not have to manually control the PC.

Instead, you’re supposed to use a touch-sensitive swipe pad or voice control on the head-mounted display arm, the “glasses” part of the equation. The arm also has a proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, LED light, GPS, a compass, a gyroscope, camera, speaker, microphone, and, of course, the display, a 640 x 360, quarter-inch-sized display.

Not all of the functions were working on the pre-production unit I tried, including the swipe pad and voice control. So I mostly navigated the tiny Windows desktop in the upper corner of my eyesight by using the buttons on the mini PC in my hand.

I also didn’t find the dynaEdge AR glasses to be super comfortable in the short time that I wore them. It was challenging to really see the display in a way that didn’t make me feel a little cross-eyed. Fortunately, the display arm is adjustable and can be switched to the left side of the face for people who are left-eye dominant. Once I did that, they felt slightly more comfortable. (Attaching the arm to a more stable hardhat, instead of a pair of flimsy frames, also helped.)

I was able to make a test phone call over Wi-Fi, using a Toshiba app built on top of Skype For Business. I called a “remote colleague” — really a representative from Toshiba sitting across the remote — and sent a photo to him from my headset, which he was able to mark up. This is something Toshiba envisions will be used for remote troubleshooting. I could also view a PDF of various parts of a jet engine, the idea being that a worker would be able to quickly confirm the name or placement of an engine part.

These kinds of work-centric use cases for face computers might not be as exciting as drone-flying apps or live-streamed volumetric basketball games, but Toshiba’s hardly alone in thinking that workplace apps might be the fastest route to widespread adoption. If that does turn out to be the case, then it all comes down to execution: how well the product works, and whether its app will be janky, shrunken versions of desktop apps or intuitive new apps that people will actually want to use.

But that future, for now, is about as clear as a tiny Windows desktop hovering above the corner of your eye.

Instagram vs. Snapchat: a battle to the last feature

2025-01-29T09:45:10-05:00

The end of February wasn’t kind to Snapchat-maker Snap: it rolled out a redesign that users decided they hated, and a single Kylie Jenner tweet about the app sent the company’s stock into a spiral. But, really, Snap’s struggles preceded all of that, due in no small part to rival Instagram.

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Facebook-owned Instagram has “borrowed” plenty of features from Snapchat. And in doing so it has managed, in a relatively short period of time, to build what feels like its own successful social silo (provided you can forget about that whole it’s-a-part-of-Facebook thing). The Instagram Stories feature alone — that series of bubbles at the top of the app that shows people’s shared photos and video clips for up to 24 hours — has grown to 300 million daily users, more than Snapchat’s total daily active users. Instagram has AR filters, too; they’re not as good as Snapchat’s, but they’re fun, and if we’re being honest, flattering.

But to compare each feature side-by-side would be a waste of time in a time when app features are so easily copied. The differences between apps like Instagram and Snapchat come down to how people use them, but also, how these apps incentivize different kinds of behavior; whether it’s a teenager frantically messaging a friend, a parent wanting to share one non-hectic moment from their day, or a hashtag-influencer promoting yet another brand. And for the app makers it becomes a delicate balance between providing a tool, amplifying the real world, and creating an overly curated, annoying-ad-driven one.

People may not remember exactly what was posted, but after awhile, they become aware of how an app makes them feel (a bad take on a great quote). Until they move on to the next social app and bring all their friends with them. And then the cycle begins again.