Chrome Central: Say Hello to Samsung’s New S Band Fitness Tracker

via AndroidHeadlines.com |

If we were in any doubt that the wearable business was going to take off this year, CES and Mobile World Congress have seen to those doubts. With pretty much everyone releasing some sort of wearable tracking device to tell you how you sleep, monitor your heart rate and feed data back to our smartphones, it’s no wonder that Samsung has one more wearable to announce for this year. As if the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and the Gear Fit weren’t enough, here comes Samsung’s latest S Band.

I say latest, because Samsung quietly announced plans for such a device with the Galaxy S4, but the device never quite made it to market, but now it looks like Samsung has gone back to the drawing board and come up with something a little better. Thanks to leaked photos acquired by the enterprising folk at SamMobile, these photos show off a device that isn’t dissimilar to Sony’s SmartBand. The S Band can either be clipped to your body somewhere or encased in the straps seen in the images. There will be multiple colors available, and while the S Band does look somewhat attractive, it looks more like a watch than either the Gear Fit or Gear 2 devices. What’s interesting here, is that this looks quite different to a recent leak that hit the FCC.

Functionality wise, we’re looking at all the regular sort of things an activity tracker is designed to do, such as monitoring your sleep, your calories and tracking your exercise. It’ll also vibrate and notify you of calls, but there doesn’t look to be a display so we’re not sure how useful that’ll end up being. According to the leaked info, the S Band will be compatible with pretty much all of Samsung’s devices, but it does require S Health 3.0, which so far only resides on the Galaxy S5, so updates to older devices will be needed. Of course, the S Band should end up being more affordable than any of the new Gear devices and should be, on the whole a lot more approachable a device for the average consumer. With the S Band going up against Sony’s SmartBand, which like the affordable SmartWatch 2, will work with all Android devices it’ll be interesting to see which one takes off.