LG’s CES keynote revealed a successor to last year’s Smart Activity Tracker in the form of the new LG Lifeband Touch.
Visually the Lifeband Touch isn’t quite the awkward cousin its predecessor was to Nike’s FuelBand, instead adopting a cleaner, more angular design. The rubberised body conceals an OLED display with a touch layer on top and the band itself is split near the display to flex open around your wrist.
As the company’s Jim Clayton points out, the Lifeband Touch is a fitness tracker designed to cover you for “the other 23 hours” outside of your workouts too. Although it’s not fair to call it a smart watch per se and throw it in the ring with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Gear, it has some smart features to help stretch its functionality beyond being a fancy, sweat resistant pedometer.
Users will be able to tie the Bluetooth 4.0-capable tracker into a number of apps including Run Keeper and it’s designed to work with both iOS and Android devices, offering a little more flexibility over iOS-only FuelBand. What’s more, it can govern music playback, volume control and call notifications as well as call silencing, an area unexplored by most other fitness trackers.
If the Lifeband Touch leaves you wanting more, LG is also offering up Heart Rate earphones which measure your pulse and oxygen intake and can be paired via Bluetooth to the Touch to ply you with more fitness information to keep tabs on.
LG’s Lifeband Touch is scheduled to arrive in the US by Spring, but no international launch has been confirmed. Does this fitness tracker offer the right blend of ‘smart’ or is it yet another non-descript accessory that will pass the masses by?
Leave a Reply