"smart watch" articles

Smart watch adoption is picking up in the United States. According to Parks Associates' most recent survey data, as of 2017 14% of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart watch. Consumer-reported purchase intention for smart watches has also more than doubled year-over-year, ahead of the holiday shopping season. 2017 is an important year for the U.S. smart watch market. Traditional fitness wearable brands Fitbit and Garmin have announced their first "true" smart...

The Apple Event was today, and Apple made a series of interesting announcements about its iPhone lineup. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus were announced, and the rumored iPhone X was confirmed. These new iPhones offer more powerful processing via Apple's new A11 chip, as well as an Apple-designed GPU. This allows Apple to offer on-device machine learning and computer vision-enabled abilities which enable a number of new use cases. Apple's machine learning tech enables: Native...

The traditional watch market faces two forms of competition from the CE space. First, the ubiquity of smartphones decreases the need for a separate timepiece. Second, the smart watch category challenges the traditional watch segment directly. Shipments of Swiss-made watches fell by over 14% from July 2015 to July 2016, and traditional watch sales declined across all price categories. Recent Parks Associates research assessed the impact of smart watches on the traditional watch...

On February 8th, Verizon moved to introduce its new—and first—smart watch, the Wear24 . The Wear24 is one of the first Android Wear 2.0 devices. Its standout feature is that it offers LTE connectivity, and is capable of making and receiving calls and texts without being paired to a nearby smartphone. (You still need to have a phone on Verizon's network, though.) Like the LG Watch Sport—another Wear 2.0 device, developed by LG in partnership with Google—the Wear24 offers...

Apple recently released its holiday quarter’s earnings . Although the blockbuster sales of iPhones dominated the headlines, analysts and pundits were also drawn into the debate about the health of Apple’s smart watch business. Since Apple does not disclose its sales figures and only provided vague qualitative comments about this line of business, estimates and guestimates are all over the place. We have our take as well, outlined below, based on a slew of data from primary...

Fitness device use is most frequent among owners with active gym memberships with no cancellation plans Over one in three fitness tracker and/or smart watch owners have an active gym membership and do not plan to cancel. Past research from Parks Associates has found that many as 10% of fitness tracker and smart watch owners have canceled or plan to cancel their gym memberships as a result of using their device. However, new research is showing that high device usage rate of active...

It's no secret—the wearables market isn't doing as well as it should be right now. According to Parks Associates' estimates, the leading smart watch—the Apple Watch—experienced a YoY sales decline of ~53% in Q3 2016. Even with the Q4 release of the Apple Watch Series 2, Apple may be on track for moderate growth in 2016 relative to its 2015 debut. Compare this to Fitbit, the leading fitness tracker: as per Fitbit's SEC filings, its sales grew 21% YoY in the nine months ending October...

After a week-long rumor mill about Fitbit acquiring the struggling smart watch maker Pebble, the suspense ended today when Fitbit announced that it is acquiring Pebble’s software assets and IPs , not the latter’s hardware business. Though it is a smart move to skip Pebble’s hardware business, the rationale for Fitbit to acquire Pebble’s software business remains unconvincing to me. We don’t know the price tag of the deal so have no idea how much value Fitbit attaches to...