The smart watch is fully bluetooth-enabled but does not have in-built SIM slot. iRistPro once synced with the smart phone, displays all kinds of notifications from smart phone, lists all call logs and enables the user to make/receive calls using smart phone’s SIM via bluetooth. The smart watch also has an in-built pedometer that helps in step monitoring, distance measurement and calorie count. All this is tracked with precision to help the user stay healthy and fit.

Pebble announced its release of 3 new devices on May 24, which included two new smartwatches and a non-smartwatch device which focused its efforts on health and fitness. The smartwatch, Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2, is more like a classic smartwatch with the latest versions and stainless steel case model. Both new watches have been updated to appeal to fitness fanatics and now feature a heart rate monitor and Pebble's health tracking software system.

Fitness freaks usually prefer two things – A fitness tracker and a music player. The company also wanted to innovate something other than usual smartwatches and that’s where the third non-smartwatch Pebble core is designed.

Although all smartphones can do all the Core’s functions, users prefer something convenient and easy to use. So every time when you go for a walking or jogging, you take your smartphone to track records or music player to play songs.

Bundling the GPS tracker and a music app into a watch would make it more expensive, Pebble didn’t take that route. They did something first ever non-smartwatch.

The Pebble Core is an Android-powered wearable designed for runners. It has GPS to track your running, a built-in 3G modem that lets you stream music over Spotify (need a sim card). This 3G modem can also send emergency SOS notifications. It has WiFi for syncing your running stats with apps like Runkeeper, Strava, MapMyRun, Google Fit and Under Armour. The buttons on the Core can be programmed to perform a variety of tasks, such as hailing an Uber or opening a garage door.

It has 3.5mm headset jack and if you prefer to go wireless then you can access Bluetooth. It does have 4GB storage to load songs through wifi. On its back is a magnetic clip, which can be clipped on to your shirt or your pocket.

Coming for the price, It’ll retail for $99, but the device can be pre-ordered at $69 through the early bird discount applied on limited stock and it comes in two different colours. Scheduled to be launched in 2017.

For its battery life, Migicovsky (Pebble CEO) tells that it should last 9 to 10 hours before needing a recharge. It comes with a wireless charger or you can charge it in the headphone port cable.

Still it does have some shortcomings. Say, the Core does not have a display so it needs to be synced with other smartphones and also it becomes difficult to choose or select the song without a display. As for that Spotify we mentioned earlier, its streaming works only with Spotify premium so thanks for the 4GB storage.

The product has hit the right track and took a promising approach to compete with the well-established products like Apple watch and the Samsung Gear. Pebble Core has already been a hit with numerous pre-orders booked, with the numbers rising at a very fast rate. 

As mobile and wearable devices such as smartwatches grow smaller, it gets tougher for people to interact with screens the size of a matchbook.



That could change with a new sonar technology developed by University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers that allows you to interact with mobile devices by writing or gesturing on any nearby surface -- a tabletop, a sheet of paper or even in mid-air.

FingerIO tracks fine-grained finger movements by turning a smartphone or smartwatch into an active sonar system using the device's own microphones and speakers.

Because sound waves travel through fabric and do not require a line of sight, users can even interact with a phone inside a front pocket or a smartwatch hidden under a sweater sleeve.

In a paper to be presented in May at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2016 conference in San Jose, California, the UW team demonstrates that FingerIO can accurately track two-dimensional finger movements to within 8mm, which is sufficiently accurate to interact with today's mobile devices. The work was recognized with an honorable mention award by the conference.

"You can't type very easily onto a smartwatch display, so we wanted to transform a desk or any area around a device into an input surface," said lead author Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. "I don't need to instrument my fingers with any other sensors -- I just use my finger to write something on a desk or any other surface and the device can track it with high resolution."

Using FingerIO, one could use the flick of a finger to turn up the volume, press a button, or scroll through menus on a smartphone without touching it, or even write a search command or text in the air rather than typing on a tiny screen.

FingerIO turns a smartwatch or smartphone into a sonar system using the device's own speaker to emit an inaudible sound wave. That signal bounces off the finger, and those "echoes" are recorded by the device's microphones and used to calculate the finger's location in space.

Using sound waves to track finger motion offers several advantages over cameras -- which don't work without line-of-sight when the device is hidden by fabric or another obstructions -- and other technologies like radar that require both custom sensor hardware and greater computing power, said senior author and UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering Shyam Gollakota.

"Acoustic signals are great -- because sound waves travel much slower than the radio waves used in radar, you don't need as much processing bandwidth so everything is simpler," said Gollakota, who directs the UW's Networks and Mobile Systems Lab. "And from a cost perspective, almost every device has a speaker and microphones so you can achieve this without any special hardware."

But sonar echoes are weak and typically not accurate enough to track finger motion at a high resolution. Errors of a few centimeters make it impossible to differentiate between writing individual letters or subtle hand gestures.

The UW researchers employed a type of signal typically used in wireless communication -- called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing -- and demonstrated that it can be used to achieve high-resolution finger tracking using sound. Their algorithms leverage the properties of OFDM signals to track phase changes in the echoes and correct for any errors in the finger location to achieve sub-centimeter finger tracking.

To test their approach, the researchers created a FingerIO prototype app for Android devices and downloaded it to an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone and a smartwatch customized with two microphones, which are needed to track finger motion in two dimensions. Today's smartwatches typically only have one, which can be used to track a finger in one dimension.

The researchers asked testers to draw shapes such as stars, squiggles or figure 8s on a touchpad next to a smartphone or smartwatch running FingerIO. Then they compared the touchpad tracings to the shapes created by FingerIO's tracking.

The average difference between the drawings and the FingerIO tracings was 0.8 centimeters for the smartphone and 1.2 centimeters for the smartwatch.

"Given that your finger is already a centimeter thick, that's sufficient to accurately interact with the devices," said co-author and electrical engineering graduate student Vikram Iyer.

Next steps for the research team include demonstrating how FingerIO can be used to track multiple fingers moving at the same time, and extending its tracking abilities into three dimensions by adding additional microphones to the devices.