We were promised a flood of new wearable devices at CES this year, and our friends in the industry have been kind enough to deliver. But this one is a few ticks left of center: Razer has released its own body-tracking wristband called the Nabu.
It's odd to see a wearable lifestyle product emerge from a company best known for fancy gaming accessories and pricey gaming laptops. But Razer is also a company with a long history of smart design and innovative twists on familiar ideas, so the Nabu is actually a product that should make other wearable-makers pay attention. For one, though it does track your steps and sleep, it's more than just a body monitor. It also functions like a smartwatch by pairing to your phone and serving you notifications from connected web services.
As you can see from the photo above, the Nabu looks similar to other Razer products: matte black with bright green accents. It pairs to a companion app on both iOS and Android, it syncs over Bluetooth LE, it's splash-proof (wear it in the rain, but not the shower), and Razer says the battery will last 7 to 10 days on a single charge.
The first cool feature is that it has two screens. There's one on top that just displays notifications. The little OLED square tells you what type of alert has arrived: a text, a phone call, an email, a Twitter @reply, flight status, whatever. Then, you flip your wrist over to see the second, larger screen, which is concealed on the inside of the wrist where it allows for more privacy. This screen displays more information, like the caller ID of the incoming call or text message, or departure details of the flight you're about to miss.
You can select or unselect exactly which data you want the band to collect.
Cool feature number two: fitness-tracking on the Nabu can be set up however you'd like. There are on-board sensors and tools for collecting biodata (steps taken, distance traveled, stairs climbed), helping with your sleep (tracking duration, sleep patterns, and a vibration alarm), and logging your location as you move about during the day. However, in the companion iOS and Android apps, you can select or unselect exactly which types of data you want to log and collect. Maybe you want to turn the GPS off, for example. It's a nice touch.
The third cool feature is a social component that feeds this data to various web services, and allows for automatic communication with other Nabu bands nearby. Let's say that you want to auto-check-in with Foursquare whenever you arrive at a new venue. Or that you want to tweet your steps at the end of each day. You can already do this with any of the other web-connected trackers (or even your smartphone) just by setting up some IFTTT recipes, so it's not entirely new. It's just simplified.
Also, if there are other Nabu-wearers nearby, the bands can passively recognize each other and talk to each other. For example, you can set up your band to gather the Twitter handle of another Nabu-er, and when you shake hands with that person, you automatically follow them on Twitter. Of course, for this to work, it requires both parties to be wearing the same device on their hand-shaking wrist (so it can recognize the gesture) and for both parties to have agreed to make all the relevant information sharable with other nearby bands. Still, this gives an interesting glimpse as to the sorts of behind-the-scenes actions that we'll begin to see as wearables become smarter and more fully automated.
For these sorts of passive interactions to work with third-party services, significant buy-in from developers will be required - which is why Razer is going to ship Nabus to developers first. Any software hackers who are interested can get their hands on a beta version of the Nabu this month for only $50. Consumer-ready bands will follow in March or April for the full retail price - there are no pricing details yet, but we'd expect it to cost around $100, maybe just a little more.
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