The Verge is covering the rapidly evolving world of wearables. We test everything from smartwatches like the Apple Watch, to smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans, to fitness trackers like the Oura Ring to find out which ones deliver on their promises. Follow along to find out whether covering our bodies in screens and sensors can actually make us smarter and healthier.
The event, taking place on September 16th at 7PM ET, will be livestreamed.
Snap announced the design for the augmented reality glasses — and their eye-watering $2,195 price — in June, but it’s unclear if anyone can look cool wearing them. (They seem especially heavy on the ears.)
The company launched its Meta Glasses with a “more helpful” assistant powered by its new Muse Spark models, but now the upgrade is coming to its Ray-Ban Display glasses as well.
Meta is adding support for Threads on its Ray-Ban Display glasses and will also allow wearers to use its neural handwriting feature to prompt Meta AI.
The Air Zoom Hyperslide, launching on September 29th for $249, uses a pod from Hyperice to offer three levels of heat and vibration across the top of the foot, running in 15-minute cycles controlled directly on the pod or from its mobile app.
Hyperice CEO Jim Huether says that after the $799 Nike Hyperboot, they were focused on something athletes could wear while they’re on the move.
Its recent attempts to shore up privacy don’t seem to be convincing skeptics.
Meta says it’s banning some content filmed with the company’s smart glasses from Instagram. Moderation gets messy very quickly.
Living an optimized, self-quantified life can get a little out of hand.
The smart wearables company has a new feature for its companion app called “UltraSphere,” which provides over 60 suggested actions to improve rest, wellness, and recovery. The actions are location- and weather-aware, and tailored to the user. Suggestions can include things like “get light,” “cut caffeine,” and “wind down.”
Plus the first specs, including a battery life better than Meta’s.
The smart glasses come with Google’s Gemini AI on board and will debut this fall with the designs we first saw in May — plus these two new ones from Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
The watches sport a new chip, bigger batteries, and new health metrics. But the updates come with another price hike.
Android Authority spotted that a new version of the Galaxy Wearable app is rolling out with a simplified three-tab layout, refined UI, and new home tab with useful shortcuts to key watch settings. It’s presumably no coincidence that it lands the same day Samsung is due to launch new Galaxy Watches at Unpacked.
Leonardo Del Vecchio, president of Ray-Ban and chief strategy officer at EssilorLuxottica, posted these to his Instagram story. The first is a picture of an activist ad plastered over an actual Meta Glasses ad… and the second is Del Vecchio saying, “If we can’t laugh about it why should anyone trust us?”
Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky says buyers should “trust the company” when buying his relaunched wearables with 30-day warranties. But it does make you wonder how much Pebble trusts its own products.
quimerinhaa:
I mean, offering a 30 day warranty makes it sound like the company itself doesn’t trust it’s product to last more than that either.
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Marketing materials for the Galaxy Watch 9 and Watch Ultra 2 have been shared online by leaker Evan Blass. The Galaxy Watch 9 reportedly features a Snapdragon Wear Elite chip, and is shown in three color options. The Watch Ultra 2 upgrades reportedly include a 800mAh battery and up to 5,000 nits of peak brightness.
The EU is excluding wearable devices, including smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart glasses, from an incoming rule that will require a wide range of electronics to have user-replaceable batteries. The Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t exempt, though, and will come with a replaceable battery in the EU by the time the law goes into effect in February 2027.
If you are, Withings’ BodyScan 2 is available to buy starting today. Why is the scale $600? Well, it measures 60 biomarkers, and it’s positioned as a “longevity station.”
It also offers noninvasive metabolic metrics like glucose resilience via bioimpedance spectroscopy and foot sweat. Yes, foot sweat.
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Pebble says it’s sent free replacements to everyone who reported Time 2 hardware issues like cracked screens and broken touch panels “regardless” of whether the defective watches (out of 19,000 in service) were still covered under its 30-day warranty.
…we will continue replacing reasonable reports of glass cracking for free as long as we can. At some point, we will shift to offering a replacement at a highly discounted amount.
watchOS 27 feels like a culmination of several years of smaller updates.
8
Verge Score
This is a smart ring for new users. Everyone else should wait until their current ring dies.
In the interview below, he describes it as a local, encrypted feature used to identify people you already know. Not, he says, as a feature that pulls data from a central database. Even so, there are discussions to be had about consent and whether it’s actually that awkward to ask, “Hey, where do I know you from again?”
Apple is suspending work on a display made in partnership with Samsung Display for an entry-level XR device, according to a machine translation of a report by The Elec (which we saw thanks to MacRumors). Seems like Apple is moving away from headsets in favor of glasses.
It’s been missing from the first two versions of the beta, but you can now continue conversations from your phone on your wrist, and vice versa. I’m playing around with it now, but I’m curious to hear from fellow smartwatch nerds. (You’ll need a Series 9, Ultra 3, or SE 3 and later to run the dev beta.)
The AI wearable surveillance state hinges on good intentions masking legitimate privacy concerns.
