Sunday Runday
In this weekly column, Android Central Wearables editor Michael Hicks talks about the world of wearables, apps and fitness technology related to running and health, in his quest to get faster and fitter.
This week Polar released a 22mm “Payment Wristband” with an NFC chip built into the strap, which allows you to pay by touch if your watch doesn’t support it. We haven’t seen tech-packed watch bands since the early days of the Pebble and Galaxy Gear, but Polar’s modular technology has me wondering if this abandoned idea deserves a renaissance.
Smart bands died for several reasons. Put technology in a strap and it naturally loses its flexibility, is more prone to failure, requires a power source and is generally less comfortable. It also prevents users from replacing their own bands as this means loss of functionality.
Instead, with massive watches like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 on the rise, designers are using lightweight bracelets as crutches to offset the extra weight. A fat band full of technology would be counterproductive.
In that context, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want “smart bands” to return. Still, if handled properly, smartwatch bands have untapped potential, and some companies have begun to explore that potential.
A brief, unfortunate history of ‘smart’ watch straps
The original Samsung Galaxy Gear has a 720p camera with autofocus, two microphones and a speaker in its belt. Samsung engineers saw that extra space for the strap as an opportunity to make the main watch more compact, rather than cramming everything into one space.
Our original reviewer called the 73g Gear “bulky and uncomfortable” and the camera sensor on the strap “a wart.” Samsung engineers agreed. The Gear 2 moved the camera and microphone/speaker technology to the watch, and future iterations like the Gear S2 had a much greater focus on style and comfort. From then on, you can replace any band on a Gear or Galaxy watch without losing the core technology.
Companies have tried to put smartwatch bands on watches before, but they never caught on.
In that same early era, Pebble launched the Pebble Time, its second-generation watch, on Kickstarter with a unique “Smartstraps” gimmick. It featured a “smart accessory port” so that third-party strap manufacturers could pack technology and sensors into their straps that would sync directly with the watch.
Pebble offered $1 million in funding for Smartstrap developers, promising users add-ons like GPS, heart rate monitoring, or extended battery life. There was even an NFC payment strap from Pagaré. However, after Fitbit bought the failed Pebble brand the following year, the concept died before it could really get off the ground.
These “optional” health and fitness accessories have become standard features in fitness watches over time. Watch designers have become so efficient at cramming useful components into a 13mm case that shoving technology into a thick strap would unnecessarily complicate things.
Sony has taken a different approach, selling standalone smart bands that you attach to non-smart luxury watches. His 2015 Wena Wrist Pro tracked your steps, calories and sleep. It even had a bizarre piece of OLED display that displayed tiny contextual data along your wrist. However, its exorbitant price and limited features made it a novelty that never caught on.
It also sold a standalone fitness tracker with built-in GPS and heart rate data called the Wena Wrist Active. I mention this because Sony designed it with a unique connector that allows you to mount any watch to its face, adding classic style while keeping your health data safe.
Apart from the Hands On Talk watch from 2013, which had a microphone and speaker built into the strap (thanks Wikipedia), I don’t know of any other smartwatches with smart bracelets. The concept seemed to die out quickly, as most brands mimicked the Apple or Galaxy watches in design.
The benefits and challenges of upgrading modular clocks
Polar’s €59 payment wristband has one simple application: it’s designed to get consumers to make NFC payments themselves instead of adding the technology to the Polar Vantage V3 or other watches. It’s a niche tool, unlikely to achieve high sales, but still very useful.
Are there other smartwatch “accessories” that could fit inside a 20mm or 22mm watch band? It’s complicated.
Ultramarathoners would love Pebble’s original concept of a replaceable battery-boosting strap. Here’s the problem: You’d need a port to receive power in the strap connector — probably not Quick Release compatible — and the engineers would need to keep the bracelet light and flexible despite how thick the batteries tend to be. In addition, wrapping the batteries in TPU material makes them susceptible to damage and malfunctions.
I have no design or engineering experience, but the extra strap with the Ultra Wideband seems more feasible to me. UWB allows iPhone 15 owners to pinpoint their lost Apple Watch or use their watch as a digital car key; the next Pixel Watch could add UWB as well. But a UWB strap, like an NFC strap, could theoretically work as a standalone accessory for any watch.
Straying freely into wish-fulfillment territory, I imagine most Garmin watch lovers would love a strap that has the added LTE compatibility. Since the Forerunner 945 LTE, they’ve waited in vain for more cellular options to make Garmin watches more useful in an emergency.
However, like the battery belt, LTE would be difficult to implement. Despite how small a 5G chip is, a standalone receiver with the necessary power source would be opposite from portable. You would need a physical connection via a strap to the main CPU, and I just don’t know if that will work.
For any other potential addition to the watch, the engineering challenge alone makes it more likely that smartwatch brands will just… put the technology in the watch. For example, you might assume that a wristband could track sweat loss in an athlete, but this Apple patent shows how a watch would track that data directly from the main body.
The future of smart belts
Currently, the only practical application of a dynamic watch band that I know of is on portable blood pressure watches. There are several models to be inflated bars that widen during BP readings for more accurate results, in theory. I can’t tell you if the Galaxy Watch 6’s blood pressure readings are more or less accurate with a normal watch band.
The next limit is related to the bands of neural interfaces. Remember the Double Tap feature that became popular with the Apple Watch, only with much greater precision because these bands can read signals from your brain, knowing that you intend to make a pinch even if your fingers barely move.
The Mudra Band, released this year, replaces a typical watch strap and becomes a neural controller for any Apple computer, TV, Vision Pro or other devices. Tech geeks could get a lot out of this, even though it costs almost as much as the 9 Series itself.
Meanwhile, Meta is building its own neural EMG harness, promising mid-air typing to chat with AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that “the neural interface is getting better at understanding each person over time” and says it will be ready for product in a few years. I would have to assume it would be expensive as well.
Maybe that’s the future of smartwatch band technology we should expect: expensive, niche, a bit cheesy and with cool implications. Simpler smart bands with added features or battery improvements sound pretty neat in theory, but a little too impractical and expensive for the consumer for companies to invest in the idea.