LG Lifeband Touch and Heart Rate Earphones review
The first fitness products from LG show a dash of inspiration
LG took it’s first leap into fitness tech today at CES 2014, launching a fitness band and a pair of heart-rate measuring headphones. First up is the LG Lifeband Touch includes a small touchscreen OLED display, allowing it to function as both a fitness tracker and smartwatch in a single device.
The sample device on show was a little on the small size for our wrists, but it’s likely to be an Asian pre-production model and we’d expect it to be scaled up slightly for a European release. Keeping that in mind the rubber curved section of the band gripped our wrist firmly and it stayed where we placed it.
More concerning from an ergonomic point-of-view is that the screen is long and slender and runs around the device, so you have to read it at 90 degrees to the natural direction of your arm. It’s supposed to turn itself on automatically when you angle your wrist to read it, though we couldn’t get this to work reliably on the sample, possibly because we were confused as to how to orientate our wrist to read it.
You control the device using a single button plus taps and swipes (to the left or right) on the touchscreen. The interface was straightforward and we quickly got to grips with the step counter, calories burner and stopwatch functions. Inside is a 3-axis accelerometer and altimeter which should accurately track distance, speed, calories used and your speed.
It will connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth to upload fitness data to the new LG Fitness app or many other popular fitness services, or can be used as a smartwatch, for caller display, incoming message alerts etc. We didn’t get to test this part of its functionality unfortunately.
LISTENING TO THE BEAT
The Lifeband Touch will also work in tandem with the new LG Heart Rate Earphones. These measure your heart rate by detecting the pulse in the your ears and then communicate that information to an app on your smartphone or to the Lifeband via Bluetooth. It’s an ingenious idea as many people wear headphones when exercising anyway and it could save them from having to wear a sizeable hear rate chest monitor.
The earphones have rubber pieces that go behind your ears to keep them firmly in place, they were a comfortable fit, though we didn’t get to test their audio quality today.
They should be available later in 2014, and though we have some issues with the design, they are a strong first effort into the fitness market for LG.
