14 DAY TRIAL // These past few months, we've seen a slew of wearables being launched on the market, including smartwatches and fitness bands.
For example, Samsung has been getting a lot of attention with its new Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo models, which now utilize the company’s own Tizen OS platform.
Bearing this in mind, we’d expect smartwatches to be in charge of the increasingly complex wearable market, but according to a new report from ABI Research, this is not actually the case.
Maybe customers prefer something that’s more specialized or maybe the more affordable wearable prices are also an incentive, but it turns out that activity trackers were actually far more popular than smartwatches in Q1 2014.
The new researches showed that activity trackers outsold smartwatches by 4 to 1, with a total of 2.35 million units being shipped out in Q1 of 2014.
In concurrence with an earlier report coming from Canalys, Fitbit has taken the crown of all wearables in Q1 2014. Other similar devices like Garmin, Nike, Jawbone and others are also trailing behind.
However, consider Samsung’s recently launched Gear Fit, a device that saw the light of day at MWC 2014 in Barcelona and started selling only in April, so things could radically change in the upcoming months.
As for smartwatches, as we told you in the past, Samsung remains the market leader for now, with Sony and Pebble coming in at number two and three, respectively.
Even so, you might remember that a different report claimed that Samsung and Pebble are indisputable kinds of the market, although this information applied to the US market.
The reason that customers might prefer fitness trackers instead of smartwatches is that some people don’t feel it is justified to own two different devices that bring about similar functionalities.
Fitness trackers on the other hand have been built to monitor and aggregate health and fitness information, with the purpose of improving the owner’s overall wellbeing.
This trend might explain why major tech manufacturers like Samsung and Apple have recently unveiled fitness-centric platforms, designed as a means to collect and aggregate health-related info from different apps and devices in order to provide some relevant statistics on the matter.
Google itself is expected to make a big announcement of sorts at its I/O conference towards the end of the month. The service will reportedly be called Play Fitness and will most likely be released via a new version of Play Services.