Wearables Unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2015

If you are not aware, there is a big tech convention in Barcelona Spain known as Mobile World Congress. A lot of big mobile companies enjoy making announcements and here are some made this year in the world of wearables.

Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2015

First of all, the LG Watch Urbane LTE, which is a standalone smartwatch that runs the LG Wearable Platform OS, or webOS. I believe this is different from the Urbane, and it works not only as a smartwatch but a fitness-oriented product. As the LTE name implies, you can take calls as well as respond to text message directly from the watch itself.

HTC made a wearable announcement as they entered the fitness tracker business with the HTC Grip. It has a P-OLED screen, GPS receiver, and has a waterproof material so you can track walking, running, cycling, and other exercises. It can also work with Android or iOS for notifications.

In addition to the wearable on the wrist, HTC announced an interesting VR headset known as the Vive. The Vive is designed to work with Valve, the one who gave us Steam. The Vive has a pair of 1200 x 1080 displays that are capable of 90 frames per second, and it will have some kind of “intuitive controls”, but I have no idea what that means. Believe it or not, HTC plans to have the Vive available by the end of this year, with a developer kit available in the spring.

Something tells me that we are going to see a lot of VR headsets going to be in the hands of consumers. I might as well take the time to report on this now, but Sony is planning on releasing the Project Morpheus in the first half of 2016. If you are not familiar with the Project Morpheus, it is a VR headset for Sony PS4 and it can handle 120 frames per second. Okay, I kind of cheated with that announcement, because technically Sony announced that at the Gaming Developers Conference (GDC).

Huawei has also got in with the wearable market with the TalkBand B2, an upgrade of the B1. It comes in a choice of black, silver, or champagne gold with improved motion tracking and a touch surface on top to see a stopwatch, sleep tracker, pedometer, and calorie monitoring. It is good for both Android and iOS, and it also works as a convertible Bluetooth earpiece.

Huawei also made an announcement with their first smartwatch, which is just known as the Huawei Watch. Not to be confused with the Apple Watch of the exact same name. Here’s what we know about the Watch as it has a 42 mm circular face, stainless steel housing, and 40 face looks to make it look an analog watch.

Acer even made a contribution to the MWC hype with the Liquid Leap +, a fairly basic fitness tracker that can pull notifications from the smartphone. It has a one-inch OLED touchscreen with no physical buttons so you can swipe through all kinds of apps on Android, iOS, or Windows. It uses IPX7 certified water-resistant and has low-energy Bluetooth 4.0. Look for the Liquid Leap + later this month in Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a price of $88 USD.

In case you were wondering at what Samsung was up to, well, they had their hands full with the Samsung S6, but there were rumors that they would be unveiling a smartwatch called Orbis. We now know that Samsung is working on “the perfect smartwatch” according to our friends at Ubergizmo.

Mobile World Congress officially runs form March 2-5, but something tells me that were going to hear even more than I can even report while the news is going on.

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