The Wyze Band is part fitness tracker, part Alexa smart home controller
Wyze, best known for its inexpensive cameras and smart home gadgets (and an unfortunate server breach last year), is planning several new products for 2020, including the Wyze Band. Part fitness tracker, part smart home controller, the Wyze Band will have built-in Alexa capabilities, according to a blog post from the company. Dave Zatz gave some deeper insights on ZatzNotFunny with details gleaned from a Federal Communications Commission filing and a publicly available beta app (via Engadget).
The band has features that are now expected from a basic fitness tracker, according to Zatz: it offers a jogging app, alarms, weather, step counter, sleep tracker, and heart rate sensor. Alexa can be triggered by a long press on the touchscreen where a side-mounted mic array will listen for your voice command. The touchscreen also lets owners control Wyze smart home devices to do things like toggle lights on and off or record a video from a Wyze camera. The band has a few customizable clock faces and backgrounds and appears capable of displaying smartphone notifications and fitness badges.
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There’s no indication yet how much the band will cost, though it’s expected to cost less than the Alexa-enabled Fitbit Versa 2, which offers similar functionality for $200, as noted by ZatzNotFunny. There’s no date for when consumers will be able to get their hands on it, but Wyze says in its product announcement that the band is in beta, and it expects to begin preparing for an early access launch “soon.”
For 2020, the Wyze Band will be joined by the Wyze Cam Outdoor, Wyze Person Detection, Wyze Scale, Wyze Doorbell Cam, and the Wyze Lock, according to a blog post by Wyze co-founder Dongsheng Song. Only the lock is in early access; the rest are in various stages of testing and development.
One thing Song doesn’t mention in the blog post is the massive security breach the company experienced in December when an unsecured server exposed data from 2.4 million customers for about three weeks. The company attributed the leak to an employee error.
Wyze, best known for its inexpensive cameras and smart home gadgets (and an unfortunate server breach last year), is planning several new products for 2020, including the Wyze Band. Part fitness tracker, part smart home controller, the Wyze Band will have built-in Alexa capabilities, according to a blog post from…
