Welcome to The Wearable Weekly, your trusted guide to all things wearable tech. If you only have time to read one thing about wearables this week, this is it. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Wearable Weekly using the form below to make sure it hits your email inbox every week!
Industry Highlights
Black Friday Wearables: It’s Black Friday and wearable tech is one of the most popular deals to grab during this sale frenzy either online or in-store.
A very VR Christmas?: Samsung and Oculus have officially released their Consumer Edition of the Gear VR just in time for the holidays driving optimism in VR adoption over the holidays.
Statistics & Forecasts
Apple Watch owners check device up to 80 times per day (MobileSyrup)
Swiss watch shipments dropped by 12 percent to about $2 billion in October, correlated to smartwatch sales (Tech Times)
66 percent of people expressed interest in “watching TV, movies and video” in VR, compared to 60 percent who reported interest in games (UploadVR)
Device Announcements
Pebble Time arrives in Canada on December 4th (MobileSyrup)
Fossil Q Founder smartwatch now available in the USA for $295 USD (9to5 Google)
Fossil Q Founder smartwatch will be available in Canada mid-December (MobileSyrup)
Apple Watch now available at select Canadian carriers (MobileSyrup)
Chaotic Moon unveils prototypes of biometric tattoos for medicine and military (TechCrunch)
LG pulls LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE from market due to “image quality” issues (Ars Technica)
Misfit and BaubleBar team up to release the BaubleBar Helena Necklace and Helena Bracelet for the Misfit Flash (Mashable)
HP and Titan, the fifth largest watchmaker in the world, announce partnership to produce a new line of wearables (Wareable)
Dispelix Oy debuts anew display system for smartglasses which they aim to release in 2016 (Tech Insider)
Samsung Gear VR Consumer Edition now available (MobileSyrup)
Atheers unveils its augmented reality glasses, AiR (Bloomberg)
Funding, Crowdfunding & M&A
Apple acquires facial motion capture technology company Faceshift with rumored uses for VR (TechCrunch)
Fitness Wearable And Coaching Startup GOQii Lands $13.4M Series A From NEA And Cheetah Mobile (TechCrunch)
Major Milestones
Fitbit update adds “SmartTrack” to automatically track a variety of exercises (MobileSyrup)
Samsung Gear S2 gets its first major update with bug fixes and new watch faces (MobileSyrup)
Star Wars app updated with Android Wear watch face (MobileSyrup)
Volkswagen rolls out the use of Google Glass as an official tool for employees in its Wolfsburg plant (Tech Times)
Pebble update adds beta feature to reply to text messages on iOS via AT&T network (Apple Insider)
Vine app arrives on Apple Watch (MobileSyrup)
Huawei releases software update with new app and watch face for Huawei Watch (Android Police)
Star Wars announces VR experience coming to Google Cardboard on December 2nd (MobileSyrup)
Reddit and Imgur viewer app makes it way to Gear VR (UploadVR)
The New York Times releases immersive VR documentary on the Paris Attacks (MobileSyrup)
Rumours
Google experimenting with Star Trek like communicator pin (CNET)
Subscribe to The Wearable Weekly
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Wearable Weekly using the form below to make sure it hits your email inbox every week!