Yesterday El Reg wrote about the frustrating syncing failures plaguing FitBit gadgets over the past four or so weeks. Unlucky punters say that, since a mid-August Android app and firmware update was released, they have been unable to get their wearable fitness trackers to link up consistently with their handsets over the air, …

Good news for owners of certain Apple Watches – the vendor has initiated a free-of-charge repair service for those afflicted with a design defect that can cause the screen to crack. "Apple has determined that, under very rare circumstances, a crack may form along the rounded edge of the screen in aluminium models of an Apple …

ColumnLast year I bought one of those nifty new fitness tracker wristwatches. It counts my steps and gives a me bit of a thrilling buzz on when I've reached my daily goal. A small thing, but it means a lot. This means I'm always under surveillance – in the best possible sense, my fitness tracker has its eye on me, continuously …

The European Commission has ordered the recall of a smartwatch aimed at kids that allows miscreants to pinpoint the wearer's location, posing a potentially "serious risk". The commission uses its Rapid Alert System for Non-Food products (Rapex) to send out alerts to other nations in the European Economic Area about dangerous …

CES 2019The most eye-catching debuts at CES 2019 are more analogue than digital, and dumber rather than smarter. Withings has launched its first new products in almost three years, having survived a period of ownership by Nokia. Two Withings Move watches minimise the "smart" but provide continuous fitness tracking, and boast a battery …

Last week it was Gartner's turn to look for diamonds in the ashes of the wearable market. This week another tech analyst, IDC, has expressed hope that wearables can flourish - despite the evidence. IDC calculated wearable shipments grew 21.7 per cent year-on-year in calendar Q3 to 32 million units - but this double digit …

Hope springs eternal for wearables, despite the gizmos losing billions of dollars over the past five years. And few forecasts can be more hopeful than Gartner's prediction that the market will treble in size over the next three years. Gartner places its faith in two things. One in "hearables," earpieces with added …

It isn't just Microsoft that has QA issues – so does Apple. The Cupertino giant withdrew a watchOS update that bricked the Apple Watch 4 last week, and has now rushed out a replacement containing things that don't work yet which Apple probably didn't want you to see. 5.1.1 supersedes the catastrophic 5.1 update that sent …

Apple has withdrawn a faulty update that has left Apple Watch 4 owners with bricked bling. The watchOS update (5.1) to the new kit has resulted in an endless reboot cycle for some, rendering the device useless. Watch owners at MacRumours and Reddit flagged the issue as major. Users who did successfully perform the update …

Google's decision to shove Java everywhere it can may be as catastrophic as Microsoft's "Windows everywhere" from the 1990s. Huawei unveiled a smartwatch today. This isn't really news, but Huawei making a smartwatch based on its own open-source embedded OS very much is. The new Huawei Watch GT uses the open-source LiteOS with …

ReviewWhat could be more Silicon Valley than inventing a technology to alleviate the inconvenience caused by another you invented? But that's one of the biggest appeals of the Apple Watch. After 18 months of lolling about without a discernible purpose – like a boomerang kid who can't decide what to do with their life – the Watch has …

By popular opinion, Apple's most accomplished product of 2018 – and maybe even in years – has been its Watch Series 4. But wait, if you live in the UK, there are some things you should know about well before you pull out your wallet. While fanbois can swan into an Apple Store today and emerge more than £1,000 poorer for the …

IFAThe world's largest annual electronics trade show, IFA in Berlin, was supposed to be where wearables and in particular smartwatches returned from the dead. If a big theme emerges from IFA then retailers can make last-minute changes to their Christmas retail plans. If it doesn't, they focus on what they can flog. But Qualcomm …

RoundupThis week, the infosec world descended on Las Vegas for BlackHat and DEF CON to share stories of bug hunting, malware neural nets, hefty payout offers, and more. Meanwhile, outside of the desert… Snapchat source sourced Photo-slinging biz Snapchat had a pretty rough week, as a mystery code dump on GitHub turned out to be a …

AnalysisImagine if Intel had decided in the 1980s that all of its CPUs henceforth would have a vast parallel processing unit worthy of a Cray supercomputer, integrated into every chip. This would quadruple the price of an Intel microprocessor, but "future-proof" its PCs. Samsung Gear S3 Smartwatch And lo, Qualcomm hath declared that …

Some optimists are betting on Google own-brand devices to save the smartwatch. Others are betting that new generations of Google-free Android-based hardware will do the same thing. And one of the latter is IDC. IDC has predicted the smartwatch category will return to growth in the next few years. How so? IDC points out that …

AnalysisFeatures introduced in the latest version of Apple's wearable OS suggest Apple wants to produce more sophisticated small computing devices and avoid getting embroiled a straight fight with fitness trackers. That's a reasonable strategy, for the killer features of the Apple Watch so far have turned out to be not apps, not …

AnalysisWhoever predicted that fitness bling-flingers would struggle to survive should take note of the latest numbers on the wearable market from Canalys. Garmin eased itself into the No.2 spot as a smartwatch vendor in Q1 worldwide, successfully making the move upmarket into higher margin products. This wasn't supposed to happen, …