With the number of sports watches on the market, more and more people are turning to buying one in order to keep up their fitness routines. However, many people also use their smartphone to stay on top of their health. Well now you don’t have to choose between one or the other. Now you can use your smartphone to track your health, but have those statistics delivered straight to your wrist. The device that allows you to do this is called the Echo, and it’s by a company called Magellan.
Magellan is best known as a GPS company that has made a number of watches and personal GPS products before, specifically for hiking and fitness monitoring. But they recognized a niche in the market that has yet to be filled. A smart watch specifically dedicated to fitness monitoring!
That’s where the Magellan Echo comes in. The Magellan Echo works the same that most other smartwatches do. It basically connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0, or the power saving version of Bluetooth, and delivers notifications straight to your wrist. The Echo is different however, in that it displays notifications specifically from fitness apps. This enables you to be able to see your fitness data while you’re working out, instead of having to take your phone out of your pocket to check. If there’s any time you don’t want to take your phone out, it’s while you’re working out!
The Magellan Echo can display information about your fitness such as achievements and goals, elapsed time, distance, and so on. The Echo also gives you a number of controls over the apps in your smartphone, such as the ability to start and stop your lap, and also pause, play, and skip your music.
Besides being able to display information from your fitness apps, the Magellan Echo is able to display other alerts and messages from fitness apps too. It’s also pretty compatible, with the ability to connect with the iPhone 4S and higher, as well as a selected number of Android based handsets that support Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.
Being a fitness device, the Magellan Echo is water-resistant, and should be fine in rain and even the shower. You probably won’t want to go swimming with it though, just to be on the safe side.
The Magellan Echo is an open platform, and as such makers of fitness apps can enable their apps to be compatible with the device. It comes in a number of designs, with both digital and analog watch faces, and is expected to be released around Christmas at $149 for just the watch, and $199 for the watch plus a heart rate monitor.
