Author: Valentina Palladino

(credit: Polar)

While known for advanced and often niche fitness trackers, Polar isn't afraid of the smartwatch market. Today, the company announced a new kind of fitness watch: the M600 is, in the words of Polar's reps, a cross between an Android Wear smartwatch and the A360 fitness band, one of the company's mid-tier devices. Polar reps told me the company wanted to combine the best parts of a smartwatch with the efficiency and features of a serious fitness device. The M600 is the first Android Wear fitness device to be made by a major fitness company, rather than a tech company.

The M600 retains the signature look and feel of Polar products. While most Android Wear devices go for style, the M600—with its simple rectangular module, square display, and interchangeable silicone band—looks and feels like it's built for fitness. Inside is a built-in GPS, and underneath the module is a 6-LED optical heart rate monitor. The M600's HRM is a modified version of the A360's HRM, with extra LEDs for reduced noise and improved accuracy. The M600's HRM also works with Polar's heart rate chest straps, in case you’d rather wear the strap instead.

While the M600 looks more like a fitness tracker, it has the battery life of a smartwatch. A single charge should last 48 hours, while iOS users will need to charge up every day. No word on battery life while using the GPS, but you can bet it will be mere hours. That's a drawback for anyone who uses the M600's fitness features as regularly as they use the smartwatch features—all that work will drain the battery even faster. The interface is similar to other Android Wear devices, with the time on the default homepage, an app menu when you swipe to the left, quick settings when you swipe down from the top, and your most recent notification when you swipe up from the bottom.

(credit: Philips)

Comparing the potential benefits of one fitness device to another can be difficult when the market is so saturated, and companies work hard to stand out from the competition. For Philips, that means medical devices instead of fitness devices. The new suite of health devices that Philips launched today, including the Philips Health Watch, targets people who have or risk developing chronic conditions such as hypertension. In addition to the watch, Philips has a smart scale, a thermometer, and two blood pressure monitors as part of its family of medical-grade consumer devices.

With its simple black frame and Gorilla Glass-covered display, the Philips Health Watch isn't trying to be flashy or make a fashion statement. The watchface itself isn't a touchscreen, but the bezel around it is, so you swipe and tap on the circumference of the watch to change the display. A bunch of quick views shows you stats like steps, calories burned, active time, and so forth, and tapping the top lets you access a detailed menu full of in-depth stats. You can even input what foods you've eaten directly into the watch, which means you don't have to log every meal and snack through your phone.

Inside the $250 watch is a Philips-developed continuous optical heart rate monitor, as well as an accelerometer. In addition to basic metrics like steps, calories, and heart rate, this sensor also tracks resting heart rate, resting respiration rate, active time, sedentary time, and sleep. Even though the Health Watch is not a fitness device, it can automatically track running, walking, and biking so you don't have to manually start tracking those exercises. The watch's heart rate monitor is smart enough to know when your heart rate is consistently high, so it will register when you're doing other kinds of workouts as well.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

If you've ever zoned out at the gym in the middle of a set and lost count, here's a solution that will let you zone out as much as you want. BowFlex's new SelectTech 560 smart dumbbells is proof that fitness tech is moving beyond wristbands. This set of two weights is considered "smart" because they allow you to adjust how much you life from one to 60 pounds on each dumbbell, and, as you lift, the dumbbells automatically record every rep. When paired with a mobile app, the smart dumbbells let you "just lift" (literally, that's an in-app exercise) or follow lifting and exercise routines that incorporate the dumbbells.

While the SelectTech 560 sounds like a no-brainer for hardcore lifters who want to exercise at home without investing in an entire rack of weights, there are a few catches: that's 120 pounds of weight you'll have to get into your home, and the set costs $499. Check out the video above to see what I thought of the BowFlex smart dumbbells after I gave them a try.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Certain tracker features are now ubiquitous: step counting, distance calculation, sleep tracking, and most recently, heart rate monitoring. But one of the more elusive features—swim tracking—is often mentioned as a side-note or overlooked completely. It might be seen as a niche activity for enthusiasts or just for a particular time of the year, but swimming is one of the best workouts you can do for your body.

Unlike wrist-bound heart rate monitoring, swim tracking hasn't become so popular that companies are trying to outfit all of their devices with it. Some of the most affordable fitness devices can track swimming, but then there are mid-tier and high-end trackers that have similar features. Which one you ultimately decide to buy depends on how you plan on using it every day.

(credit: Square Enix)

The Apple Watch will soon get its first true RPG, developed by Final Fantasy creator Square Enix. The company released a teaser website that simply shows what is presumably the name of the game—Cosmos Rings.

Aside from some psychedelic blue-and-purple artwork, the site simply shows a wrist with an Apple Watch on it and details that the game will indeed be an RPG available for the Apple Watch through the Watch App Store. While there's no detail of actual gameplay, the Japanese website Gamer appears to have some screenshots of what the game may look like on the device. However, there's no way to know how credible those screenshots are, and Square Enix could still be finalizing Cosmos Rings, so the actual look and feel of the game could change significantly. Also noticeably absent is any mention of Android Wear or other smartwatches—the game appears to be exclusively for the Apple Watch.

Apple's smartwatch isn't necessarily built to support an intense RPG, though. Its screen is quite small and aside from tapping and maybe some gestures, controlling actions in the game might be difficult. There's also battery life to consider—currently the Apple Watch only lasts a full day on a single charge, so putting the system under stress from this game will only make the battery run out faster.

Android users now have another, more convenient option to make use of their Amazon Prime Video subscriptions. Amazon pushed out an update that lets Android users download movies, videos, and other content from its Prime Video service to the SD cards in their handsets.

Previously, Amazon only allowed content to be saved to the internal storage on those smartphones. With this update, not only will users be able to save their internal storage for other content, but they could potentially download content to multiple SD cards, switch those cards in and out of their handsets, and watch all of that content offline. In addition to Amazon Prime videos, users can download any videos they've purchased to their SD cards.

This feature is something only Android users can take advantage of, since iPhones lack the requisite SD card slot. The feature is rolling out on Android tablets and smartphones starting today in the US, UK, Germany, Austria, and Japan.

(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

The back-and-forth war between YouTube and the music industry continues, this time with a new privacy report from Google. In the company's "How Google Fights Privacy" report released today, the company details data showing that YouTube has paid $2 billion (£1.5 billion) to copyright holders through its Content ID system. That's double the payout it announced in 2014, which covered the payments received by the music industry since Content ID was introduced back in 2007.

Content ID is YouTube's way of scanning user-created content for copyright infringement, and it also has the music industry up in arms. When a creator uploads content to YouTube, the Content ID system detects if there's any trace of copyrighted material in the user-generated content, such as music. The copyright holders have the power to use Content ID to either report, block, or monetize videos that are identified as containing copyrighted content. In Google's report, YouTube claims that 90 percent of the more than 8,000 rightsholders choose to monetize that content, and 50 percent of the music industry's revenue from YouTube comes from this monetization.

While Google and YouTube have consistently reported how much they pay copyright holders, the music industry claims that the $2 billion it has received is not enough and that the Content ID process is inefficient. It's true that Content ID hasn't been completely accurate in the past; it erroneously flagged content that has been protected under fair use, such as Let's Play videos that include gaming content owned by gaming companies. Some reports also note that Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) estimated that Content ID "fails to identify upwards of 40 percent of the use of UMPG’s compositions on YouTube."

(credit: Shawn Campbell)

If you've ever tried to post a GIF to Twitter only to be told that the file size was too large, you're in for a pleasant surprise. According to Twitter's Help Center, the company has increased the maximum GIF size to 15MB on the web, a much-needed change from the original 5MB limit.

Twitter didn't mention this change on social media, nor did it make a big announcement about it. Rather, its Help Center page detailing image, video, and GIF-posting regulations reflects the change under the "size and file type requirements" section. "Photos can be up to 5MB; animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on web," the page states. That means you'll only be able to take advantage of the higher limit if you're posting to Twitter from your computer—you'll still have to live with smaller GIFs if you're posting from your smartphone.

While Twitter's inherent limits have been a large part of its popularity, the company has recently been loosening some of the restrictions. It stopped counting images, polls, and usernames as part of the service's 140-character limit, and it has also relaxed the rules of its quick-video platform Vine by increasing the video length limit from six seconds to 140 seconds.

(credit: Amazon)

Amazon's annual 24-hours of deals, dubbed Prime Day, is coming soon on July 12 and the company is incentivizing voice-shopping with its virtual assistant Alexa. On Prime Day, those with an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap can use Alexa to shop exclusive deals only available while voice shopping. Customers will also receive $10 off their first purchase of $20 or more when they use Alexa from now through July 12.

On July 12, customers can ask, "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?" to get the full list of exclusive savings. Amazon has been tight-lipped about the exact deals of Prime Day so far, but in a press release, the company did detail that some of the exclusive deals will be on smart home products, toys, Amazon devices, and more. For the past few days, Amazon has been releasing new deals every 24 hours leading up to Prime Day; some of today's deals include 35 percent off a Polaroid Cube 1080p action camera and 66 percent off an Anker 20000 mAh PowerCore portable charger.

Amazon has been pushing voice shopping using Alexa for a while now, so it's fitting that the company would hide some deals away to entice Alexa users who may have never shopped using the virtual assistant before. Keep in mind that Amazon's Prime Day deals are only available for Prime members, as are the Alexa-exclusive deals as well. Would-be buyers still have time to sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime before July 12 to get in on the sale.

Valentina Palladino

The Sony Xperia X Performance.

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Sony is switching gears when it comes to smartphones and that shift is embodied in the new X line of handsets. There's the Xperia XA Ultra, a "selfie" smartphone with a 16-megapixel front-facing camera, the middle-of-the-road Xperia X equipped with a Snapdragon 650 processor, and then there's the Xperia X Performance. This device is the "flagship" of sorts for the new line, sporting a 5-inch FHD display, a Snapdragon 820 processor, and 3GB of RAM.

New letter aside, some of these X phones pick up right where the Z series left off, which means that in some ways they feel just a step behind the rest of the competition. The X Performance's biggest problem isn't that it's a bad phone but that it's a $700 phone that often feels inferior to $400 phones.

Look and feel

All of Sony's new Xperia X smartphones look quite similar, and the Xperia X Performance looks nearly identical to the standard Xperia X. Thanks to a better processor and a larger battery, the X Performance is just about a millimeter thicker and a few grams heavier than the Xperia X. While the lower-powered handset resembles a more rigid iPhone 6s, the X Performance emphasizes its blockiness with the additional thickness and weight.