Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein and I'm tracking my heart race can you tell how they're tracking my heart rate well it's not on my wrist it's actually in my ears these are LG's new heart rate earphones and they work in tandem with another thing that I'm wearing the LG life band touch these are two separate devices that LG is now selling we sell these back at CES and they're both attempting to do different things in the wearable health market I just got in my ear the information all the calories and I'm being burned and the fact that I've got a heart rate that's astonishingly high at over 90 beats per minute because I'm talking to you now how those work is that they've got contact patches here and so you avoid any sort of LED on your wrist which we found is kind of a mixed bag in terms of accuracy anyhow these are always connected once you start the workout unless you take them off and you've got this little bluetooth dongle right here that allows you to press a button to get your heart rate reading and it glows to tell you your relative heart rate zone you gotta remember what color though by checking the manual it's not easy to remember now the life band touch is its own separate activity tracker this is a watch but it's also a Fitness band a lot like the Nike Fuel band or your Fitbit force that type of territory and also is a little bit smart like the Samsung gear fit but don't get too excited about how smart you might think it's gonna be if you're an iPhone user it only shows you that someone is calling nothing else on Android you get the caller ID you also get the ability to check messages or that couldn't read the content of the messages it just told me that something was being sent and you can silence a call by putting your hand over it you can also just reach in your pocket and turn off your phone it's not too complicated this also has the ability to control your music volume and skipping tracks but a lot of wearables do that now and it tracks your steps or the pedometer but also connects with heart rate monitors ones bipolar and Zephyr in addition to the LG heartrate earphone so it's not a vast expanse but you do have other options you don't have to pay up for these and these are $180 these are expensive little earphones the sound quality is okay it's not that great and you have to wear these all the time in order to use them as heart rate monitors do you want to use these as opposed to your own earphone I don't plus they don't plug in like regular earphones you got to use this dongle and it's all you got about four hours of battery life so you've got to keep recharging this with micro USB now this has its own little slide to charge dongle that connects on the back here but uses micro USB after that this gets about two to five days of battery life that's really not that great in this world there are a lot of bands that last a week and others that last even more if they're using a built-in coin battery it slides onto your wrist is rigid but flexible at the other end pops on there are three different sizes it's a little thick kind of like a bangle feels even bit thicker than the Nike FuelBand and its water-resistant very nestlé's to wear it in the shower the good news is at the LG fitness app is surprisingly deep and it works with third-party app connectivity as well things like My Fitness Pal RunKeeper MapMyFitness those are supported in there so that's much better than Samsung s health which doesn't tap into that and I use that with gear also terms of Android and iOS the support is limited you can't use any Android phone you really can use certain phones from LG and Samsung including the Google Nexus 5 and on iphone it's iPhone 4s and better you got to use iOS 6 or 7 on Android you have to use jelly bean 4.3 or later navigating with the life band touch also means you have to press this button to cycle through modes you also can swipe and you can tap for certain areas so you know if to remember the right pattern and make sure you're not pressing and tapping instead of swiping as otherwise you'll hit the wrong sub menu button and if you want to enter your daily goals you can only do in terms of calories not steps taken that doesn't make any sense for me you can get better options out there in fitness bands this does some basic stuff nice to pair with heart rate but there are other ones like the Garmin vivofit that do that too so $150 for this seems a little pricey and doesn't really go anywhere that futuristic life band touch is like one small step in a direction where doesn't go far enough and I'm not sure about those earphones I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the LG life band touch and these separately sold heartrate earphones