More than two months after we first got wind of a new Sony SmartBand, the device has been made officially official.
The Sony SmartBand 2 will launch in September 2015 in 60 countries around the world, with pricing set at around 119 EUR ($132 USD). It'll be available in four colors — black, white, pink, and indigo — but the bands are interchangable so that you can swap 'em out to fit your mood.
Sony is touting the SmartBand 2 as a “multi-sensor life logger” that uses an accelerometer and heart rate sensors to measure your pulse, fitness, excitement, and stress. The SmartBand 2 can also be your fitness buddy thanks to its ability to track your walks, runs, and workouts, and you can keep view the info gained from these activities using the Sony Lifelog app. Sony’s new wearable can track your sleep, too, thanks to its automatic sleep detection. You can also let it determine the best time to wake you up based on your sleep cycle, which will hopefully ensure that you always wake up on the right side of the bed.
In addition to its activity tracking, the SmartBand 2 can serve up notifications from your paired smartphone. It can alert you using vibration or pulsing RGB LEDs. There are also music control buttons to handle the tunes coming from your smartphone or tablet. And if you’ve got a Sony Xperia phone or tablet paired with the SmartBand 2, it can alert you when you’re more than 10 meters away from your connected device.
The body of the SmartBand 2 is IP68 rated, making it resistant to fresh water up to 3 meters and 30 minutes of exposure. In terms of battery life, Sony says that you should expect to get around 10 hours of continues use, 2 days of “normal mode” use, and up to 5 days in Stamina Mode. Sony says that the SmartBand 2 is compatible with Android devices on 4.4 or higher and Apple products on iOS 8.0 or higher.
While it offers several of the features of a smartwatch, the SmartBand 2 comes in at a price that’s a bit cheaper that most smartwatches since it doesn’t have a big ol’ screen on it. That lack of a screen could also make it a bit more fashionable that some smartwatches since it looks like a pretty plain bracelet. Of course, that lack of a display could be a negative for some folks that want to actually view incoming alerts on their wrist. If you’re looking for something a bit more subtle, though, the SmartBand 2 may be a good fit for your wrist.
