SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) - Google glasses are still a couple years off, but if you're athletic you can get a taste of the wearable technology of the future today to augment your outdoor sports and activities. My colleague Jay Greene has been testing some of the latest connected wearable tech that adds new dimensions to training or sports.
I love the
Zeal Z3 GPS goggles for skiing. They are the closest to what Google has been showing, with a micro-display that gives you a head-up readout of your speed, altitude changes, run count, etc. And they look cool! They are the most expensive piece of gear on today's list at $549.
The Nike+ Fuelband is a cool looking wrist device that monitors just about all your activity and records it as calories burned and movement taken. The idea isn't all that revolutionary, but its integration with an app is: Set your goal for the day and the LED's on your wrist move from red or green as you approach that goal. FuelBand is $149.
We came away a little dubious of the
Adidas miCoach SpeedCell, a cool little device that locks into the sole of certain Adidas shoes. It tracks your running speed, acceleration, distance and pace - especially suited to playing soccer - then uploads that info wirelessly to an app on your iPhone or your computer. Only we couldn't get it to work with either a Mac or PC. $69.
Notice all these devices record information and can offload it later to a computing device like a computer or smartphone. As this category matures, look for wearables to sync & share data to the cloud without the intermediate clunky step of manually syncing. That may require a cellular data connection for each device, which is where the wireless industry is already going with the recent
introduction of multi-device plans at Verizon.
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