Earlier this year during CES 2014, Sony announced their SmartBand, a fitness tracker come lifelogging accessory that tracks your steps and monitors your sleep thanks to the tiny Core that was inside it. It took a little while for that to hit the market, but it’s been available for some time now and it seems that Sony has a fairly successful little device on their hands. Fast forward to today and Sony is announcing the SmartBand Talk, complete with an eInk display that tells the time and displays a little information on just what you’re doing at any given time. More than that though, the SmartBand Talk features both a mic and a speaker so that you can talk calls while you’re on the go.
Built with the same sort of design language as Sony’s previous SWR110 band from earlier in the year, the SmartBand Talk is available in a range of different colors and features the same sort of rugged texture to the top of the band and the same concentric-circle design button to hold the band together. Where the SmartBand Talk differs from the original is that it just adds more features. It still works with Sony’s LifeLog application like the SWR110 tracking your steps and where you’ve been etc, but while you’re on this journey, you can now take and answer phone calls. Sony is calling the mic and speaker at work in the SmartBand Talk “HD” quality, but we’re not so sure on that one. Still, there’s a single button plus a volume rocker on the side, so taking calls shouldn’t be much of a problem.
The eInk display here will display the time as well as the progress you’re making into your daily goals you’ve set with LifeLog. All-in-all, we’re looking at a SmartBand with a few smartwatch features thrown in. There’s a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with 2MB of memory behind that 1.4-inch curved eInk display, so don’t go expecting the same sort of performance as a smartwatch, here. Still, for €160 the SmartBand Talk does have a lot going for it and you’ll be able to choose from four different colors when it hits shelves this Fall. Much like the original SmartBand and Sony’s Core, you’ll be able to swap the core of this one out with different color bands, too.
