A significant portion of the wearable experience is “actually off-wrist,” TomTom Vice President Walter Hermsen said on Monday, shortly after the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based original equipment manufacturer (OEM) revealed some of the new features of the TomTom Sports platform. Mr. Hermsen explained how TomTom recently adopted a new product strategy aimed at delivering a more comprehensive experience which transcends the concept of a smartwatch, stating that there’s a finite amount of information companies can serve to their customers through devices they wear on their wrists. The newly introduced TomTom-made platform ships with a revamped system of fitness points and VO2 Max scores with the goal of making the end-user experience more intuitive and turning the company’s offering into a more reliable and versatile fitness tracking solution, the company previously said.
Mr. Hermsen said that contemporary wearables are more than capable of tracking a wide variety of metrics but are limited in terms of the volume of information they can send to their users without overwhelming them with data, which is an issue that TomTom is now looking to address in the future, starting with the new TomTom Sports platform. The Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer is seeking to target the “less active” portion of both its user base and the overall market, with the latest redesign of its platform being aimed at delivering useful information and providing users with a personalized experience which offers more than the sum of its parts and isn’t “just another load of numbers among the numbers you already see,” Mr. Hermsen explained.
In a recent interview with Wareable, TomTom VP said that the firm is seeking to make fitness trackers and related tech more accessible to people who don’t run marathons or are otherwise extremely serious in the manner in which they approach their hobbies. Instead, the firm is trying to appeal to the casual audience by delivering a reliable and easy-to-understand solution which won’t discourage its customers from tracking their fitness activities by making the entire process overly complex. His comments come shortly after reports that TomTom is preparing to exit the wearable market segment, which currently doesn’t seem like a probable scenario, at least in the context of the firm entirely abandoning this demographic, though it remains to be seen how consumers will react to its latest product strategy.