You know Razer for its crazy gaming tablets, and awesome gaming laptops. But now its branching out some. Get ready to know Razer for its smartwatch/fitness band thingies? Yeah, it’s a little weird.
Say hello to the Razer Nabu. It’s a dual-screened fitness band-type gadget with all the bonus features of a smartwatch. You looking for notifications on your wrist? You got it, front and back; the front-side OLED “icon screen” for simple notifications that just indicate “email” or “text message”, and the back-side “message screen” for potentially more sensitive information like snippets of text.
And all of that comes on top of your standard fitness band functionality: sensors like an accelerometer and an altimeter, sleep-tracking, an app to help you keep track of all your stats, and a promised battery life of seven days.
But all that — aside from maybe the two screens — is pretty standard fare. What the Nabu aims to bring to the table is an open development platform and bands that interact with each other directly. The Nabu plays nice with Android and iOS, and offers up all its sensors to developers who want to make a Nabu-centric app, or just wrap functionality into an existing one.
The specifics are a little hazy, but the vision is at least interesting: you and a friend/colleague/dude you just met shake hands — both of you for some reason wearing Nabus — and boom, you automatically send a friend request on Facebook. Or follow him on Twitter. Or some other activity of your/his choosing.
And while the neat-at-best social networking applications are the easiest to wrap your mind around, there are maybe some neat “gaming” applications too. Augmented reality tag? Street-passing everywhere? Johann Sebastian Joust? Something cooler nobody’s thought of yet? It’ll all depend on how many of these get out there, and how much love they get from developers.
But with a starting (developer’s only) price of $US50, the Nabu might stand a chance. Especially if that price doesn’t skyrocket on the band’s early 2014 release. It’s a neat little gadget for sure, but the fitness band crowd is getting more crowded by the minute.