Android-based Gameband smartwatch lives a second life as a gaming machine

By Williams Pelegrin Published February 9, 2017

If you have ever looked at your smartwatch and wished you could play games on it, you might be intrigued by what FMTwo Game Inc. cooked up with its Gameband smartwatch.

As the name so subtly implies, the watch focuses on gamers and does so with two versions. There is an Atari version, which includes classic Atari titles like Pong, Crystal Castles, and Asteroids, and a Terraria version that includes a minigame based off the original title. Regardless of the watch version, the Gameband ships with 20 minigames and several pre-installed apps, such as calendar, weather, and contacts.

Recommended Videos

The Gameband’s focus on gamers is also evident through its MicroSD card slot, which accepts up to 256GB cards and augments the 4GB of built-in storage. That card slot lets you connect the watch to your PC in order to run PixelFurnace, which not only lets you download and install watch games to your Gameband, but also store PC games on the watch. That way, when you connect the watch to another PC, you can play PC titles on that computer through the PixelFurnace app.

Elsewhere, the Gameband features a 1.63-inch, 320 x 320 resolution AMOLED display, with the watch powered by Qualcomm’s wearable-focused Snapdragon 2100 processor and 512MB RAM. The hardware is powerful enough to run a custom version of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, with no mention of an update to the newer Nougat. As such, you will not find Android Pay or Google Assistant, features included in Android Wear 2.0, though Amazon’s Alexa is available as a substitute. Voice control does not work out of the box, though the folks behind Gameband said it is “in the roadmap.”

The biggest concern is whether anyone will actually play games on such a small screen, even if only for a few minutes. The Gameband already surpassed its $75,000 goal on Kickstarter, so more than a few people are at least interested in the idea. It also helps that the cheapest available tier starts at $150, so you will not need to plunk down a fortune to experience it for yourself. The campaign is available until March 17, after which the Gameband will go into full-scale production and hopefully make its way to backers in September.

Williams Pelegrin

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send…

Topics

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Mobile

How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?

Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?