First Look: Wyze Band with Alexa

As initially revealed by the FCC back in November and formally disclosed this week, the upcoming Wyze Band is described as:

a wrist-wearable smart home assistant and activity tracker. Wyze Band will allow you to control Wyze devices with a tap and using Alexa Built-in, any number of Alexa-enabled devices. It also tracks steps, heart rate, and sleep.

And, thanks to the publicly available beta app, quite a few additional details are now available — including the spiffy animations and images embedded in the YouTube video below.

Beyond the requisite activity tracker features, including alarms, weather, and a jogging app, the Wyze Band is notable for bringing Alexa capabilities to what’s presumably a lower-priced entrant (vs the Fitbit Versa 2). Further, it’s also effectively a touchable hub for the Wyze smart home with graphical shortcuts, to toggle lights and initiate video recording, for example. Smart phone alerting also appears to be present, with a variety of fitness and communication notification badges. Visually, there are several clock faces, of various colors, and backgrounds that it seems you can mix and match.

In terms of hardware, we’re obviously dealing with a color screen… although it remains to be seen if it’s OLED. Below the touchscreen, is a touch sensitive area (similar to the MiBand) that is used as a home/back button via a short tap while a long press triggers Alexa and the side-mounted microphones.

As to timing, Wyze implies we’re still a few months away from release:

Wyze Band just completed a round of hardware testing and we are busily implementing user feedback. We expect to complete the beta phase soon and move on to preparing for the EA launch.