Microsoft's Fitness Wearable Said Just Weeks Away

Microsoft's long-rumored smartwatch plans will reach fruition in just a few weeks time, insiders claim, with what's said to be a fitness-centric wearable expected to debut imminently. The Windows-maker's ambitions in the space have been well whispered since last year, and as recently as June 2014 there were suggestions that the unnamed wrist-band would hit the market in October, complete with a full complement of motion-tracking sensors.

Now, according to Forbes' sources, that time is almost upon us. Described as a smartwatch rather than a fitness tracker more akin to Jawbone's UP24, for instance, the wearable tracks heart rate among other metrics.

Lending weight to the idea of it being a more comprehensively featured smartwatch is the suggestion that it will have battery life of around two days. While that would make it better than most Android Wear watches, though still fall short of Pebble with its power-sipping monochrome display, it still pales in comparison to the 7+ days most fitness bands can last.

Jawbone, for instance, pushed out new firmware earlier this year that extended the UP24's runtime to a whopping fourteen days.

Interestingly, according to the leaks the Microsoft wearable will offer cross-platform support, rather than being limited to just the company's own Windows Phone OS. That would represent a different approach to Google with Android Wear and Apple with the Apple Watch, both of which only work with Android and iOS respectively.

According to Forbes, the Microsoft device will be on sale "soon after launch" so as to reach shoppers in time for the holiday season.

Previous leaks have pointed to wireless charging in addition to notification support and calculating distance moved and calorific burn.

In fact, Microsoft is said to have borrowed heavily from its work on Kinect for the wearables sensor suite.

SOURCE Forbes