Pebble and Fitbit are beginning to show that they are at the top of the wearables market.
According to the research firm, Canalys, and some of its most recently released data, among all of the consumers who own wearable technology bands around the world during the first quarter of this year, nearly half were owners of the Fitbit fitness band.
That said, when it comes to smartwatches, Pebble has been ripping ahead of the competition.
Despite that the comparatively small Pebble is up against some powerful tech giants such as Samsung and Sony in the wearable technology category, the little guy still seems to be the consumer favorite, for the moment. Canalys identified these wearables and smartwatch market trends in its quarterly report. It pointed out that in the basic category such as fitness bands, Fitbit was the clear leader, despite the fact that its Fitbit Force had to be recalled due to the allergic reaction that the material of the band was causing among some mobile device users.
The recall of that wearable technology wasn’t small and yet the brand still managed to succeed.
A news release from Canalys stated that “While a significant number of Force bands had shipped, the recall only affected the initial roll-out in the U.S. and Canada. The issue was handled well and did not dramatically slow the company’s sales momentum.”
Equally, while the end of 2013 brought a new UP24 fitness tracker from Jawbone, it did see rapid growth through the expansion of its international distribution, but not to the degree that Fitbit has been experiencing.
On the other end of the scale, Nike recently announced that it would no longer be making the FuelBand and that it would be stepping out of the wearables hardware business so that it could concentrate its resources on the Fuel software platform that has been designed for those devices, as well as on the Nike+ user community. Following the analysis conducted by Canalys, it rapidly became clear why this was the case, as the first quarter of 2014 caused Nike’s share of the wearable technology category to plummet down to only 10 percent.
