Wristcam brings two cameras to your Apple Watch — again — for $299

By Andy Boxall December 3, 2020

What’s the one big feature your Apple Watch is missing? If you said a camera, then your wait is almost over. It’s called Wristcam, and it brings a pair of cameras that can shoot stills and video to your Apple Watch’s strap. Cameras on smartwatches are a forgotten genre, with past examples adding dubious benefit to the first wave of serious smartwatches years ago. And it turns out that despite the new name, Wristcam is itself not entirely new either.

Contents

The Wristcam
Glide, CMRA

The Wristcam

The Wristcam has an 8-megapixel main camera that faces out into the world, and a second 2MP camera for taking selfies. The Wristcam app shows a viewfinder on the Watch’s screen, along with a shutter button, and the main cam can shoot 1080p video. It has its own battery rather than adding additional strain to the Watch’s own cell, and is recharged using a USB cable. The Wristcam’s battery is expected to last for a day. All photos and videos are stored in its own 8GB memory.

Wristcam Painting

In addition to stills and video, the Wristcam has a feature for sharing live or recorded video clips with friends. Photos and video can be shared straight from the watch, or transferred to your iPhone to edit. A Quick Capture system makes it easy to use, with a single tap to take a still, a long press to record video, and a double tap to switch from the front camera to the main camera. It connects to the Watch and iPhone using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Why would you want such a thing? According to Wristcam, it’s to ensure you always have access to a camera even if you leave your iPhone at home, or don’t have it on hand. There are two LEDs to tell those around you the camera is active, in an effort to avoid privacy concerns. The sacrifice you make is in wearability. The bulbous, 23=gram Wristcam module is attached to its own special Apple Watch strap, which comes in four different colors, and it does add a lot of bulk to the usually svelte Apple Watch.

Glide, CMRA

Putting a camera on a smartwatch isn’t a new idea. Samsung put a camera on the original Galaxy Gear (released in 2013) and its sequel, the Galaxy Gear 2, but abandoned the feature after these models. Other smartwatches with a camera include the disastrous Neptune Pine, and odditiess like the Arrow Smartwatch. Cameras on the Apple Watch aren’t new either, as the team behind the Wristcam has explored the concept before.

Ari Roisman, Wristcam’s CEO and co-founder, started video messaging app Glide, and at CES 2017 revealed a complementary product called the CMRA, which was a band for the Apple Watch with two cameras inside. The company has since rebranded as Wristcam, according to a post on the CMRA support page hosted on its otherwise defunct website, with functionality and design of the product largely very similar.

Digital Trends contacted Wristcam to understand the situation better, and received the following response by email: “Wristcam originally launched as CMRA in 2016. The team has spent the last four years working on the design and the technical aspects of building a camera into a smart band, and they worked closely with Apple to ensure the functionality and design was just right. It paid off and they received “Made for Apple” designation.”

Regarding the original CMRA band, this is only now shipping to those who ordered it when it was first available in 2016. Deliveries should arrive before the end of the year.

The newly branded Wristcam is available to purchase today from the company’s own website for $299. This makes it more expensive than an Apple Watch SE, and also more than the CMRA band when it was first announced.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Senior Mobile Writer

Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

Mobile

The Apple Watch Pro may be bad news for your watch band collection

The back of a blue Braided Solo Loop Band on the Apple Watch Series 7.

If you're anticipating the reveal of the Apple Watch Pro at next week's Far Out event, you may want to look out for this little detail. There's a rumor going around that the Apple Watch Pro may not be compatible with your existing Apple Watch bands.

According to a post by Weibo user Uncle Pan (via MacRumors), the Apple Watch Pro will have a 47mm/48mm screen, complete with a flat, squared-out display. That means that the watch strap will be a little wider than the 41mm/45mm bands that are currently being used for the Apple Watch Series 7. Despite the strap having the same design as the existing ones, this change may force Apple Watch customers to pay extra money for new bands.

Mobile

I added a camera to my Apple Watch and this is what happened

Apple Watch with Wristcam showing selfie view.

Rumors have been swirling for years about mainstream smartwatches gaining camera support, from a Samsung patent in 2017 to more than a few from Apple over the years. However, even though these reports repeatedly suggest companies are exploring the area of wearable photography, nothing has yet come of it.

Realistically, there may not be much demand for cameras on smartwatches. Among the concerns I commonly hear from smartwatch users, wishing for a camera barely makes the list. Nearly all the flagship smartwatches have to be paired with a compatible smartphone that’s guaranteed to have a better camera than anything that can be crammed into a wrist-sized device.

Mobile

Is the Oura Ring finally good enough to replace your Apple Watch?

Oura Ring, iPhone 13 Pro, and Apple Watch Series 7.

I regularly wear the Oura Ring and the Apple Watch Series 7 together, as one fills in the gaps the other has in its arsenal of features. Through two recent updates, the Oura smart ring has increased its ability to monitor health and fitness with the addition of simple fitness tracking and SpO2 blood oxygen monitoring. Is the Oura Ring now a full-fledged health and fitness tracker ready to be worn on its own, without any compromises?
New features
Both the workout tracking and the SpO2 blood oxygen monitoring have been promised since the launch of the third-generation ring in 2021, so their arrival is overdue. The workout mode employs the ring’s heart rate tracking and came to the ring at the end of May, while the Sp02 feature came at the end of July. Once you set the feature up, it works automatically.

The workout mode is quite simple as it only looks at your heart rate to assess intensity, and doesn’t seem to use the accelerometer to cover movement, making it relatively basic when compared to other wearables. The SpO2 monitoring works when you’re asleep. With it, the Oura Ring also tracks Breathing Regularity — helping to identify changes in your breathing patterns overnight, which may be indications of sleep-related problems like sleep apnea.