Apple and LG tie for best smartphone of 2014 award, Moto 360 takes wearables

Every year at Mobile World Congress, the GSMA — the folks behind the event — vote on the best technology, software and ideas in mobile. This year’s winners might have seemed obvious, but there were a couple of “gotchas” that caused us to take notice.

The biggest shock is that Apple didn’t take home the Best Smartphone award alone for the iPhone 6. They actually tied with LG for the LG G3. It’s sure to be great news for the South Korean manufacturer up against stiff competition from their neighbors Samsung or the folks out in Taiwan named HTC.

Motorola took home two awards for two different products. They won Best Affordable Smartphone (those which cost 0 or less) for last year’s Moto E, and took home the Best Wearable category for the stunning Moto 360.

Other notable wins at the Global Mobile Awards include Gameloft winning Best Game for Asphalt 8, and IFTTT winning the big grandaddy of app awards with their automated web service being voted the best overall app of 2014. Well deserved, we’d say.

As we found when we reflected on the year a while back, 2014 was great. The best part is that 2015 is looking even better with tons more wearables bound to be introduced, great new smartphones on the horizons and more innovations that we have yet to even know about. Be sure to take a look at all of the winners over at the GMA website if you’re curious.

New Google Fit partners bring support to more wearables, allow developers to pull even more data via SDK

Back in May, Google announced an update to Google Fit that allowed users to track their fitness goals and history, even adding a handy Android Wear watch face to help users stay on top of things. Today, Google Fit Lead Product Manager Angana Ghosh announced a handful of new Fit partners not only adding Fit support to their wearables, but bringing additional data to the SDK.

Endomondo, Garmin, the Daily Burn, the Basis Peak, and the Xiaomi miBand are Fit’s latest partners. With new Fit support, users can now store workout sessions and activity data when using those wearables on their Android device. Others include LifeSum, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal who bring nutrition data like calories consumed, protein, carbs, fats (even vitamins and minerals) for developers to tap into using the History API in the Fit SDK. A new sleep activity is also headed to the Fit SDK thanks to Basis Peak and Sleep Android.

Again, all this data is now accessible to any developer to incorporate into their own apps. For instance, based on meals written to Google Fit by other apps, Runkeeper can now display a Google Now card reminding users to “work off” meals they’ve just eaten. It’s like one big happy family of fitness services and data working together to help keep you in shape.

For those that like beta testing new software, Google mentions that Instaweather has recently integrated Google Fit into a new Android Wear watch face currently in beta. You can try it out by joining the Google+ community here and following the links therein to download the beta version of the app.

For more info on integrating the Google Fit SDK into your own app, check out the developer page here.

[Google Developers]