Misfit's Flare is a $60 no-frills fitness tracker
You can, however, program the touch-sensitive face to play music.
If you're in the market for a bare-bones fitness tracker, Misfit has just unveiled the $60 Flare. It can track your steps, distance, calories and sleep quality, and you can program the touch-sensitive face to start and stop music or do a few other functions. Don't expect any fancy call or message notifications, movement reminders or other frills, though -- for that, you'll need to step up to Misfit's $100 Ray or Shine 2 trackers.
There aren't a lot of trackers in the Flare's price range -- another option that pops to mind is Fitbit's original Flex, which runs $80 but can be had online for much less. Others include the $35 Xiaomi Mi Band 2, $47 or so Withings Go and Jawbone Up 2. Misfit used to sell the $30 Flash, but appears to have discontinued it.
As with its other models, Misfit's Flare is waterproof, but swimmers need to pay an extra $10 to unlock its pool tracking features, for some reason. It comes with a 3-axis accelerometer, single white LED, Bluetooth 4.1 and a capacitive touch sensor. The latter can be programmed to activate your phone's battery, play music or "control household devices," presumably speakers or other things with some relation to exercise.
As with other devices from fashion brand Fossil (Misfit's parent), the Flare looks pretty nice for the price, with an aluminum case and crystal face. As a design-focused firm, Fossil has a unique position in the wearables market compared to tech firms like LG and Huawei -- ie, it can make nice-looking watches that people will actually want. Between its own brand and Misfit (with the Vapor), it already has more Android Wear watches than most companies, for instance. The Flare tracker is now available online and in stores for $60.
