fitness tracker
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Garmin intros three smartwatches, all of them aimed at sports junkies
Credit where it's due: Garmin has managed to basically reinvent itself. Once the king of in-car GPS navigation, the company is now equally known for its sports watches and fitness trackers. Indeed, with the exception of a few low-end navigators no one cares about, Garmin is pretty much only showing wearable devices here at CES. In brief, this year's lineup runs the gamut, with prices starting at $250 and going all the way up to $600. Still, they all have this in common: They're equal parts smartwatch and fitness tracker.
The Movo Wave is a stripped-down fitness tracker that costs just $30
These days, there are only two reasons for us to write about fitness trackers: Either they pack an impressive number of sensors, or they're really, really cheap. The Wave, from a new startup called Movo, definitely falls into the latter category. The device itself is unremarkable in every way -- design, functionality -- but it's nonetheless worth a mention, thanks to its super-low price of $30. In setting the price so low, Movo has managed to undercut out already-affordable devices like the Jawbone Up Move and Misfit Flash, both of which sell for $50. We say, considering how disposable fitness trackers are -- how easy they are to set aside and stop wearing -- these price cuts can't come fast enough.
Basis Peak to get its smartwatch-like features in December
In our recent review of the Basis Peak, we pointed out its potential to be a pretty good smartwatch, just as it is a fitness tracker. And, thanks to a firmware update set to arrive next month, Basis, which is now owned by Intel, will be making its wearable better than it already is. Around mid-December, the Basis Peak is going to begin supporting notifications from Android and iOS devices, including those that come from your calendar, text messages and phone calls. While you'll have to wait for those smartwatch-like features to come to the Peak, something new that's available now is the ability to share your heart rate data with third-party fitness apps via Bluetooth. What's more, the Basis Peak is expanding availability outside of the US, to Canada and the UK in the middle of December as well -- Basis says international pricing will vary depending on the region.
Garmin Vivosmart review: where fitness band meets smartwatch
There are fitness trackers and there are smartwatches, but there's only a small number of devices that attempt to be both. The Garmin Vivosmart is one such exception. It's a $170 band that does everything you'd expect a fitness gadget to do: track your steps, calories burned, distance traveled and sleep. In a unique twist, though, it also has an OLED screen showing things like emails, texts, Twitter and Facebook notifications and incoming calls. In essence, it's a full-fledged fitness tracker that also acts like a full-fledged smartwatch. The question is, can it do both jobs well?
Microsoft unveils new iOS-compatible fitness tracker, Microsoft Band
Microsoft today entered the fitness tracker market with its new Microsoft Band wearable device to compete with new offerings from Fitbit and Apple's upcoming Watch device. The Band's biggest feature is its cross-compatibility, supporting iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It also moves beyond a fitness tracker and inches into the smartwatch category with support for notifications and other smartphone-connected features. The Microsoft Band includes a variety of different sensors to measure heart rate, sleep, UV exposure and physical activity. The device also connects to a compatible smartphone, allowing users to receive text messages, incoming call alerts and other notifications without having to look at their phone. Cortana voice assistant control is built into the device, but that feature is available only to Windows Phone owners. To accompany the Band, Microsoft is enabling Microsoft Health, an online repository for your fitness data. The service syncs data from your Band and allows for the import of information from third-party apps such as MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and MapMyFitness. The new Microsoft Band costs $199 and will go on sale at Microsoft's online and retail stores starting October 31.
Pivotal Living hopes you'll pay $12 a year to use its fitness tracker
Fitness trackers come a dime a dozen and worse, they all seem to do the same thing: monitor your step count, calorie burn and sleep quality. As it happens, the Life Tracker 1, the first device from a startup called Pivotal Living, does all these things, and not much more. But it's not what the product does or how it looks that has the potential to distinguish it -- it's how you pay for it. Whereas most health trackers cost somewhere around $100, and work with a free companion app, Pivotal Living is charging $12 a year for access to its Android and iOS apps. For the money, you also get the hardware, a simple plastic band with an OLED screen for showing your daily step and calorie count. Every time the company introduces a new iteration, you can renew or extend your subscription for $12 and in so doing, get the latest piece of kit. If you ever cancel, you can keep the band and continue to view your daily stats on the device; you just won't have access to the app, or any of your big-picture data.
Wellograph Watch: Activity tracking with style and sapphire
There are a ton of fitness and activity monitors out in the wild now that could basically be described as the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some of the fitness monitors I've reviewed over the past few years have been amazing, with accuracy, good battery life, and interaction with apps that track your activity and inspire you to do more. A handful have been just awful, with battery life issues, crashes, and apps that weren't thought out. And there were the ugly devices - and I mean they were awful to look at. The Wellograph (US$349) certainly isn't an ugly device, and it's one of the more innovative fitness devices I've seen so far. But like so many others fitness monitors that are rushing to market, it seems to be a work in progress. Specifications Dimensions: 1.65 x 1.30 x 0.5 inch (42 x 33 x 12.5 mm) Weight: 3.52 ounce (55 grams) Display: 1.26 inch low-power LCD with backlight Sensors: 9-axis motion sensor, Tri-LED heart rate sensor Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0 LE Battery life: 7 days per charge (210 mAh) Waterproof: 5 ATM, up to 50 meters or 160 feet Materials: Anodized aluminum lower case, stainless steel upper case, spherical sapphire crystal. Design I have to feel a bit sorry for the Wellograph design team, as their device - which is ostensibly a watch-style wrist device - will inevitably be compared to the upcoming Apple Watch. Rather than a smooth, curvaceous design, the Wellograph is quite boxy with rounded corners. That being said, the design really grew on me as I wore the Wellograph. The case comes in two different finishes: Silver Satin with a brown leather strap and Black Chrome with a black leather strap. Additional straps are available for $49 each either in leather or as a black nylon Nato strap. One of the big selling points of the Wellograph is that it uses a sapphire crystal - the exact material that was expected on the iPhone 6 models (it does exist on the Touch ID home button) and that will be on several models of the Apple Watch. That should help to keep the crystal from being scratched, and in testing for almost a month the crystal remained scratch-free despite some accidental bumps. The user interface is controlled by two buttons on the right side of the case, which might make it difficult for left-handed people to use and wear. Unlike the Apple Watch, the display operates only in one orientation while being worn so it can't be flipped. Most fitness tracker UIs use a single button to cycle through a number of screens. The two buttons on the Wellograph are used to scroll through text-based menus on the device and select those menu items. While the UI is rather easy to pick up and understand, I found that changing the settings on the device was cumbersome. It's definitely a lot easier to do that through a smartphone app like so many other devices. The display is kind of schizophrenic, at times both wonderful and annoying. Outside in bright sunshine, it's a joy to use, with large white letters appearing on a stark black background. On cloudy days or in a darkened room, you'll find it's difficult to read the display without using the backlight. Once selected in the settings, the backlight turns on while you're pushing buttons, then fades to darkness over a few seconds. At the bottom of the default digital time display are three small icons. One shows the relative battery charge level, the middle one is the current day of the month, and the last is a heart-shaped icon that visually displays how far you've come toward your daily exercise goal. The Wellograph app tries to steer you to do 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise daily. The strap on the Wellograph is a standard leather strap that is quite comfortable. For those who are more active or wish to take the device swimming (it is waterproof!) there's a nylon Nato band. For charging, there's a magnetic dock that the watch rests on, displaying a "sideways clock" while the device is getting power. Function Part of my comment about the Wellograph feeling like a work in progress has to do with how new the device is; during my weeks of testing, I was notified about three firmware updates. Those are done through the iPhone app via Bluetooth The Bluetooth syncing seems just plain odd. Most devices have a simple way to sync, where you just push a button and the device contacts your iPhone and begins a sync. Not here. Syncing the Wellograph involves launching the app and tapping sync, at which time you're asked to "Select an accessory." Huh? I finally realized that it was trying to find the Wellograph, which it didn't do automatically because the device turns Bluetooth off in between syncs. To turn it on, you turn to the watch, and then have to punch the two buttons a total of ten times to cycle through menus and turn Bluetooth on just long enough for your iPhone and Wellograph to talk to each other. Sure, turning off Bluetooth is a great way to make sure that your device isn't constantly burning up battery power, but I'd much rather charge the device once a day than have to punch buttons every time I want to sync the device. Even my $35 Virgin Pulse Max has a better sync design than this, and it has a battery that lasts for about six months! With it, I just punch one button seven times quickly until the screen says "Sync", launch the app, and the two devices communicate and transfer info. Done. To achieve that 7-day per charge battery life, the Wellograph seems to make some other sacrifices: the display backlight that's only on when you're pushing buttons and a "power saver mode" that you have to remember to get out of by pushing a button. The first day of use I didn't know I had to push that button to "wake" the Wellograph, so it didn't track my steps until much later in the day when I actually "woke" it. Since that power saver mode seems to enable itself when there's not too much activity (it thinks you're asleep), the Wellograph enabled the mode many times while I was working at my desk. Since I didn't look at the watch face obsessively, I wasn't aware until later that it wasn't tracking my steps. A step tracker is worthless unless it's constantly tracking your steps. One feature that is pretty cool is the heart rate sensor - a similar sensor will be on the back of every Apple Watch as well. All you need to do to measure heart rate is to push buttons until you get to the BPM screen. Initially, a heart shape pulsed along with my heart until it got an average reading, at which it stopped and displayed that reading. On occasion I found that it would "beat" but not display a beats-per-minute figure, which made me wonder if I had just died. Not good. After one of the firmware updates, the heart rate sensor changed to an actual EKG-like heart trace. I compared the Wellograph BPM figure with that from both another smartphone-enabled device - a Withings Blood Pressure Monitor - and with the time-tested manual method. In all cases, the heart rate was within a few BPM, so it looks like their sensor is right on the money. The "fitness" number that is calculated by the app didn't sit well with me, either. What it does is display a bell curve showing the percentile you're in for your "fitness age". The app explains that the "fitness age depends on your BMI, age, sex, resting heart rate, and your exercise". I just turned 57, but the device showed that I was in the 85th percentile for people with a 63 year old fitness age. Why complicate matters? Just tell me that I'm at the 50th percentile of fitness for people who are 57 years old or whatever, don't tell me that I'm in better shape than 84 percent of 63 year old males. One other complaint about the Wellograph: it doesn't work with anything but this app. Many of the other fitness trackers on the market work with a number of apps, allowing you to take the information gathered by the device and put it into whatever app fits your fancy. Not so with Wellograph -- you're stuck in its small ecosystem. The app displays a home screen with three big icons on it: Activity, Heart, and Sessions. Activity shows your current step and calorie count, as well as a daily, weekly and monthly total. I found it rather odd that when I tried to change my daily step goal in the user profile settings, it took quite a while for the change to "take", leading me to wonder if the app had frozen. One other oddity with the settings: regardless of how many times I put in my birthdate, it kept reverting to one year later days after I'd save it. I guess being a year younger is a benefit of using Wellograph. I also found the Wellograph's step counting function to be well off of what two other devices - my iPhone 6 Plus and that cheap Virgin Pulse device - agreed on. It was always somewhat on the low side to the tune of almost 20 - 25 percent of my step total. I've noticed similar low numbers for some other wrist-worn fitness trackers - the Misfit Shine, for example - while other devices have been right on the money. The Heart display is fascinating, showing the amount of cardio time you've put in and displaying light, moderate and vigorous activity by percentage of total. When you swipe the screen to the left, you get a display of your heart rate - high, low, and average for a day, week or month. Sessions involves tracking specific exercise sessions - say, a workout on an elliptical machine or exercise bike. All-in-all, I found the app to be somewhat unexciting and less motivating than other fitness apps I have used. Finally, there's no sleep tracking function. Considering that even the $99 Fitbit One can give you an idea of the quality of your sleep, I find this to be a surprising omission on the Wellograph. Conclusion After several weeks of putting the Wellograph through the daily routine, I found that it is one of the more comfortable fitness trackers I've worn, and it looks good. It gets the advertised one week of battery life, but at the expense of display clarity indoors, continuous tracking, and ease of syncing. The bottom line, though, is that there are a number of less expensive fitness trackers that do the same job as well or better than the Wellograph. With the Apple Watch on the horizon, able to do health tracking as well as running a variety of apps to do just about anything and display all of those on a vibrant color screen, is there really a place in the market for a $349 monochrome device that performs just a handful of functions? At a lesser price, I could see a place for Wellograph for those people who don't necessarily want an app-enabled battery hog on their wrists. If you need a device that wouldn't look out of place in a boardroom, that's waterproof, and that just tracks fitness factors, then Wellograph might be for you. Rating: 2-1/2 stars out of 4 stars possible
Basis unveils its first fitness tracker since getting acquired by Intel
You probably mainly think of Intel as the company trying to make 2-in-1s happen, but lately it's been dabbling in fitness, too. It all started when the chip maker acquired Basis, the creator of what was quite possibly the most sophisticated fitness wearable on the market. Intel promised it'd make it even smarter. Or something. Now, six months later, Basis is introducing the Peak, its first fitness tracker since joining Chipzilla. And it is indeed a bit smarter. Mostly, though, it's just a better-designed device.
Misfit Flash is an affordable, fun, and waterproof wearable
If you think that the world of wearables turned all Apple last week with the announcement of the Watch, you're wrong. Over the past few days TUAW has received information about a number of new wearables, including one that is incredibly affordable. The new Misfit Flash (US$49.99) is the second wearable from the same folks who brought you the Shine. Misfit, of course, is the company co-founded by none other than ex-Apple-and-Pepsi CEO John Sculley along with Sonny Vu and Sridhar Iyengar. Despite its low price tag, Flash is relatively full-featured. It's made out of a soft-touch plastic for comfort and it's waterproof down to 30 meters (98 feet). As you well know, the much more pricey smartwatch from Apple isn't waterproof... While the Misfit Flash won't run apps like Apple's Watch will when it arrives next year, it will track your activity and sleep, tell you the time, and sync with the Misfit App on your iPhone. Flash comes in seven colors, including "lemon-lime Zest, funky Fuchsia, and minimalist Frost." Like the Shine, you'll never have to charge the Flash -- it uses a common watch/camera battery to run for up to six months. You'll be able to buy one at Best Buy, Target, Amazon.com, and Walmart starting in October, or you can pre-order one today.
IRL: Living with Withings' Pulse O2 fitness tracker
Last year, Withings released the Pulse, a Fitbit-esque activity tracker that clipped to your waistband. Its party trick was an optical heart rate monitor built into the back that helped it stand a little taller than its rivals. I reviewed it and liked it, but my feeling then, as now, is that the mainstream will never think a belt-worn pedometer is the best wearable technology can offer. My point was that it's far too easy to leave the unit on another pair of trousers pants, losing days' worth of data at a time.
Garmin's Vivosmart is part fitness band, part smartwatch
Considering how many damn smartwatches and fitness bands we've seen, it's incredible how few of them manage to combine aspects of both. Sure, there was the Fitbit Force, which was designed to show incoming calls for iPhones, but that was discontinued after a recall. The Samsung Gear Fit and Gear 2 have some fitness features, but you need a Samsung phone to use them, and besides, the step and heart-rate tracking aren't very accurate anyway. You might even remember the Razer Nabu, which won our People's Choice Awards at CES, and promised to display notifications for emails, among other things. But since that still hasn't come out, it's basically a moot point. All of this is to say: There's a wide-open market for fitness trackers that can also do the core job of smartwatches. Enter Garmin. The company just announced the $170 Vivosmart band, a fitness tracker that shows texts, emails, calls, calendar appointments, game notifications and music playback controls. For the time being, at least, it might be the most versatile fitness device you're going to find.
Sound off! Have fitness trackers and wearables improved your health?
Smartwatches are all the rage right now, but before we were obsessed with interesting new ways to get more notifications, it seemed like every company was developing a fitness tracker. Fitbit was one of the first with its pocketable tracker. Now there are bracelets, watches, belt clips and more that can track your every movement. Are you using these tools to help you become a more healthy person? Is it working? Hop over to the Engadget forums and share your stories!
Wellograph's fashionable fitness tracker is now on sale
It was back in January that we got our first look at Wellograph's stylish fitness watch with a sapphire crystal display. More than half a year later, however, and the company is ready to start pushing the hardware out to its customers. The Wellograph not only provides the time, but is an activity tracker and heart-rate monitor, thanks to its optical sensor on the underside of the case. The company promises that, in addition to a seven-day battery life, the hardware will store up to four months of activity data before you'll need to sync it with your smartphone. Priced up at $350, the hardware will begin arriving on pre-order customers doors on September 12th, and you can rest assured that we'll be running our eyes (and hands) over this hardware in the following few weeks.
Runtastic Orbit: The new activity tracker on the block
It seems like everyone is getting into the wearables market these days. There's Fitbit, Misfit, Nike Fuel Band, Withings Pulse, and about twenty others I can think of. So when a new tracker shows up on the market, it has to have some redeeming value to make it stand out from all of the others. Recently I was approached by Runtastic about doing a review of their new Orbit fitness band (US$119.99). Runtastic is primarily known for a number of activity tracking apps as well as a hardware line with heart rate monitors and bike accessories among the favorites. Design Highlights The Runtastic Orbit is a tiny device about 1.89 x .71 x .35 (at thickest point) inches (4.8 x 1.8 x .9 cm), weighing just .3 ounce (8.5 grams). It's made of a translucent smoked plastic, although you'll rarely see that plastic because the tracker is installed into either a wristband or belt clip. Runtastic provides two wristbands and a belt clip with each device -- the review unit came with black and blue silicone wristbands, although you can also purchase accessory bands in other colors. The front of the Orbit is dominated by three things: an white on black OLED display, a large and easily pushed metal button, and a tiny light sensor that is barely visible. The back contains the recessed contacts for the USB charger. The wristbands are quite comfortable -- important if you're going to wear the Orbit 24 hours a day -- and designed so that they're very easy to put on. I've tested some fitness trackers that I've wanted to throw out simply because the wristbands were almost impossible to put on, but that's certainly not the case with the Orbit band. The belt clip (seen in the image at the top of this page) is also well designed. When you place the Runtastic Orbit into the flexible silicone rubber clip, it's upside down, which means that you can actually read the display -- smart design, since you don't have to take the clip off in order to read it. The clip also has a rather strong grip, important for making sure that you don't lose the Orbit. Battery life in my testing was about one week. At the end of that time, I simply recharged the Orbit using the included USB charging cable. During charging, an animated display shows the battery "filling up", which is a nice visual cue. One end of the cable plugs into a standard USB port, while the other end has two small contacts embedded into a plastic head that has a strong magnet in it. The design of the prototype cable caused a problem, which I'll describe in the next section of this review. Finally, the device synchronizes with a new, free Runtastic Me iOS app. That app can pass along information about your exercise to the Runtastic or Runtastic Pro apps. Functionality Highlights As a fitness tracker, the Runtastic Orbit does a really good job. It tracks steps taken, sleep duration, will show calories burned, can be used as a watch and alarm, and as noted above, it has good battery life compared to a lot of trackers. Part of this is due to the fact that you need to push the button to see the time or how many steps you've taken -- that display is off otherwise, helping extend that battery life. Each push of the button takes you to another screen -- first the time, then steps taken, then calories burned, and finally active minutes. The display is easy to read both in dark rooms and in full sunlight. Most fitness trackers are designed to work hand-in-hand with a companion app, and in this case, the default app is Runtastic Me. Upon launching the app, it connects to the device via Bluetooth and synchronizes automatically. The display of Runtastic Me shows the current number of steps taken, active minutes during the present day, the number of calories burned, distance walked in miles or kilometers and, if you've enabled sleep tracking, the hours of sleep you had the previous evening. Tapping on any of the items displays more detailed stats, including a timeline of when you were active. By swiping up you can move to the detail displays for the other tracked items, and for things like steps taken, a tap and hold on the display shows how many steps you had take up until the selected time. Enabling sleep tracking is quite simple. You simply hold down the button for three seconds as you're going to sleep, and a "bed" icon appears to let you know you're now tracking sleep. When you're waking up, just hold down the button for three seconds again, and a "sunrise" animation is your indication that sleep tracking has been turned off. Launch the Runtastic Me app, and you'll have almost immediate data on how well (or poorly) you slept the previous evening. Runtastic shows that the device will do "mood tracking", but it did not appear that the feature has been enabled yet. The Orbit is also supposed to do ambient lighting tracking so that you can make sure that you're getting enough sunlight each day, but that is also something that will come in the future with a firmware upgrade. As with most of the fitness trackers on the market, Orbit uses vibration alerts to wake you up in the morning (alarms are set through the app) or to prompt you to get moving. It's a good strong vibration, guaranteed to get your attention. One of the best features of the Runtastic Orbit is that it is complete waterproof. You can swim with it on, take a shower, or even go diving down to 300 feet with it. No other fitness tracker is waterproof to that extent, and a number (Nike FuelBand SE, Withings Pulse O2, Fitbit Flex, Jawbone UP24) are either just water-resistant or have no ability to withstand water at all. I was quite impressed with the fact that the Orbit lives up to its battery life of 7 days. That's almost exactly what I got from a full charge. The accuracy of the Orbit's step tracker is up for debate. I matched the steps taken with another activity tracker as well as my iPhone 5s, and when I used the belt clip, the numbers were almost identical. I did see lower step numbers when I used the wristband, which was a bit of an anomaly. Charging with the prototype magnetic charging cable (blue cable below) caused a problem at one point. The magnet in the cable made it stick to the metal end of another cable, shorting it out and melting the charging cable. I reported the issue to Runtastic; they are redesigning the charger cable (I was using a prototype) and will have a revised version with all shipping Orbits. I would still recommend unplugging the cable when it is not in use. Conclusion Runtastic's Orbit activity tracker is another welcome entry to an increasingly crowded market. At $119.99, it's slightly more expensive than the Nike FuelBand SE, Fitbit Flex, Misfit Shine and the Polar Loop, less expensive than the Jawbone UP24 and Garmin Vivofit, and the same price as the Withings Pulse O2. Waterproof to 300 feet, with some planned features (mood and ambient light tracking) that don't exist on most competitors, a choice of how the device is worn, good battery life, and a well-designed app, the Orbit is a solid competitor. Two factors -- the lower step count when worn as a wristband and two advertised features that are not working at this time -- are keeping me from giving the Orbit a top score. Rating: 3 stars out of 4 stars possible
Runtastic's Orbit band is a fitness tracker that doubles as a running watch
If you've heard of Runtastic, it probably means you're something of a jock: The company got its start building running apps for tracking your distance, pace, et cetera. For the past two years, though, it's been making all sorts of gear to go with it, including a GPS watch, armband, heart-rate monitor, speed sensor, bike mount and even a WiFi scale. Now the company's rounding out its collection with something super obvious: a fitness tracker. The Orbit, as it's called, does all the things you'd expect a fitness band to do: track your steps, calorie burn, sleep patterns. It's waterproof up to 300 feet, meaning you can use this for swimming, in addition to jogging. It vibrates to wake you up in the morning, and when you've been inactive for too long. And, like competing devices, it uses Bluetooth Smart to wirelessly sync your data with either an Android or iOS app. Thanks to that low-power radio inside, battery life is rated for seven days. So far, so familiar.
Jawbone takes on Weight Watchers with its latest app update
There are things fitness trackers are generally pretty good at. You know, like counting your steps, measuring how many calories you burned. And then there are things fitness trackers are generally bad at. Logging your food intake is a particularly sore point. After all, it's not like the onboard sensors can tell when or what you've eaten, so you have to go through the tedious business of manually entering all your meals. What's more, companies like Jawbone and Fitbit aren't exactly weight-loss specialists, which means their food databases tend to have gaping holes compared to services like Weight Watchers. So, even if you're disciplined enough to keep a food diary, the thing you ate might not even be in the system. That goes double if you eat out -- how are tech companies supposed to know how many calories are in the brownies at that cafe around the corner?
Garmin Forerunner 15 review: sports watch first, fitness tracker second
As the reviews editor for this tech blog, I often get asked which fitness tracker I own. And I tell people: I don't need one, silly; I run marathons. Maybe that sounds snotty, but it's true: During training season, at least, I'm probably more active than most people buying a fitness band. And besides, I already own a running watch to track my time, distance and pace. That doesn't mean I can't use a little extra motivation, though. My activity slowed to a crawl this winter, precisely because I was burned out from all those long training runs. (The frigid weather didn't help either.) At one point, I didn't exercise for nearly two weeks. I gained back the weight I lost last year, and my muscle mass shrank. It now hurts to do squats. Even so, asking me to wear another device is a tough sell -- especially when it means my stats are getting spread across different services. For people like me, there's the Garmin Forerunner 15, a sports watch that doubles as a fitness tracker. Like other running watches, including those made by Garmin, the Forerunner 15 tracks your distance, pace and time. It's offered with an optional heart rate monitor, and has a handy run-walk setting. But it also tracks your activity between workouts, telling you how many steps you've taken and how many calories you've burned. It issues not-so-subtle reminders to move, lest you spend too much time in your cubicle. At the same time, it doesn't do everything a standalone fitness tracker would: It doesn't automatically monitor your sleep habits, and you can't log your food intake directly from the app. Priced at $170 ($200 with the heart rate monitor), it costs more than your typical fitness tracker, but it's cheap for a running watch. So is it a good deal? That all depends on your priorities.
Misfit's fitness tracker is now available as a Pebble app
We're calling this "wearable-ception." Misfit's Shine is a waterproof fitness tracker. With an accelerometer and 5 ATM rating, so (potentially) is the Pebble smartwatch. Color us surprised then, to find out Misfit and Pebble are partnering to re-imagine Shine as a Pebble app. Misfit's experience and bespoke fitness tracking software is being shoe-horned into a watch-friendly format, and will be available in the Pebble appstore today -- no Shine required. If you already have a Shine, and are an iOS user, an updated app will fold in support for Pebble watches, should you prefer to keep things separate. The updated app also includes some new metrics, such as calories burned, and distance traveled. Pebble already has a number of fitness apps, but the company claims this is the first stage in an ongoing collaboration with Misfit -- so expect even more fitness functionality in the future.
X-Doria's KidFit is a low-cost fitness wearable for five-year-olds
X-Doria is a company we normally associate with smartphone accessories, but now it's decided to branch out into wearables. While the jury is still out on whether children should be introduced to the concept of the quantified self, X-Doria wants to help get kids moving with its new KidFit activity tracker. Targeted at children between 5 and 13, the multi-colored slappable wristband scores activities to reach a daily goal of 100 points. Parents are encouraged to set goals using the iOS or Android app, which connects to a smartphone or tablet using low-power Bluetooth and provides feedback on a child's progress via its vivid "Results Cards." The wearable is also splash-proof, holds a charge for up to seven days and like the FitBit or Jawbone Up, can be set to track sleep patterns with the push of a button. While it won't track your kids in the literal sense (there are plenty of GPS-enabled wearables targeted at kids that can do that), it does offer a 24/7 overview of their activities. It'll be available on August 15th for $50 in black, aqua, hot pink, yellow, and red variants. If you get in now (and are one of the first 1,000 buyers), you can pre-order the tracker for $40.
Garmin's new GPS watch wants to keep you moving on and off the track
Running watches are great when you're headed out for an afternoon of training, but are typically pretty useless when it comes to day-to-day activities. Garmin is looking to change that by combining two of its most popular wearables, the Forerunner 10 and vivofit, into a new device called the Forerunner 15. The device does everything you'd expect from a GPS watch, such as tracking your distance, pace and calories burned during a big run, but it's also meant to be worn all day. Also an activity tracker, it'll encourage you to get up and move if you've been lounging around too long.
