I’m fascinated by wearable fitness trackers. By measuring your physical activity, and even comparing your efforts with your friends’, they make you constantly aware of your sad sedentary life, and always remind you to take the stairs or park farther away. The good ones also track your sleep, which is usually a completely invisible, undocumented part of your life. That window onto the invisible one-third of your existence can have a huge effect on your health, productivity and self-awareness.
A few weeks back, I reviewed two of the best fitness trackers: Jawbone’s Up band and Nike’s Fuel band. Each is a bracelet, so it’s always on you and always tracking — a better idea than the clip-on, FitBit types. And each has a fatal flaw.
The Up band can’t transfer its collected data to your phone for analysis and graphing until you take it off, pull off a cap, plug it into your phone’s headphone jack and open the app — and then reverse all that. The Nike band solves that problem — it transfers its data wirelessly, by Bluetooth, without removal from your wrist — but it doesn’t track sleep, only activity.
Furthermore, Nike uses an older, more battery-hungry Bluetooth technology — not Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, which uses power only when it’s actually transmitting data.
At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, the fine folks from FitBit flashed the features of the FitBit Flex. It’s a silicone band just like the ones offered by Up and Nike, but with neither of the drawbacks — it does track sleep and it does use Bluetooth 4.0.
It’s also much less expensive: $100, versus $130 for the Up, $150 for the Nike.
It’s shower- and swimming-proof. It has indicator lights that represent how close you are to your daily activity goal. It has a silent vibrating alarm clock. It can share its data with existing fitness apps like RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal.
Alas, the FitBit Flex won’t arrive until the spring. But if I were Jawbone or Nike, I’d do some thinking about the competitive landscape — soon.