Hasta La Gadget!

Now that the Jawbone Up and Nike+ Fuelband have paved the way for wrist-worn fitness monitors in the market, Fitbit has announced their own lightweight exercise monitoring writstband.

The Fitbit Flex allows you to track your fitness with ease. The compact device will track your steps, distance traveled, calories burned, active minutes, and the quality of your sleep. All of this data syncs up with your iPhone or Android device via Bluetooth.

There’s even a vibrating alarm function that you can use to wake you up discreetly, which is perfect if you get up at a different time than your bedmate.

The Fitbit Flex will be launched this Spring in a variety of colors and will cost $99.95(USD).

[via Uncrate]

The Fitbit pedometer is a fun way to track your daily perambulations. They’ve launched a number of products over the past year including the One and the Aria scale.

At CES the company just announced the Fitbit Flex, a tiny wrist-worn pedometer that syncs wirelessly with your phone or PC and, in a world seemingly full of pedometers these days, is a cool little device.

We sat down with James Park, founder, and talked about the service and the new pedometer. He noted that many users are surprised by how few steps they take each day and that the average active Fitbit user hits about 6,000 steps a day.

The Flex will be shipping later this year for $99.

Wearables like Google Glass may be eye-catching, but it’s tiny fitness monitors like Jawbone UP, Nike Fuelband, and others that are actually showing up clipped or strapped to people, and that’s the market Fitbit is chasing with the new Flex. We grabbed some hands-on time with the new Bluetooth 4.0 equipped activity dongle – and its companion smartphone app – at CES to see if it could oust UP from our wrist.

It’s certainly small. While Fitbit has been focusing on Flex as used with a wristband, the dongle itself can be removed and used with another type of clip; when out, it’s a small, sturdy lozenge of plastic. On the outer edge there’s a discrete row of LEDs which show your progress toward your daily goal in 20-percent increments; it’s a nice balance between the fuller (but battery-consuming) display of the Fuelband, and the UP which gives no feedback whatsoever until you plug it into your phone.

The strap itself fixes on snugly, and Fitbit will supply two sizes to suit different wrists; it’ll also be available in a range of colors, depending on whether you want a more discrete black, or prefer something eye-catching like bright red.

Fitbit Flex hands-on:

It’s the app and the Bluetooth that really make Flex special, however. The low-power Bluetooth – when used with the right phone – sends over performance data in real-time to your device, allowing you to monitor how you’re going through the day. It also records sleep patterns, showing different light or deep phases, and telling you if you’ve had a rough night.

All in all, we’re left with warm, fuzzy feelings about the Flex, and even though Fitbit is later to the market with it than Nike or Jawbone, the company appears to have learned from its forebears with elements like the battery-sipping LEDs and the water-resistance. It’s up for preorder now, priced at $99.99, and will ship in the spring.

Fitbit Flex hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Quantified Self enthusiasts are getting their fair share of excitement at CES this week. Basis first unveiled its intriguing health-tracking watch at the event last year, but after hiccups and lawsuits, the company finally launched its product on the market in November. At launch, however, the band looked great and the entire package was very promising.

Unfortunately, the company hasn’t yet launched the mobile apps that will accompany its tracking band and web dashboard, yet today the company gave a glimpse into its first app — for Android — which will be made available in March.

For those unfamiliar, Basis’ band and dashboard allows users to continuously monitor skin temperature, heart rate, motion, calories burned and sleep patterns, among other things. The watchband comes with an LCD display that shows the date and time, BlueTooth support (to be activated once the apps launch) and, most impressively, is laden with sensors.

The watch has a 3-axis accelerometer that measures sleep patterns, an optical scanner to track blood flow and heart rate, skin and ambient temperature trackers that measure heat dissipation and workout intensity, etc. The startup then uploads all this information into the cloud, applies its algorithms and allows users to view heat maps and activity patterns, and then allows them to accumulate points, unlock habits (meant to gamify the experience), and so on.

The idea behind the accompanying mobile apps is, as one would expect, to be able to view all that health data on the go. But, beyond that, it’s been unclear how the company’s mobile apps will supplement its web experience. Thanks to Basis’ demo at CES today, we’ve got a little bit more of an idea. As the startup made clear in its blog post today, its new Android app will include automatic syncing, allowing users to sync data from their bands wirelessly to their dashboard.

Users will be able to sync the app with the dashboard “automatically in the background and on-demand” so that the dashboard is always up to date. On top of that, users can view their habits and insights from their phones and receive notifications, which will alert them when they hit targets and achieve goals, or offer reminders when in need of a push in the right direction.

The app will be available for beta users “by the end of March,” and Basis says that an iOS version is “also in the works” but would give no timeframe for its release. It will likely hit sometime this summer.

Again, it’s an active week in the activity space at CES, as Basis’ announcement follows Fitbit’s launch of its new $99 Flex wristband, which gives the popular health tracking device a new form factor, taking it from clip to wrist. Find out more here.

The new product isn’t available yet, but it’s clear the space is heating up, and some of these companies are already launching multiple product lines. Meanwhile, Basis is taking its time to roll everything out. It remains to be seen whether this approach will work to its advantage. So far, we think it looks great.

Check out our big year-end list of healthtech apps, gadgets and startups here. Full review here.

You know what they say, right? You can never have too many fitness trackers. After coming out with two health monitors back in September, Fitbit is back with a third product, the Flex — a waterproof wristband seemingly designed to compete with the Jawbone Up. (In PR speak: “Fitbit understands that one tracker does not fit all.”) Like other Fitbit devices, it counts calories, steps taken and distance covered (but not flights climbed). It then automatically sends that data to a personalized website over Bluetooth. You can record your food intake, too, but you’ll have to do it manually using either the website or one of the company’s mobile apps.

The Flex tracks your sleep quality as well, but the approach here differs from other Fitbit products: whereas the Fitbit One and Fitbit Zip have a key you can press to enter sleep mode, the Flex has no buttons at all, so your only recourse for logging sleep is to use the app or website. We have to say, that sounds like a bit like a case of form over function: the Up can detect when you’re sleeping, as can the pricey new Basis band. The good news is that the battery life seems decent: Fitbit says the Flex can last between five and seven days on a charge, and that’s despite having a Bluetooth 4.0 radio inside. For comparison’s sake, the Jawbone up is rated for up to 10 days but then again, you have to plug it in every time you want to sync, and the cap covering the charging piece is easy to lose. So, that’s something to keep in mind. In any case, if you prefer the wristband form factor and want something less expensive than the Up, the Flex costs $100 and is up for pre-order today, with shipments expected to begin sometime in the Spring.

Filed under: Wearables

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