If you own a Fitbit Force — a fitness tracker with a built-in OLED display that we like quite a lot at Cultofmedia — you might want to check under the band.
Do you see any redness? If so, you should avail yourself of a voluntary recall of the Fitbit Force.
The Fitbit is one of the most popular fitness trackers out there, and today its companion iOS app was updated with an interesting new feature for iPhone 5s owners. By taking advantage of the new phone’s M7 co-processor (a chip also found in the latest iPads), Fitbit has turned the 5s into a health monitor without the need of an additional wrist strap.
MobileTrack uses the M7 to track the user’s activity throughout the day and distill it into helpful data, like miles traveled and calories burned.
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Fitbit has today announced its new fitness tracker, the Force, which combines all of the features found in the original Fitbit Flex with some of the more advanced features found in the Fitbit One tracker. It costs $129.95, slightly more than the $99 Flex, and it’s available today.
The M7 Motion Coprocessor (MoCoPro?) in the iPhone 5s is something of a mystery beast. It’s function is clear – it is an always-on low-power chip that processes data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass in your iPhone – but its eventual purpose is still a little unclear. So why don’t we do some speculation?
At this point, Withings has to be the most complete biometric suite in existence outside of a hospital or Langley. The outfit began with a scale (which also measures body-fat percentage), added a separate blood pressure cuff and then snuck an air-quality sensor and a pulse meter into their scale.
The latest addition is the a wearable activity tracker that adds a feature unique, at this point, to activity trackers: a pulse meter (which explains why they’ve named it the Pulse).
Wearable tech has really started to take off over the last two years thanks in part to fitness trackers like the Nike Fuelband and FitBit. But while those companies are worrying about humans, a new company called Whistle is launching a new fitness tracker specifically for mans best friend.
The Whistle Activity Monitor is a little on-collar device that will track all of your dog’s activities, including rest, walks, playtime, and other activities. It’s kind of like a FitBit for dogs. The device comes with a slick iOS app too that lets you check in on your dogs stats throughout the day no matter where you are.
Sounds kind of crazy to buy a pet its own activity tracker, but when you consider most people only take there dog to the vet once every 3 years, Whistle will probably help you keep your pet in shape and enjoy a couple extra years together.
Here’s a video of how Whistle works:
The FitBit Flex is a $99 rubber band you wear around your wrist to track how many steps you’ve taken every day. It connects via Bluetooth to your iPhone, or through a dongle to your Mac. If you are utterly sedentary, it’s a fantastic gadget that may very well encourage you to make some slight adjustments to your lifestyle before your heart explodes in front of your computer desk one day. If you are already even lightly active, though, the FitBit Flex is a puzzle of a product that seems fetishistically focussed on how much you walk while utterly ignoring how much you bike, swim or even run.
The Fitbit Flex has officially gone on sale for $100 online and in U.S. retail stores. We saw the “OG fitness-tracking dongle” at CES earlier this year, where it was clear that Fitbit was trying to steal the mojo from competitors like Nike’s Fuelband and the Jawbone Up. Now the Flex is out in the wild, and users can be the judge.
Bluetooth 4.0 is used to connect the silicon wristband to an Android device or iPhone. It does everything the typical fitness tracker accomplishes: counts calories and steps, monitors sleeping, and lets you share stats with friends to keep you motivated. The actual exercise is still on you, though.
As the CEO of Square, and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has quickly become one of Silicon Valley’s most admired CEOs. His Square payment system is quickly changing the way consumers buy things, and it’s making businesses and consumers interact on a more personal level.
Square’s goal is to make payments quicker and easier for both business and consumers, so the company has an intense interest in wearable tech. When asked in a recent interview whether he thinks Google Glass is an interesting product, Dorsey answered that he doesn’t see much value in Google Glass right now, but he’s intrigued by devices that wrap around the wrist – like Apple’s rumored iWatch – because they feel more natural.
When asked whether he’s looked into Google Glass, Dorsey had the following to say:
Fitbug is a company that makes exercise accessories that work with iPhone apps. Fitbit is also a company that makes exercise accessories that work with iPhone apps. Their names are similar, and so are their products. It’s kind of like they’re the same company, except they’re totally not, and that’s the problem.
The confusion between the names of the two companies has really started to get under Fitbug’s skin, so it’s decided to sue Fitbit for trademark infringement to decided who gets to be the fittest company in the U.S.
What can Apple bring to the table, er, wrist, that Timex and any one of hundreds of cheap watches don’t already provide consumers?
That’s the question Harvard Business Review’s H. James Wilson asks today, and he comes up with a fascinating answer.
The iWatch, he says, won’t actually be a watch at all.
You probably made a lot of New Years resolutions to get off your butt and work out. You probably said you were gonna work out five times a day. Maybe more. Maybe you said you’re going to do one of those cool juice diet cleanses with a side of anorexia.
For those of us who made all these exercise goals, but are still binging on cheeseburgers, there’s an amazing — if not extreme — FitBit hack that can help. With just a FitBit activity tracker and a Belkin WeMo internet-controlled power outlet, you can set your daily activity goal, and if you don’t reach it, the system cuts power to everything plugged into your Belkin Wemo to give you some extra motivation to go jogging.
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LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – UK-based Fitbug is new to the U.S., and makes gadgets very similar to Fitbit — but they weren’t shy about letting us know they were the first to come up with the idea.
“We were first.” Fergus Kee, Fitbug’s Executive Chairman, stopped short of actually saying fitness gadget-maker Fitbit is a wholesale clone of his company — but he got pretty close.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Withings has now added a heart-rate monitor and an air-quality sensor into their WiFi Body Scale, which previously just measured weight and body-fat percentage. In fact, their scale now has so many sensors, they’re not even calling it a scale anymore.
Apple was on fire in 2012. Along with the incredible iPhone 5, we saw the first retina tablet and the pocketable iPad mini. This was also the year in which Apple let the iPod touch out to play, giving it features on a par with the iPhone 4S instead of using leftover components from Google’s leftover Nexus parts bin.
But not everything from Apple made it into our top ten. The Retina MacBook Pro, despite being an amazing machine, is still a laptop, albeit one with a hi-res screen and no DVD player. And the new iMac’s most interesting contribution to tech is the HDD/SSD Fusion Drive. Sure, it’s skinny, but who really cares about a thin desktop machine? It’s like making the world’s thinnest lawnmower.
Most of the rest of my picks reflect the fact that high-tech consumer electronics are now as utterly mainstream as the iron or the microwave oven. Sure, us nerds still love to play with the latest crap, and there will always be plenty of ill-informed consumers who are suckered into buying cheapo Android tablets, but these days gadgets generally Just Work, and the differences are in the little details.
That’s why we have fitness widgets alongside fancy portable speakers and implausibly good-for-the-price headphones.
So, should you be in the mood to read yet another end-of-year best-of list, carry on.
One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.
This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.
We’re running a little behind, so playing catch up today by posting our first and second day picks along with our choice for December 3rd.
Our Day 1 choice? FitBit, an awesome iOS accessory that can help you get healthier and more fit in no time.
There’s never been a better time to get fit, thanks to the wealth of fitness tracker options available to work with your iPhone. That’s not strictly true — first, it’s always a good time to get fit. And second, the more choices there are for fitness trackers, the more opportunity there is for procratination.
Still, the Striiv is a welcome addition.
FitBit, my favorite fitness and activity-tracking widget, has at last gotten a brother and sister, putting an end to that awkward only-child behavior which surely would have developed otherwise (animal torture; computer programming; you know the drill).
The newborns have been named FitBit Zip and FitBit One, the baby and the smart overachiever of the family, respectively. The One can also sync direct with your iPhone.
There are a ton of ways to get fit and lose weight. And there are even more stupid books and fad diets that may or may not help you to slim down and get healthier. But there are really only two things you need to do: eat less and do more.
Of course, it isn’t easy. Luckily, those of a certain nerdy bent will find all the motivation they need in gadgets and apps. I have been doing just that for the past few months, and I thought I’d write a little about how to get thinner and fitter by using your iPhone.
It’s August, and you’re either on vacation, or leaving soon. The problem? You just tried to fit into last year’s swimsuit and – worse – you did it in front of the mirror. While it might be a little too late to lose that belly before you hit the beach this summer, take steps now and you’ll be a slimline hottie in time for Christmas and New Year, ready to undo all that good work in a week or two.
To help you, here’s our list of the best fitness gadgets around.
