fitness - page 6

Jabra made a big show of introducing their Sport Bluetooth music/phone earbuds at CES this year, even bringing in triathlete celeb and Ironman champ Craig Alexander to flaunt the buds while he sweat away the miles on a stationary bike. Unfortunately, the Sport has been plagued by reports of abysmal Bluetooth connectivity (possibly due to range) and poor fit ever since it shipped.

Jabra’s response is their new Sport Wireless+, the successor to the Sport, which Jabra says has made everything better.

This is something we don’t see often enough: outside-the-box thinking applied to sports armbands for the iPhone. Digifit—an outfit we’ve covered before that makes fitness tracking devices and software—took the tired old bicep-hugging armband and slid it all the way down to the forearm; presto, no more yoga poses just to see your lap times.

Zensorium’s Tinke is one of those gadgets that’s a little off the beaten path. Like many fitness gadgets, it can measure heart rate. What makes it different is that it’ll also measure blood oxygen levels and respiratory rate — and what it does with that data is even more unusual.

Summer isn’t over quite yet, so if you’re still looking for a little motivation to get you back in tip-top shape Nike added a new Challenges feature to its running app.

To start a challenge in Nike+ Running 4.3, simply set a distance and send the invite to your Nike+ friends. The app will keep track of who’s in the lead and if you win you get a shiny digital medal to show off to your momma.

The free app is available in the App Store now for both iPhone and iPod touch.

Here are the full release notes:

Connected gadgets are the hotness in tech right now. It seems like everyone is trying to track your activity during the day and your sweet sweet R.E.M.’s during the dark of night.

Withings, makers of the Smart Scale and other connected tech., is now ready to join the world of fitness tracking with their new Pulse—a teensy little thing—which tracks your daily steps, pulse, sleep, and with its built-in sensors, even the altitudes you traverse. But there’s more to the story here than basic tracking; with historic data available on its touch-enabled screen and astute iOS integration via the Withings app, the Pulse is a talented first offering from Withings, and an easy fitness tracker to recommend.

It’s not exactly the belle of the ball, and its name is in serious need of some marketing help; but the LifeTrak Move C300 activity tracker makes up for its lack of charm with some powerful bonus features, like waterproofness (to 90 feet!) and the ability to also measure heart rate.

On top of all that, the device’s energy requirements are so low that its coin-sized, non-rechargeable battery will last a year.

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).

I know what you’re asking: Yet another activity tracker? But LIT tracker from NZN Labs has a big secret ingredient that most others don’t — and that special ingredient makes it perfect for action sports like snowboarding, surfing and mountain biking.

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.

Looks like this whiteout winter may finally be waning. Time to soak up a little sunshine; so grab your bike, backpack, rod, oars, harness and a Pocket Ranger official State Park Guide app for Android or iOS and get yourself outside. Why a Pocket Ranger app? Because it’s stuffed full of info about anything and everything related to state parks in your area — for free.

Cult of Mac’s vote for the best all-around fitness app for the iPhone is Runkeeper, and it just got a fantastic new update that makes your running preferences more customizable than ever, including a brilliant new ‘night color’ mode which makes the display easier on the eyes, even if you are not a night runner.

It’s taken three years, but HeartMath has finally responded, in the form of a major redesign, to the concerns we (and probably other critics) voiced over their original emWave stress-management gadget.

Where the emWave required plugging in to a USB port and cost $300, their new Inner Balance system works with pretty much any 30-pin iDevice and sells for just $99.

The promise of the Wahoo RFLKT is of a tiny, ultralight box with an LCD readout which displays information from an iPhone cycling app on the handlebars of your bike. You get the advantage of using your favorite tracking app, and also of having an easy to read and control HUD, instead of having to buy an expensive GPS-enabled bike computer.

The reality comes somewhat short.

Moves is that rare thing on the modern App Store — a free app that has an enormous amount to offer. It’s magical in its simplicity, an app that asks no more than you switch it on and forget about it.

All you have to do is carry on with life. Moves tracks your movements, intelligently works out whether you’ve been walking, running, cycling or using transport of some kind, and provides you with a helpful summary at the end of each and every day.

Best of all, though, it does so without any need for input from you. You don’t have to tell it that you’re going out for a run. You don’t have to tell it you’re walking from A to B.

It just knows.

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.

I have a complicated relationship with gloves. On the one hand, I love that they keep my fingers from falling off in frigid weather. But then there’s the frustration at their complete lack of cooperation when I’m trying to use the touchscreen on my phone. As a result, I end up either constantly removing and re-donning my gloves in an endless cycle that freezes my delicate fingers anyway — or abandoning my phone altogether in disgust.

The problem is that most touchscreens rely on our fingers to act as conductors, and conventional gloves block that conductivity. But glove-makers have rolled with the times, and there are solutions — gloves that allow conductivity to pass through the glove’s fabric and onto the screen. One of the most buzzed about is Outdoor Research’s Sensor Gloves ($69), which use real leather that doesn’t appear or feel any different than leather used in non-conductive gloves.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 –

When it comes to gaming on the iPhone, most people probably think of Angry Birds-style leisure games. The BowBlade, a new active-gaming device being shown off at Macworld, take an entirely different approach to gaming on iOS. The BowBlade is out to prove that you can stay fit and have fun playing games at the same time.

At first glance, the BowBlade probably looks a little unwieldy. After all, it is about the size of a typical bow. The cool thing about it, though is that the device lets you mount an iPhone inside it which can interact with 35 existing iOS apps for an immersive, active, gaming experience.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Our own Charie Sorrel wasn’t a huge fan of the BodyMedia Fit Link activity tracker when he reviewed it a few months back; negatives ranged from a user-unfriendly app interface and just the overall gawkiness of the device itself. BodyMedia has listened, and addressed at least one of those issues with a smaller, sleeker version of the Core called the Core 2 — and it’ll even allow you to pop the four-sensor device into elegant jewelry designed to accept the, well, core of the gadget.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – FitBit – the OG fitness-tracking dongle – has gone toe-to-toe with the Nike Fuelband and Jawbone’s Up. Or maybe that should be “wrist-to-wrist,” as the new FitBit Flex is a tracker which wraps around your arm.

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.

The Larklife fitness gadget doesn’t just lifelessly track all the mundane details of your life, like calories burned, miles trudged and hours snoozed away. No, this little thing actually learns your habits and tells you, in realtime, exactly what you should do to make yourself healthier.

Whenever I read the name “Wahoo,” I can’t help but think of Mario jumping, punching the air an screaming it in his falsetto tones. Wahoo!

Then I come back down to Earth, take a sip of coffee and a deep breath, and realize that Wahoo is the maker of fitness gadgets, geegaws and dongles. So I guess it does — in some convoluted way — have something to do with jumping.

Today’s Wahoo (Wahoo!) item is the Wahoo Balance Smartphone Scale, a scale for weighing your smartphone (except the Galaxy Note, which will overload it). Just kidding. It’s actually a Bluetooth-enabled scale for humans (although the Note really will overload it).

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.

MapMyWalk is one of a range of apps from the people at MapMyFitness. It’s not a pretty app, but mapping walks doesn’t have to be pretty to be functional. And it is functional. Mostly.