fitness - page 8

Out of the box, the iHealth HS3 Wireless Bluetooth Scale ($70) is somewhat impressive. With its digital (albeit not backlit) display and snazzy looking-glass top, this is a scale that will at least look spiffy in your bathroom when company is over. Even in the box, the scale makes a good case for gadget adoption: It promises to keep track of your weight, calories and exercise easily using only the scale itself and an accompanying app that can be used on your iPhone or iPad. Technically, the iHealth Scale does do that, but there are a few kinks that make this product’s promises fall flat.

You see that alien looking band permeating through the aurora borealis? No, that’s not a UFO looking for fuel, it’s actually Nike’s latest fitness accessories made for today’s connected world. Nike wants to remind us that “Life is a sport, make it count,” and that’s exactly what the Nike+ FuelBand does — count. It counts your calories, steps taken, time, as well as a variety of other activity.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — I’ve personally been waiting a very long time for this sort of thing, disappointed by idle promises and vaporware. This set of LEDs paired with audible announcements isn’t exactly what I’ve been waiting for, but I’ll take it. Question is, does Lance already have a pair?

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – We figured health and fitness was going to have a large footprint at CES this year, and so far we haven’t been disappointed. Case in point, the Zensorium Tinke dongle: it measures heart rate, respiratory rate and the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream — all just by pressing your thumb on it.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – With an eye on improving the way parents monitor their children’s health, French company Withings announced their Internet-connected baby and toddler scale, the Withings Smart Baby Scale. Providing a new way to monitor children’s growth, from birth to age 8, the Withings Smart Baby Scale integrates with iOS via the WiScale App that gives parents quick access to growth statistics to monitor their child’s health and compare measurements with child growth health standards.

The idea behind the Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile ($99) is that the quality of your sleep affects your health in a bigger way than we generally recognize, and that measuring the amount of time we sleep and its quality — then quantifying that sleep with a number on a 100-point scale — will give us the information we need to improve our sleep, and ultimately our health.

The behemoth Consumer Electronics Show is upon us. By tomorrow, press-only showcases will already begin revealing this coming year’s tech magic (the show floor opens for everyone else on Tuesday).

We’ve been drawing aside the curtain as much as we were able in the form of previews throughout this past week. For those who missed them — and for the rest who want a quick recap as we plunge into the show — here’re the big highlights going in.

Despite all our 21st-century technical wizardry, one of the easiest and least expensive ways to get a very basic idea of physical health is through a metric that’s been used for a very long time: body weight.

The Withings WiFi Body Scale ($160) takes this concept to the next level in many ways, including allowing you access to all your data on a gorgeously designed iOS app. It also adds an even more important metric, body fat percentage, and goes a long way to erasing many of the pitfalls using a simple scale can lead to — and it does this all while remaining incredibly easy to use. In fact, it might be the most effective tool I’ve used to keep healthy.

This is it, people — this is the year your New Year’s resolution to get fit really takes hold. This year, you’re going to stick it, and we’re going to show you how.

Wahoo’s popular ANT+ Fisica dongle, which allows the iPhone to read signals from fitness gadgets like heart-rate monitors, pedometers and bike sensors, is probably most widely used fitness iPhone accessory since its release a little  over a year ago. And today, Wahoo took the first step toward killing it.

Jawbone has pulled its newly-released UP health band and offered a “no questions asked” guarantee that customers can get a full refund and keep the product.

In an official statement Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman says “We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action.”

Jawbone has released the UP wristband and iOS app to help you keep track of your physical activity, sleep patterns, and exercise schedule. The wristband serves as a lightweight monitor that’s to be worn at all times, while the iPhone app is used to offload data and show recorded activity along with other details, such as running routes and sleep pattern graphs.

Priced at $99, the UP aims to revolutionize healthy living in the digital age. The Jawbone UP iPhone app is available for free in the App Store.

If you’ve got a bicycle and an iPhone/iPt, here’s a pretty interesting development: iBike, who earlier this year introduced a $200-plus kit that turned the iPhone into a sensor-linked cycling computer, has just released a $70 iPhone cycling package for riders who aren’t Gu-fueled cycling nuts; and it includes what looks like a stellar — and free — cycling app.

Last week was just a little more sweet than bitter for Apple devotees who also happen to be fitness junkies. That’s because Abvio’s trio of fitness apps — Runmeter, Walkmeter and Cyclemeter (which we’ve raved about) — have been granted two big upgrades, namely iOS 5-style notifications, and something we’ve been waiting a long time for: the ability to gather data from ANT+ dongles like Wahoo’s Fisica.

Review by Jordan Trimas

It’s nice to know that when I get caught in the rain with my headphones on, I don’t have to anxiously hide them if I’m wearing the Monster iSport Immersion In-Ear Headphones ($180). Did your kid spill his Kool-Aid on them? They’re machine washable!

Review by Kelly Keltner

Griffin’s Sport Armband for iPhone ($30) — a product name that fills my head with visions of iPhones running around the track (“Go, go, little 3GS! You can do it! You’re not too old!”) — allows you to get up and go without worrying about your iPhone. It’s a decent attempt at making workout clothing for the iPhone, but just as with those just-a-bit-too-tight yoga pants, there are a few bulges that might cause a few sideways looks in the gym.

I was just speaking with another reviewer here about how surprisingly common it is for manufacturers to copy each other’s designs. To ‘port an entire line of products, though, is a little more unusual: iHealth has just announced an app-enhanced digital scale, blood pressure monitor and baby monitor that mirrors Withings‘ entire lineup, gadget for gadget.

Presumably for those without an iPhone and its wealth of app-based fitness options, iHome has partnered with New Balance to offer a set of earphones packed with workout features, including a pedometer and a heart-rate monitor.

Why bizarrely cool? Forget that it’s an app-enhanced fitness gadget that sands data to your iPhone; sure, that’s neat, but there are a stack of devices out there doing the same thing.

No, Scosche’s little myTREK fitness gadget is that nifty because it tracks bio data using a method straight out of the future — it uses light beams.

Cadence.FM (free) is an excellent iPhone app that compliments your workouts by providing you with a constant streamof music that consistently matches a chosen tempo — it’s your “on-demand personal DJ.”

Its best feature is that all of the music it plays is streamed from the SoundCloud music community and includes the best popular remixes, trance, house, dub-step and club music — so you don’t even need to store tracks locally on your device to use it. Just choose a channel and specify the BPM to which you’d like to work out and Cadence.FM will select the music for you — and it does a great job of it!

Seems like just yesterday that the Swoosh introduced its Nike+ iPod kit to the delight of iPod-toting runners everywhere. It  wasn’t yesterday though, it was five years ago (and one week). To celebrate, Nike has been giving away free copies of its Nike+ app (regularly $2) at the App Store. The app uses the iPhone’s GPS and MotionX technology — the same tech found in Jawbone’s stunning new Era Bluetooth headset, btw — to track your run (the GPS works well outdoors, the MotionX tech takes over where GPS signals are weak). And then there’re all the great motivational features and post-run sharing options.

Better make a dash if you want a copy, though — it’ll probably revert back to $2 soon.

Sounds like Sci-Fi malarkey: an app that measures the amount of calories burned throughout the day just by sitting in your pocket and using the iPhone’s accelerometers to measure motion. But nope, it’s real, and it’s at the App Store for $3.

The new SportWatch GPS offers Nike+ functionality without the need for an iPod or iPhone. There’s lots to like about Nike’s latest toy, but early teething trouble combined with poor GPS accuracy are currently letting it down.

Supposedly, what you see on the left here is the new iPod Nano, complete with 1.3 megapixel camera and with the clip removed. Consider us skeptical that Apple would ditch the Nano’s sports cred for anything as utterly superfluous as camming yet another camera into people’s pockets.

Seems practically everyone has cottoned on to the idea that the iPhone makes for a stellar cycling computer — because hardware that turns the iPhone into a feature-packed riding companion keeps popping up. The latest is Velocomp’s iBike Dash series of app-enhanced hardware stashed inside their waterproof Phone Booth case that work with its free iBike app.

The unit starts out at $200 for the waterproof case with built-in ANT+ receiver and a speed sensor for your bike; $329 will bag you the Deluxe kit that adds a heart-rate strap, cadence sensor and supplemental battery for the iPhone. Velocomp also sells the Phone Booth case only — without the ANT+ electronics in it — for $50.

The waterproof case looks pretty rugged, but pricing strikes us as a tad steep compared with other kits out there from Wahoo, Digifit and New Potato Technologies (even though we were less-than-enthusiastic about the latter).