Tag Archives: fitness tracker

Fitbit Announces New Models and Drops Old Ones

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Fitbit has announced a handful of new wrist-worn trackers; the Versa Lite, the Inspire, the Inspire HR, and finally for kids, the Ace 2.

The Versa Lite is available now for GB£150 with a choice of four different colours – white, lilac, marina blue and magenta – and differs from the more expensive Versa by dropping a few features. Missing from the Lite are floors climbed, swim lap tracking, on-screen workouts and music player functionality. Personally, I’d miss the swim lap tracking but if you’re more of track and field person, the Lite version might save you £50. It’s still water-resistant to 50m, so good for surface swimming, and the Versa Lite will go four days between charges.

The Inspire and Inspire HR slot into the lower end of the Fitbit line-up, replacing both the Alta and Flex product lines. Priced at £70 and £90 respectively, the key difference between the two is that the HR has constant heart rate monitoring. Both devices do activity and sleep tracking, calories burned and connect to your smartphone for notifications, but if you want heart rate measurement and sleep cycle tracking, you’ll need the HR and an extra £20. Battery life is around five days for both devices and they’re water-resistant to 50m.

For children, Fitbit have the Ace 2, which will be coming out later in the year. Building the original Ace, the new version even more child-friendly but still does all the usual activity-tracking stuff with a touchscreen that can be customised with new faces. As with the Ace, the tracker becomes part of a family group so parents can monitor their little darling’s activity. 50m water-resistance and five day battery life. Price hasn’t been announced, but the current Ace is £80 so expect something similar.

Sadly, it looks like the Fitbit Zip has followed the One into obsolescence as neither are now available in the UK store. Mind you, the Zip’s had pretty good run (sorry) for a gadget, originally coming out in 2012.

And by pure coincidence, I’ve been notified today by my Fitbit app that I’ve got the Earth badge, which is equivalent to 12,713 lifetime kilometres.

Oaxis Combines Fitness Tracker with Analogue Watch

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That spot on your wrist is in high demand at the moment. From Apple Watches to smart watches, retro digital and vintage automatics, they all want in on that skin real estate. Personally, I still like a watch with hands to tell me that I’m late but I do like step counting and heart rate monitoring too. Consequently, I tend to swap what’s on my wrist depending on activity: it’s not ideal but works for me…mostly.

There might be an improved solution to my problem with a new watch launching on Kickstarter by epaper experts Oaxis. iPhone owners might know the company for their InkCase which provides a second epaper screen on the back of the phone. In this instance, Oaxis are crowd-funding Timepiece, a minimalist analogue watch with an embedded fitness tracker than displays data in a small OLED display in the dial.

The watch uses a Swiss quartz movement from Ronda and the fitness tracker records heart rate, steps, sleep and call / text notifications. As you’d expect, there’s a complementary app to get the data off the watch with Bluetooth. The info only mentions an iOS app, so you might want to confirm there’s going to be an Android app too.

There’s a range of combinations of case, strap and size, with both 38 mm and 41 mm cases. The black dial with red hands looks particularly good but the white dial looks classy too. I’m not sure if its just the lighting but sometimes the white dial has black hands and sometimes they’re silver. Case is a little over 12 mm thick.

And unlike certain other smartwatches, Timepiece will last a month on a single charge – charging is done via a small dock. One of the other cool features is that the time can be set via a Bluetooth connected smartwatch.

The watch is waterproof to 30 m, which means that it’s ok for a bit of light swimming.

If you like the look of this, head over to the Kickstarter campaign. Early birds can get in for US$123, GB£95 or €110.

Delivery is expected in March 2019 and as with all things crowd-funding, don’t pay what you can’t afford to loose.