> Fitbits’ stock shot up almost 30 percent after the first rumors surfaced. In recent months, the company’s stock often traded below $3, down from close to $48 shortly after its IPO in 2015. Today, after the announcement, it went up to around $5.20.
Good lord, must the acquisition offer feel like a relief? Surely, Fitbit wouldn't do a Groupon now.
The article fails to mention Fossil, but Google recently did acquire their wearables research division for $40M [0]. It looks like Google is gearing up to launch multiple wearables. Xiaomi, Huawei, and Huami have really taken the wearables market by storm [1]. If anything, price differentiation seems to be the key. I hope the rumoured Pixel Wearable isn't comically expensive like its Phone counterparts.
> Xiaomi, Huawei, and Huami have really taken the wearables market by storm
You link to a press release. Are there actual sales numbers to back that claim up? Because all I see out in the real world are Apple watches and Fit Bits.
> I hope the rumoured Pixel Wearable isn't comically expensive like its Phone counterparts.
The Apple Watch Series 3 is available on apple.com for $199.
I think they mean in the US (which obviously is not the whole world)
Here in the US the iPhone is more than 50% market share (likely much higher, if you were to count hours of use rather than just raw devices. Many mid-range android users own one simply because it’s what the company told them to buy and they “just wanted a phone” while low end android devices lack battery life.)
In the wearables market in the US, Garmin exclusively sells to hardcore fitness fans. They really are a niche company, (a very profitable niche, with high selling prices).
In that context, yep, all you see are Fitbits and Apple watches. Fitbit is seen as the “android” of the smart watch world, which is quite funny as wearOS has become DOA.
Here in my part of Australia apple watches are pretty rare, but I see a lot of more general fitness trackers, and plenty of Garmin watches. When I was in SF for work recently it seemed like every second person had an apple watch.
Garmin sells a wide range of fitness trackers, only some of which are targeted to hardcore athletes. They have other models for casual users or those who care more about style.
> Many mid-range android users own one simply because it’s what the company told them to buy and they “just wanted a phone” while low end android devices lack battery life.)
It's ironic that you're totally inverted here. Most of the iPhone owners I know were given one by their company. It's the corporate standard so businesses which deal in phones hand them out.
I've actually never met someone with an Android device issued through their company. Literally 100% of the corporate phone users I know use iPhone!
Either your anecdote is the exact opposite of mine, or you're trying to create a narrative here that isn't really true.
> Apple doesn't own the majority of the smartphone market
They don't have to? Most people who pay for an iPhone already have bought into the ecosystem and are willing to pay a lot for Apple items (ear pods). Those people also would likely be more willing to buy wearables, so it's quite likely that they have a large stake in the wearable market (as your data shows). Most people who buy phones don't have the resources to buy accessories (like a wearable).
Even what you linked was 40% Apple, that's a huge market share for wearables (which is what you see in public). Not the majority, but probably enough that a person can say "it's all all see in the real world". Especially, if you are from a more affluent area, where locally it may be the majority.
I love my Garmin. The always-on display, week long battery life, the vast variety of well-designed watch faces, and the movement prompts (with thresholds for when one has moved adequately) are really golden. My only criticism for it is the clunky charger.
My Garmin watch has been excellent for 5 years now. It records runs accurately, stays out of the way, and holds a charge for several hours of running. It didn't cost much more than a Fitbit, but it connects with a chest band, records steps well, reminds me to move around, etc. I guess the only disadvantage is that it's kind of ugly.
Google isn’t buying Fitbit to improve Fitbit, Google is acquiring a company to gain their experience in the wearables space to compete with Apple and Samsung. I suspect Google thinks AppleWatch is helping them erode the Android market share and/or preventing switchers from moving to Pixel.
The only thing useful that Fitbit has is marketshare (declining), community and maybe patents.
From my experience with their products, you do not want their experience in the wearables space ... It is not going to help to compete with Apple and Samsung.
You’re confusing the product with production. Google has plenty of product people that can tell them what to build. FitBit has engineers, hardware designers, production capabilities, suppliers, distribution, as well as the ownership of name ‘Bit’ in the wearables space. Makes perfect sense if Google is trying to make a rapid push into a new market.
I’m surprised google can buy anything at this point and not foul up on anti trust... but I guess if there’s a non business they could buy this would be it. But one has to wonder how this played out because there rationale is about as terrible as Apple buying beats — I haven’t seen a Fitbit in ages but I do see Apple watches and on people who probably are carrying around two grand in Apple products when three years ago weren’t even wearing a Casio much less a Fitbit. With this and the hyped supremacy post, one has to wonder if they’re worried abut the pace of things over there in Mountain View..
They were able to get billions from private investors that knew they could pawn it off into the public market. What happens when the public market doesn’t have the stomach to give them more money in a secondary offering and they can’t get loans from banks?
You may not have read that far down, but the article mentions exactly what you did regarding Fossil:
> Fitbit would not be the first deal that Google would be carrying out in the wearables space. Fossil Group Inc said in January it would sell its intellectual property related to smartwatch technology under development to Google for $40 million. Google’s plans for these assets are not clear.
I was really happy with the Fossil hybrid watch that I got for christmas two years ago. The bluetooth worked perfectly which I would never had expected.
Whilst the Fossil app is great the actual bluetooth reliability has gone downhill with the latest updates and I'm wondering whether it is related to talent moving to Google.
I have a Fossil Q Hybrid. I would say buy it, but make sure you can return it after opening the box.
Their bluetooth stack seems rock solid. Especially coming from Garmin where intermittent issues were the norm for me.
I'm only interested in 4 things: counting steps, getting calendar notifications, getting call notifications and getting text notifications.
Steps counting and syncing works without issues, calendar events work without issues. Text and call notifications stopped working for me altogether.
Basically, it either works really well or not at all.
I'd be willing to invest time into this to get it to work, but their support is not much help. It doesn't go beyond checklist and "have you tried re-pairing and enabling all permissions".
It's a shame they sold to Google. They seem to have had some really good talent there and I fear it is going to be wasted at Google.
I like my Fossil Q Explorist well enough. I have the Gen 3 which doesn't have the heart rate monitor or GPS, but on the whole it's a good watch. If you want a smart watch that can do all the smart stuff and last a couple days, I'd look elsewhere. Fossil watches don't have the best battery life. The Gen 4 says like 2 days on standby a day with usage. I get about 6-8 hours tops actually using the watch (looking at notifications quickly and swiping them away, looking at the time, changing songs on my phone), and the charge time is like 3 hours. They suggest it can do sleep tracking, but I've never tested it because I need to charge it every night.
If you don't mind having a watch that is mostly for doing watch things, and then charging it every night - Fossil is nice. But I would look elsewhere if you want a smart watch for daily use doing "smart" things.
Every person I've talked to over at Fitbit (pre-this news) has been down on the company. Sounds like they've had trouble effectively scaling software/new hardware to the level of success that the initial device had.
While this could easily be another money sink for Google as they attempt to figure out some sort of Android wearable, it also has the potential to be an Instagram level-acquisition. Non-Apple wearables seem to be ripe for the picking
Something definitely has been off at Fitbit - I had their first device and then after swearing off smartwatches got a new Fitbit for Christmas. 10 months later I'm on my 3rd watch from them - the first one stopped taking a charge after a few months, the second one the screen went out in a week or two. I'm hoping the third time is the charm
Meanwhile try one, then try an older Apple watch, the Fitbit is straight up trash (with nicer battery life.) Fitbit UX is bad, and requires tons of interaction between the phone and watch and is remarkably hard to use, even switching watch faces requires digging multiple screens into the fitbit app and a 30+ second sync period, on the Apple watch this is known as 'swiping right' or at worst, holding down and tapping 'add new'.
The Pebble was worlds better at this, when I used the Versa I was surprised by it. It sells tons even though Wear OS is way ahead.
Don't discount this feature on a fitness tracker. The most recent Apple Watches are better in this respect compared to the first one, but the battery life is still measured in hours, rather than days.
The UX for a Fitbit as a smartwatch is honestly horrible. The Pebble acquihire prioritized watch apps, in (what I see as) a belief that watch apps are necessary to compete with Apple. Resources would be far better spend improving the first-party UX and apps first, before opening up the ecosystem to outside developers. The iPhone dev kit trailed far behind the initial iPhone launch.
Oh I totally agree, but Apple's advertised battery life is to ensure CSAT and does not reflect reality.
Fact of the matter is that my Series 4 watch has about 2 and a half to three days of battery life, rather than the marketed 16 hours, especially when used like a fitbit (Apple's estimate bundles in music streaming, navigation, and hardcore workouts, and is tested on the smaller model, which has a smaller battery.)
I was a huge pebble fan, I still use my Pebble 2 and Time Round sometimes, the Apple watch is in another league as per what it can do, but I honestly think the Pebbles were still a better product than Fitbit's watch at doing what fitbit is trying to do. Sure the Fitbit has a nicer screen, but what do they do with it?
Exactly this. I’ve grown tired of Fitbit’s lack of cohesive bug-free products — simple things like adjusting the volume of Bluetooth headphones were known bugs for years without progress — and I had to make a choice between jumping off the bandwagon or sticking with Fitbit.
Battery life kept me. Being able to go 4-7 days without thinking about the watch is paramount. I also don’t want to charge every night because I want to track my sleep! So Fitbit won out.
I wish they could succeed independently. They have so much love and stickiness in my friend group and we all love the simplicity of simply an advanced fitness tracker without all the weight of a full-fledged phone on your wrist. Sadly, it seems like they don’t know how to run a company effectively. Which is a shame because I really really don’t want to move to Apple or Google products or anything else in this category until they solve battery life.
Just a heads up: you can get literally weeks out of garmin watches, depending on model and usage patterns. Your concern is exactly why I sold my moto360 and never looked back.
A watch that needs to be charged once in a few days is actually worse than one that could use a charge every night.
Charge at night is a habit that can easily be adjusted to our daily schedule. btw Apple watch does last a full day (I meant 16+ hrs) with decent use, unless you are playing music out of it all the time or obsessively checking time/calendar.
Only advantage of fitbit is that some models are easier to wear to sleep, particularly if you don't need to charge at night. However, even here, apple one is way ahead - the theater mode will make sure the super bright led at the bottom won't wake you up.
No, charge every night would be way worse. My wife uses her Fitbit to track her sleep, and it does this very well (much better than her previous smartwatch). She also tracks how much she walks during the day. A smartwatch that has to be charged every day would be useless to her.
I have no idea about the UI that some people complain about, but my wife seems to have managed to get access quite a bit of functionality in her Fitbit, so I'd say it's good enough for its purpose.
I recommend using a separate sleep tracker. I was using the Fitbit constantly and got some skin irritation when I forgot to swap wrists before bed. Though, I was using a narrow version which probably made things worse.
FWIW my Apple Watch S4 can go a whole weekend on a single charge. I don't use mine extensively, though I do use Apple Pay for every transaction that I can. You can def go 2-2.5 days on a single charge.
That's right, a watch that does literally nothing but tell the time lasts a long time on a single battery charge. If having to charge your watch is not worth the benefits/luxuries provided by an expensive smartwatch, a smartwatch might not be for you.
To give a quick summary: I look at the upcoming weather, see the times of upcoming meetings, see messages people have sent me, pause/resume/skip tracks on currently-playing music, track hikes or walks, record audio, check my heart rate, check the current time/date, and pay for stuff.
Wearing a watch during sleep is annoying and can actually lead to health issues. Get a proper sleep tracker (e.g. Withings) for this. Charging nightly is perfect for a watch, really is a pro for the Apple Watch.
What I've ended up doing is charging my fitbit for 15min every morning while I get dressed.
It's enough to go from ~60% to ~80% and fits in as a daily habit, so my watch is almost always between 65% and 80%, It can track my sleep (I exclusively use my watch for tracking sleep, tracking exercise, tracking heartrate and telling the time. I don't have notifications enabled)
Then perhaps the best feature of charging the watch in this way, is that if you forget to charge (or unexpectedly away from home), the watch will always last for 3 extra days.
And if you are going away on short weekend trips, you don't need to pack your charger, just make sure it's at 100% before you leave for a reliable 4 days of usage.
This is what I do too.
However if you look at some of Fitbit's competitors the battery life is an order of magnitude better. Wondering what Fitbit is doing to make it drop so much in comparison. Lots of more features?
My Garmin only needs to be charged about once a week. If I'm using it a lot for fitness then twice a week. Once I traveled and forgot the charger, I managed to eek nearly two weeks out of the thing. I find this much better than daily charging and have steered away from watches that need to be charged daily.
Which Garmin model? I'm in the market for a running watch and/or a fitness tracker and want to buy a decent Garmin. Most online reviews seem all over the place.
I have a Garmin Instinct. When I don't have many workouts, it gives me 2-3 weeks of battery (including instant phone notifications over Bluetooth, constant heart rate, barometer, and step tracking)
I went on a 2 week trip to Europe and didnt even bring my charger -- lasted the whole time. I've had it for a year now and it's rock solid. It's been in the ocean with me, and been smashed into rocks on backpacking trips. Still in great shape.
I don't endorse many things very heavily but this thing is amazing. It's not sexy with it's black and white screen and small selection of watch faces... But it's so nice never needing to charge it, it's basically indestructible, and does everything you'd want a smart watch to do
This is just completely wrong. Garmin watches only need to be charged every few days of normal use and it's not a problem at all. Habits are irrelevant, just throw it on the charger for a few minutes when you see the battery gauge getting low.
I want a watch that only needs to be charged once in a few days, because I want to wear it at night for it to track my sleep and wake me up and I could charge it while I shower (every 2 days, in case you're wondering).
My wife does this with her Apple Watch and she only charges it while she’s in the shower and 15 mins or so before bed. It always lasts the full day. I was surprised when I learned this. So it might not be there for you yet. But it’s close.
I charge it for half an hour after my morning workout(while taking a shower and getting ready) and for 15 minutes once in the evening I sleep. I track both my sleep and workouts, and keep it wearing throughout the day otherwise.
While it might not be as 'smart' as some other ones out there. The Nokia/Withings Charge HR has sleep tracking, heart rate tracking, vibrates and does notifications too. The battery easily lasts a month sometimes longer.
Well I've had a Versa for over a year and it's been great. Basically it's a fitbit that also shows notifications from my phone. It has some simple apps that you can use for workouts or some other single-use trivial things.
The configuration part of the fitbit companion app is frustrating. But that's where the UI belongs and where it should be fixed. I have zero interest in a watch that's an even smaller and more frustrating phone UI.
Mostly I like only having to charge my watch every 3-4 days because it's long enough to forget about needing to charge it.
The real problem to be seen with the Versa lies in the source of its software being a better example of how to build their product.
I had a Pebble since their first kickstarter and the work Pebble did to make exactly what you are talking about blew Fitbit's current product out of the water (Even though Fitbit bought them and used their tech to make the Ionic and Versa). The Pebbles were faster, lighter, smaller, with better battery life (2+ weeks!) and a fantastic UX (By the same people who worked at Palm on WebOS). Sure they didn't have a touch screen, but they also intentionally had enough buttons to not need one. (Meaning they worked better with gloves)
Then you talk software quality, after using the Versa for a little while, the biggest problem is that its UI is such a mess to use. If you don't want to configure a watch face on the Watch, the Apple watch has that feature too and it is instant and easy to use, just like the Pebble was. Once you use everything else it's really clear that the smart features on the Versa are an afterthought that Fitbit tasked some scrum team to get done and shoved in the app in a week, marked the task as done, and moved on, forgetting that for the casual user, that is the only other thing you want to do with the app.
The other entire problem is that the Apple Watch is complex...but only as complex as you want it to be. If you never click the home button it can do everything you do with your watch with a nicer (bigger) screen, an easier, and a faster UI, and plus it has Siri and much better notification access. Fitbit is stuck between Apple and Garmin and they justy can't pick one. I imagine the Google sale would fix that pretty fast.
Buying a fitbit is just buying a fitbit like buying a Casio is just buying a Casio. If Apple Watch were some agnostic thing that didn't require dragging an entire ecosystem I don't live in with it, I'd probably consider it. Assuming the battery life didn't suck. As is I'll probably go with Garmin when it's time. Google is the kiss of death and if Fitbit is being shopped to Google then they're dead already.
My Pebble Time Steel from Kickstarter still works nicely and looks like new (I have changed the straps though).
I take it swimming, it has been dropped multiple times, it has had some hard knocks but the metal frame protects the glass and it seems indestructible. I am also surprised that battery charge still holds almost a week.
They did have great potential but apparently consumers didn't agree. And then they sold their IP to Fitbit. :(
I think consumers agreed. The company just seems to have been vastly mismanaged. I find it amazing that nobody is just copying it. Hell, Fitbit could sell exactly that model and have a winner on their hands (the Versa contains some insane mistakes).
Yeah, on the two Pebble OGs I owned, they had frequent display issues. However, it turned out it's because the display connector somehow starts wiggling loose or something.
You can actually fix the display-glitching yourself by adding a paper/cardboard shim. It actually works! There's an excellent post[0] that outlines the process. I had to redo mine because it wasn't quite thick enough, but after I did that mine was good to go for a long time. I think you might have to redo it when the shim gets worn down and doesn't put enough pressure on the display connector? Not sure...
yes - I sadly left my kickstarter edition on a beach, and tried replacing it with a steel and both watches I ended up buying had screen tearing issues. Tried all the tricks, but ended up going back to my old analog.
Probably received free replacements. I had 3 break down on me and only once did I have to pay shipping, coincidentally that was the last time I asked for a replacement. perhaps I am bitter.
Their support was great but when it doesn't perform the basic function of syncing with my phone or desktop app, what good is it? I had software and hardware problems (band breaks easily) on all of them.
Yeah, they were good about giving me free replacements whenever I had an issue, if not I definitely wouldn't have purchased a new device. I just swapped in the new replacement screen this morning, hopefully it works for a good long while
I just upgraded from Series 0 to Series 5. Passed it down to another family member. Battery still lasts whole day, and in general it was doing same tasks as a new one. Biggest issue I had with the old one is that it wasn't waterproof.
I've had the opposite experience. I've bought each gen of the FitBit. I never found the new version compelling enough to buy immediately (but that's generally how I feel about phones and computers, too). I think gen 1 had the strap break after a few years (it was annoyingly wasn't replaceable). Gen 2 did suddenly just die after a few years. In both cases the newer version had been out for awhile and competitors didn't look too compelling. Each upgrade was nice, too.
I did have a charging issue, but it was because I left the charger plugged in inside the bathroom. I guess the steam from showers corroded the charging posts causing them eventually to no longer make contact with the watch. I bought a few replacements from Amazon for <$20 total and started unplugging it when it wasn't charging and I haven't had the issue in years.
This was my experience as well. I had a Charge HR back when they first came out, and the glue holding the band to the display dissolved after about 4 months. Got a warranty replacement and it stopped holding a charge after about 5 more months. Sold that warranty replacement on ebay and got a watch from a competitor that's lasted for 3 years without trouble.
My Charge 3 has been nothing but problems. Freezing, blank screens, faulty readings. The proprietary charger and inability to reset when not connected the the charger have compounded the problems. I'm also on my third band.
Yeah I went through 3 Charges in a year. Lower quality than the cheapest no-name electronics I've ever had, but at a price premium. It's like they were manufactured to be disposable.
Very similar experience here, I went through 2 Charge HRs in about a year. I'm on my third now, but I purchased this one new on eBay for $50 iirc (after the Charge 3 was released).
Every Fitbit I've had has felt disposable, and I've been using their products since 2013.
I know your intent was to just say the acquisition could be huge. But I want to say anyway, in terms of ROI and being a blockbuster deal (returns being 11 or 12 figures), Instagram is possibly the best acquisition of all time. Booking.com is arguable though with Instagram still growing it takes the lead going into 2020.
And Naspers investing into Tencent and Softbank into Alibaba are up there too, though they’re just big minority stake investments.
My understanding was that the Versa Lite was a big misstep. The first Versa was super solid though (I have an Ionic, it's precursor), and the Versa 2 looks to be a solid true successor.
Google has murdered every hardware company they've bought, whether it was smarthome products, watches, smartphones, robots, etc.
I specifically bought a Fitbit because it didn't capture my location history (unless using a specific app for tracking running I don't use), and obviously I will have to leave (and stop buying them for friends as well) if Google acquires them.
Remember the Jawbone Up? It got popular with early adopters around 2013, the same time Fitbit released their first on-wrist tracker. Everyone I know who had an Up lost interest within six months. Sure, the hardware was flaky, but the novelty wore off. I'm guessing the same thing happened with Fitbit, but they somehow powered through people losing interest with a bigger product lineup and more features. But still, the novelty wore off.
Funny enough, I have an Aria scale because that's a meaningful metric for me to track long-term.
I had the Charge and liked it. It's a bit "boring" for the price. The tech seems solid though, so maybe Google could inject some excitement into the products via software.
This wouldn't surprise me, Fitbit has been getting more and more "Googlish" in its slurping of data. My current irritation is that it refuses to 'sync' your device unless you have location services enabled for the app.
I get that some folks like a "track" they can refer to, for others it puts their life at risk[1], and for me its not something I care about. Steps and heart rate are enough for it to compute calories (when you've added in lean body mass and sex). There are no features "missing" when I only sync it to an old Motorola X phone (no sim) which is sitting at my desk. I noticed that Apple and Fitbit have also fought over this, where on iDevices enabling location was optional (it would still sync), then an update and the location was no longer optional (unhelpful "no device found" message, but turn on location and amazingly there is your device right there, turn it off and poof your device is no where to be seen), then with the iOS 13 update it was optional again. But on Android it has never been optional.
I interpreted that behavior as "profitability through data sales" strategy and they needed more data cows to get more money.
The location services is likely due to both Android and iOS requiring location enabled for Bluetooth, as BLE Beacons can be used for location tracking.
this seems to have been an intentional change, to group bluetooth scanning under locations -- which would mean most people leave location feature always enabled, and all the apps that access location (especially play services) gains consent to transmit your location information to Google.
Exactly. If you have Bluetooth and wifi turned on, you're sharing your location. So the OS makers decided to make that obvious by requiring you to have location turned on.
Still bitter that Fitbit bought Pebble and did apparently nothing worthwhile with the tech or the team they acquired.
I loved my Pebble OG and kept searching for a nice secondhand Pebble Time Steel to upgrade to -- until the Fitbit acquisition where we learned the Pebble ecosystem was unfortunately doomed.
I've since "upgraded" to an Apple Watch S4, but to be honest it's really just a "side-grade" as there are major downsides compared to the Pebble OG, like battery life, lack of always-on display, and the lack of useful tactile buttons.
Being able to switch the currently-playing music track _without having to look at it_ is one thing the Apple Watch can never provide for me. I have to look, see where the UI button is, and tap on exactly the right spot on the screen. It frequently doesn't recognize that I tapped on the fwd/next track button either (presumably because I didn't tap perfectly within the hitbox). This hugely defeats the purpose of a subtle wearable that can stay "out of the way" and not steal your attention.
Being mad at Fitbit because Pebble was a poorly run business is misguided. Pebble was out of cash and going to shut down. Fitbit paid to keep the Pebble servers running and paid people to gracefully wind it down so the devices didn't brick.
The team that built Pebble built the FitbitOS ecosystem. They have done incredible work and did it even better the second time around.
I guess to clarify, I'm bitter that a new Fitbit smartwatch didn't come out that met or exceeded what I got out of the Pebble OG, to put it simply. The form factor and overall ecosystem didn't compare, from my subjective viewpoint. I imagine it has hopefully improved over time, but the last one I saw that a colleague had purchased (Versa or Versa 2, I forget which) I wasn't really impressed. :\
Oh, regardless, thanks for giving your $0.02, cool to hear from someone who worked there! :)
> battery life, lack of always-on display, and the lack of useful tactile buttons.
Have you looked into Garmin's watches? Granted, they're expensive, but these are some of the main reasons I love my fenix. (In addition to it functioning as a very capable bike computer.)
Nah, I already got the Apple Watch S4 as a gift so it will be a long time before I am looking for a new smartwatch! One day though, I'd definitely scour all the options available to me :)
At the risk of sounding contradictory — the latest Fitbit watch has AOD, more than 7 days of battery life (at least for me — half that if I turn AOD on), and a button. It also uses that Pebble tech to power their third party app ecosystem.
I had the versa (v1) and it didnt have AOD, but you would install watch faces that allowed it and battery was like half a day, if that.
So while I dont doubt your claims, I gave up on Fitbit before the versa 2.
The buttons also dont do much, sadly.
Ah yeah I am aware of that -- though I understand the S5 also has quite a bit less battery life? Is that correct? I'm pretty happy with battery life on the S4!
Officially it has the same battery life. Unofficially there are mixed reports, but I think it's just too early to tell. It's worth noting that the S5 40mm model has a new battery design that has 10% more capacity than the S4 40mm model.
Pebble hardware could never run Android Wear. It has 256 kilobytes of RAM! Android Wear requires two thousand times more RAM than that.
That's the really impressive achievement of Pebble. They built a smartwatch software platform that was orders of magnitude more efficient than Apple or Google, but still a joy to use. That efficiency gave them the flexibility to make hardware design choices (e.g. 7 day battery or 7.5mm thickness or $99 price) that Google or Apple could never make.
Not only that, despite the extreme technical limitations underpinning the device, they built a dev environment that was a joy to use, and an API that was intuitive and powerful, supported by great documentation. Pebble really was something special.
Pixel, Pebble, Slate would be a good set of names if they resurrected the branding. Bring back Nexus too, the Pixel Nexus. Drop the name google/chrome entirely, name the hardware division Pixel. The Pixel Pebble as their smart watch offering. The Pixel Nest as their smarthome tech.
I actually think google would benefit from differentiating their consumer tech from their search/adwords products.
The Pebble ran on a Cortex M3. These days the new Mi Bands offer somewhat equivalent specs for $40 with 15 day battery life on color displays with heart rate monitors.
I'd be really excited to see something similar in a more traditional watch form factor.
There is some talk of the recently announced PineTime (https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime) running RebbleOS. Should be cheaper than the Mi Bands with a more traditional watch form factor and decent battery life!
If it behaves even remotely like a pebble and runs on Rebble then I'm sold, my current pebble has a dying battery and there isn't much replacement on the market...
Mi bands don't support always-on-screens, third party apps, watchfaces, or integrations with apps outside their tightly controlled ecosystem. From my pebble I could get the weather at a glance, control my smartlights, pick the music to play on spotify, reply to messages, surreptitiously browse reddit, control my camera, and track my sleep with Sleep as Android. You can't use Mi to do any of those things.
That was the magic of Pebble: fitting an honest-to-god smartwatch on the hardware of a fitness tracker.
Mi Band 4 has watch faces and recent update brings always on screen. Has weather and can control music on phone. But yeah Mi Bands are fitness trackers with some additional features, but it does work very well for that use case with extremely good battery life.
Very bad news for anyone who has a Fitbit device. Google tends to destroy any "smart" devices they acquire; first they tie it more closely to their ecosystem, too much for comfort, then they remove features, then they get bored and neglect it, then you have a brick.
If you own a Fitbit (I do), it's great news. Fitbit have done an unmatched job of destroying the device already. I was honestly considering buying a different device already.
They don't support Spotify, or really any music app except the one (which I don't remember). Their subscription service provides no real value at all. Their devices track heart rate and nothing else. They simply don't innovate at all.
After Fitbit bought Pebble, they made the ecosystem poorer. The Pebble tech team was stronger than the team that absorbed them.
Fitbit customer service is excellent, but their warranty is bad, and their build quality seems poor.
My Fitbit Ionic (about $300) stopped working one month after the 12 month warranty ran out, and they offered me a 20% discount on my next purchase. They haven't lit up the SiO2 sensor on the Ionic after (3?) years.
Google is great at a lot of things, but how invested are they in being a supplier of a niche, always connected device that collects personal data every second of the ...
Wait a second! Things might be looking up for Fitbit devices! (But maybe not the users)
> My Fitbit Ionic (about $300) stopped working one month after the 12 month warranty ran out
My Fitbit Ionic stopped working 6 months into the 12 month warranty and they flaked on the warranty anyway.
Many Ionics were secretly sold without the manufacturer's warranty.
The problem turned out to be a shorted capacitor. My secretly-warranty-less ionic was sold during the Great Capacitor Shortage. Coincidence? Maybe. I doubt we'll ever know.
Yep, I bought it new in a sealed box from an Amazon third party store with prime shipping a week or two after product launch.
Fitbit said they "had" to refuse my warranty on account of having purchased the watch from an "unauthorized re-seller" because of clones, but their software already checks serial numbers for duplicates and rejects clones, so that sounds like an excuse.
Incidentally, my next watch was a Garmin, and while I tried to buy it from the official Garmin store on Amazon I found a 3rd party store on the receipt, so I contacted Garmin and ask them if this would invalidate my warranty. They said it would not. They made good on that promise two weeks ago when a fatigue crack showed up in the plastic frame.
Another vote for Garmin warranty: my strap catch broke (the little loop that holds the long end of the strap down). I chatted online with them and they shipped me the 50c catch in what appeared to be a large box that must have cost at least $4 to ship. A bit overkill but that's how you retain customers I guess.
A friend, who got me interested in the devices, had the same issue. His died. Mine, I stopped using, when it detected I was asleep for 3 hours one night and I was definitely up and using my phone for the entire time. The only reason I got it was to monitor my sleep. It is apparently useless for that.
I do not own a Fitbit, but on my older Pebble, the music integration feature allows me to play/pause the music, switch tracks (to skip that one song in the playlist I should really remember to remove), and adjust the volume.
When I'm working out or doing yardwork, it's handy to have access to these things on my wristwatch rather than trying to fiddle with the phone in my pocket. It's sounds like the most minor convenience, but I use it all the time. If that were to be limited to only a tiny number of apps (and not the Android bluetooth thing, which picks up whatever happens to be playing; usually VLC in my case, sometimes Spotify) it would be a lot less useful.
I still use a pebble 2 se, and notably the pairing of music controls and shortcuts is amazing. Without having to look at the screen, sleeves still covering the device, you can:
- Hit the back button a couple times to make sure I'm back on the watchface/home screen
- Hold down a button to shortcut into an app (e.g. music controls, music boss)
- Play/pause, control volume, go forwards/backwards (or 30sec skip in some podcast apps).
Hoping I can continue to use the device. Have any competitors come close in matching pebble's button UX?
Yeah I had press and hold on the lower button to launch music app, then IIRC the same button was skip track (or hold to fast forward).
I like my Apple Watch too, but I miss the hardware buttons and being able to do stuff without looking at it.
Apple's take is that I should talk to Siri instead of using buttons, but the 8 year wait for them to support 3rd party audio apps kept me from building any habits with that. I'll probably get used to it.
I'm still using the original pebble. Unfortunately, i'm getting hit by the screen tearing problem and it is so old that i can't even open it to fix the problem.
I don't want a watch that i have to charge daily, or i'll take it off and end up never putting it back on. I've been thinking of buying up some refurbished old pebbles as they have the exact features I want without the downsides of ALL of the newer watches/fitbands.
In what way can you not open it? Are the torx screws stripped? I did the "display shim" fix a couple times and it worked very well, but indeed it does rely on opening the case and putting it back together...
When I was big into running I wanted a smart watch that could play my music and connect to my headphones without needing to take my bulky phone with me
Other reasons for wanting spotify is a remote control. When I had my pebble and my phone was in my pocket I'd often use it to skip songs, drop the volume a bit, etc without having to pull out my phone each time
It's really nice to listen to music while running without your phone with an Apple Watch, it would be a really compelling feature for Fitbit to also support this functionality.
Fitbit isn't really made for serious fitness enthusiasts. If you look at its feature set and design, it's trying to give the average person a way to get data about how fit they are in the range between not fit and average. The sleep tracking, water tracking, automatic workout tracking, and other simple features are more for the average person than for a marathon runner. So it doesn't surprise me that they don't support chest straps because most people don't want to do zone training, they just want to know whether they're getting exercise that will EG condition their heart.
The problem is, you get a Fitbit as a casual person just getting into exercise - and before you know it, you've outgrown Fitbit!
That's not a great business model. They should have devices that either scale with you, or different models with feature-sets that target different ranges of users.
The people that are active and stick with fitness tracking are exactly the ones that are most likely to purchase new devices over time - either as replacements or upgrades. Instead, they switch to Garmin or some other more "serious" fitness tracker. That's a crying shame for Fitbit... the original fitness tracker.
Supporting chest-straps, or selling their own chest-strap, doesn't mean a casual users needs to buy one. But it does mean a growing serious fitness enthusiast can continue to use Fitbit, buying new devices over time.
From my experience, Fitbit still has the most polished App. It's a darn shame you can't get more out of Fitbit devices though.
As someone who has owned multiple Fitbit devices that all stopped working within the first year, good riddance. The only thing that's still working is our Aria scale and that's basically worthless now that Fitbit holds that data hostage and you need to use third party apps to sync it with anything useful (like MyFitnessPal, Apple Health, or anything else).
This isn’t correct. Their devices track sleep (amongst other things beyond heart rate), which IMO is the #1 killer app.
I have a Versa 2. They support Pandora.
I have not tried the subscription yet but plan to.
I definitely would like more innovation too, but IMO it’s still the best in class. I switched from the Band after MS discontinued. I had (and returned) an Apple Watch because of lack of good sleep tracking.
Yeah, sleep tracking is really the only thing I use mine for to get a decent idea of my cycles and at least understand how long I was sleeping. It's not perfect, but for the price and form factor it's doing an amazing job.
Nearly all other products competing in the “smart watch” category allow you to use the watch as a music source for wireless earbuds. It’s a very nice feature if you’re doing some activity where bringing your phone is impractical (like running).
There is not much "feature" in a Fitbit. You can't even correct simple numeric values of an exercise, such as the ran distance or the bodyfat percentage of the scale reading.
I can't even understand how they're able to charge as much as they do. I've owned 3 Fitbit devices and they perform uniformly worse than a cheap as dirt Xiaomi Mi Band I received as a free prize. Their battery life tops out at 2 days max and the sync feature is broken. Heck, they don't even look good
My wife's and my Fitbit Charge 2 can still get a good going of 5 days with a 3-4x hour-long exercise recording. My main issue with Fitbit is it treats us like someone who bought it for fashion. Also I prefer strength training, and to measure effort of anything but jogging and steps is out of scope for Fitbit. When I bought our Fitbit, I hoped the insights I can get out from the devices would improve over the years, because their slogan that time was about to revolutionise fitness with data. Unfortunately the usefulness of their products remain very basic.
I didn't buy a single one. I was gifted all three by different people. And they likely bought it because it has the highest brand recall of all fitness trackers outside of Apple.
Bought my chinese no-name (it probably does have a name if I saved the box, but there's no brand on the device itself) for $10. Time, stepcount, calories, distance, heart rate, BP, O2 sat, sports functions, sleep, etc. The watch does lose about 45 seconds a day, so I have to sync it once a week or so to keep the time display in an acceptable range. The app is otherwise irrelevant to me. Charge lasts about 6 days.
Step counts as well as the fitbit. Heart rate is simple. How can it mess that up? Blood pressure is relative. You don't expect it to be accurate without a cuff. Same with O2. Those can show whether you're higher or lower "now" than you were an hour ago, a day ago, but they're not intended to be accurate on an absolute scale. Sleep seems to match up pretty well with snorelabs.
Now that I think about it, I wonder how well any of them keep time without syncing to their app.
I mean, I'm not expecting them to pay a full $1 to get an RTC that keeps time up to 1s/month, but still, 45s/day is a lot, and it implies they really cheapened out on either design or components. I would mistrust even the relative measurements.
I have a Garmin fitness watch, and I mainly use it to tell the time, daily step count, and the distance/pace/heart rate/duration during runs and bike rides. I do sync the resultant recorded activities to Strava but frankly that's not very important to me.
And this is enough to justify the device for me. It only cost $150 or so, lasts much longer than a year, and earns its keep in useful functionality.
Also the battery lasts for almost an entire week between charges, which is an awesome feature. My fiancee has to recharge her Samsung watch almost every day.
This is one of those things where limiting the functionality of the device enhances the usability of it. I can easily do the 3 or 4 things I actually want a watch to do on my fitbit(stopwatch, heartrate, pedometer, see who's calling) and don't have to worry about dumb stuff like receiving phone calls or watching video on a tiny screen.
Yes, that too. It's a huge plus to me that the battery in this Garmin watch lasts for a week, even with light GPS usage. I wouldn't put up with a smart watch that required charging every night; it's too much extra hassle for little additional benefit.
I loved my Garmin for the 2-3 months I had it. Great battery life and the minimal functionality I needed in a fitness watch (GPS, heartrate, steps etc.)
It eventually irritated my skin (I had burn marks right under the light) so I had to give it up. Even with regular cleaning, I could not stop the strap itching.
The nice thing about Garmin (the company) is that they gave me a full refund even though it was well past the 30-day return. I haven't gone back to do the research on avoiding the skin issues, but I hope some day I'll be able to buy a Garmin again.
In case this helps: The higher end Garmin watches have many strap options, you can try take the supplied strap off and buy a strap made with a different material from Garmin or a third party.
Also, best to take the watch off when showering, dry it completely / wipe down. Put the watch back on once you've dried off also. If your skin is super sensitive, consider taking it off sometimes at night etc.
The rubber band is the one thing that failed on my Garmin watch (and of course it did, it's rubber). I replaced it with a third-party NATO canvas strap and haven't had any further issues. This one has the benefit of more comfort in addition to more durability.
I am doing something similar with a Timex IQ+. I use it for telling the time and to tell me roughly my activity level. I don't even bother to sync it. I recently changed the battery for the first time after using it for 8 months. I bought it because just looks like a conventional watch and because I found the design to be attractive (my taste)
Apple has allegedly had spO2 monitoring capability on Apple Watch for years too without making that function available in production. I wonder if there's a similar reason for this. I mean, I can buy a $12 spO2 monitor on Amazon, and most clinics seem to use that exact model... why not let my fitness device do it too?
Yeah, they would at least have to do a 510k submittal provided they could show a predicate device existed, and that there were existing standards that they could follow. If they're making an SpO2 monitor that doesn't work like any other SpO2 monitor on the market then the FDA would probably put them in De Novo hell for a very long time.
My 5 cents. Fitbit discontinued one of their best products Fitbit Flex 2, which I'm still using. It's a 50 bucks rubber band with 1 week battery life that tracks sleep & steps.
I don't really know why they cancelled it but I'm wearing Fitbit flex and later flex 2 since they entered the market and it's a divice that I'm used to wear and forget even when I'm asleep ( compared to the Apple Watch, which nevertheless needs daily charge and is simply too bulky to wear in bed ). I haven't found any decent competitors on that part and I'm honestly afraid of the wasted hours when I have to decide what to use as a replacement.
The Fitbit Inspire HR sounds like the successor... waterproof sleep and step tracker. Lasts a week on a charge, slim design. Costs twice as much though.
100% with you, and you can see that second hand prices for it are rising. The only modern fitness tracker with beautiful style and no watchface. There are chinese copies if you are willing to put toxic tracking devices next to your body.
Yeah. I agree. Normally I’d think they’d improve things but after dropcam, I’m less enthusiastic. The consolation is that they’re not going after Garmin, so there is that.
I bought a Fitbit ionic two years ago. It was great for the first year. Then it started behaving oddly and now it doesn't work at all with Huawei phones (which I rely on now because they seem to be the first brand that doesn't effectively brick itself after 6 months from metastasizing updates and enhancements).
My solution for the past year has been to leave the device unsynced. Strangely, it still somehow manages to upload data occasionally and I have no idea how it's doing it. about once a month it just gets stuck and I need to restart the thing. I'm going to guess those two things are somehow related but I don't know quite how.
I was planning on switching to a cheap Chinese device anyway. This is the kick in my keister that will get me to do it.
I just returned my nest thermostat the day after google acquired them. I already have to work hard to protect myself from google (and other privacy abusers), why would I want to give them a physical presence in my home?
Sad if that happens, but I doubt that's Google's intent/strategy. Presumably to spend money on an acquisition, Google must think the user base that goes along with the acquisition is valuable.
Hoping this doesn't happen with the Nest Thermostat. The good news is the install base is huge, so it's not like they can just quietly brick them and have no one notice.
They already killed all their integrations, and since I exclusively set my multiple zone temperatures by voice with Alexa, when they killed the partner ecosystem I sold my Nests on eBay and bought some Ecobees that still connect with everything.
Ok, are there any wearables left that can be trusted with personal data? I want to use it to track my own activity/heartrate, not to be used and tracked by somebody else for their shady purposes.
What are you afraid of? I would be more worried about the data in your phone. There is more damage to be made with GPS location and all the other private data.
I doubt that knowing what time you sleep, when you exercise, and your hearth rate can add a lot more risks. Maybe the hearth rate combined with what you are doing on your phone can be used to measure the effect of what you are reading or watching...
Well, this data would been incredibly valuable to insurance companies. If you could tie specific demographic information (which Google has mastered) to sleep and exercise routines, this could be used in a risk model.
I'm fairly confident this will eventually happen, as I had a professor explain to me that he wears a fitness tracker in exchange for a premium reduction. I think the incentive of the insurance company is that they found individuals wearing these devices to be more conscientious of their own health (I don't think they request any data at this point).
Even if you don't partake, these risk models will certainly generalize your demographic to their set of data.
From the Ad-revenue perspective, it's easy to see how they could target you for selling melatonin if your sleep pattern supports it. Or, maybe you're active, which brings about plenty of products to target you for.
This is one of my least favourite things about my Fitbit Charge 2. If I want to see previous days' data, or anything more than steps walked/stairs climbed, then I have to sync my watch with the Fitbit servers.
Even if my watch is connected to my phone, if my phone isn't connected to the internet, I can't get the data off of it!
There is an open source android app called Gadget Bridge which supports a bunch of wearable devices and doesn't phone home to the OEMs servers. I have been using that on my pebble watch for years now.
Personally I’m using a Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 4 on iOS 13 with an open source on device firewall. That way I can still use the official Apps like MiFit or AmazFit to sync all data to Apple Health without it being uploaded from their App to elsewhere. Make sure to use iOS12 or upwards and you’ll have to enable 2 Factor Authentication in order for your Apple Health data to be end to end encrypted.
I’m not sure how Android holds up but it should be possible to achieve something similar there, I’d guess. On Android there are third party Apps for syncing which should make things easier.
Pros:
* Mi Band 4 is very cheap
* Reliable HR, steps, activity & sleep tracking
* Easy and quick setup
* > 20 days battery life
* Custumizable watch faces
* 5ATM water resistant
Cons:
* Xiaomi and Huami are Chinese companies
* No always on display (but raising watch turns on display)
* Some data could leak should the firewall fail
* Currently no third party Apps for syncing to iOS
I wrote a short article about using the Mi Band 4 on iOS with a focus on privacy on my website if you’d like to know a bit more.
If you are a qualified developer who promised to work on apps for it (probably including an OS), then you already have one.
They have more or less stated that general availability is just waiting on someone who already has one to demonstrate a useful app. That is they could sell the hardware today, but since it won't do anything it is useless and so they see no point.
Is there a personal data vulnerability/risk with Apple Watch? I don't know of any "tracking" or other shenanigans around the personal health data gathered from it.
You can turn off iCloud sync for your Health data, but even if you keep it on, it's encrypted end-to-end across all your devices, which is nice.[1] (Some caveats apply.)
There's the general risks that they have your data and in future can change what they do it. They can be bought out in future like fitbit, which is obviously laughable at the moment but it's not the first time we've seen apple sink. Plus there's the general bluetooth privacy issues, although I think apple has a decent track record of protecting against this.
I'd be interested to know what and how much it shares info too and if it's safe against things like wifi MitM attacks.
I won't blame you if you call me a Garmin shill but the fact that it is a European company subject to GDPR was a big factor in my picking it over Fitbit when I was making my decision about two years ago. Edit: also I read on HN that Garmin can be used with open source sync solutions and thus not locked to the vendor for data storage was another big reason why I picked it.
Anybody know a good way to get your data out of fitbit? I've got a year's worth of decent data and it's obviously at risk if google shutter it. Also I don't want them to have it - so I guess I'm in the market for something independent.
Fitbit is pretty good about this. I've noticed that some derived values such as resting heart rate are not available for export, but the important stuff all seems to be there.
And account deletion is somewhat hidden, it's under settings -> personal info -> delete account (at the bottom).
When logging in I noticed there's a consent form the I was auto redirected from. Presumably this is for EU customers only and fitbit don't want to give the rest of the world privacy options.
I do feel silly giving them this data in the first place though, it's not enough to trust a company, you have to trust who they will be sold too as well.
This is the worst thing - they have a pretty good API and sensible terms to use it for personal use at least. Garmin by comparison is an omnishambles - no API unless you're a megacorp.
This is new. Is "hostile" referring to a data format that has been created to be as un-portable as possible? Feels like a more accurate description would be to just saw "poorly designed format" as you cannot know their intent (unless they published their intent of course)
Either their storage systems and file formatting philosophy are too sophisticated for me to understand or they're intentionally delivered in a way that requires moderately advanced data processing skills to use.
You can derive/assume intent; it'd be pointless to only claim intent when specifically stated (you can't always assume stated intent isn't actual intent either...).
json is a good file format, but the way that fitbit exports the data is strangely partitioned by file and object depth. Machine readable certainly, but most machines will need a lot of guidance to turn it into a useful dataset.
One can only dream. It was so far ahead of its time, and I still consider it superior to any smartwatch out on the market. I have mine from 5 years ago that still works great. We need more products like this.
Apple watch is better for most people IMO. The health features, notifications, apps and other integration at least. Max battery life isn't as great but charging once a day isn't so bad for the much better data.
Pebble didn't really get a chance to do health properly. They were making massive leaps in progress with each release and had all of these features before anyone else did.
Huami Amazfit Bip comes close, but has no apps and needs touch input to function (no music control either). It does measure your pulse and last 30+ days, though.
I would easily pay hundreds of € for the best of those watches with an open source OS.
But instead manufacturers stick to touch operated OLED screen watches that last no more than a few days, with Android Wear ones often not even lasting 1.
The bip can sort of do music control on Android if you use third party apps instead of the Huami one. Notify & Fitness, for example, can control different things when the button is pushed.
Eh, the market is the reaper of wearables. There doesn't appear to be much of a market for non-Apple wearables (at least after the initial novelty wore off - tons of people bought fitbits and wore them for a couple weeks a few years ago). These companies are only being acquired because they failed to build a profitable market niche.
It will be interesting to see how Google uses the fitbit data. I could see them synchronizing a user's searches with their heartbeat information to try to gauge emotional response to topics.
As someone who's taken the internal trainings a few times by now: NOPE. Health data is scary-scary and no team wants to taint itself with it, unless it's the core of the product.
I hope that's true. I suspect that if it is, it only is until one or two teams does it successfully and monetizes that outcome. Then it's open season.
That's a trend in computing. It's forever too hard, until all of a sudden it isn't for a very select few and they do amazing things[1]. Then a year or two later everyone is doing it.
1: Amazing is relative, and in this case may be less about customers getting something amazing and more about to the execs looking at amazing profit reports...
It's scary because HIPAA puts a lot of restrictions on what it can be used for and also puts a bunch of requirements in place for its safekeeping. My point is that once it's been shown that those issues can be dealt with profitably, others will see that as a new growth sector and follow.
Regulations are often implemented as a set of specific hard rules based on specific values (so it's easy to rule about them). The systems they regulate are almost always never so clear, and are based on competing gradients. Where these rules interact with natural systems (such as a free market) are often some of the most lucrative places for companies to develop new strategies.
Where some people see rules that prevent or kill existing businesses, other people see an opportunity for a new type of business. The whole financial sector is rife with companies that do just this. A simple example of how it could happen in this case is that there may be some non HIPAA covered data (that people may or may not think of as health data at this point in time) mixed in with the HIPAA data, and very carefully harvesting and monetizing that could be lucrative. Maybe later laws are updated to change this, or maybe it becomes the new normal.
Basically, any given health record is covered by HIPAA if it 1) includes personal health information, 2) includes personally identifiable information, and 3) is used by a Covered Entity or Business Associate for some health care purpose. Just being "data with health-related information in it" doesn't make it covered by HIPAA; it has to actually be used by a specific set of organizations for a purpose related to health care.
If Fitbit just stored your personal fitbit data in a data lake in the cloud, that's not covered by HIPAA. But if it then shared that data with a service that made suggestions about your health, now it's covered by HIPAA. But if Fitbit allowed your smartphone to download your data, and gave you an app that allowed you personally to see health-related information about that data, that is (afaik) not covered by HIPAA, because you and your phone alone are not a Covered Entity or Business Associate.
Fitbit has a "health solutions" department which seems dedicated to healthcare solutions based on Fitbit data: https://healthsolutions.fitbit.com/ My guess is anything HIPAA-related is solely done through that arm of the company. Example: https://healthsolutions.fitbit.com/healthsystems/ I take this as them saying, "Hey Covered Entities, sign a Business Associate contract with us, and you can hoover up Fitbit data directly from us". By writing some glue code and doing the HIPAA hokey-pokey, they make a tidy profit.
Health data is not that scary. You create a contract between each business associate, and you can have 20 different orgs in a chain of trust going back to a single care provider. A lot of the modern security best practices of tech companies (not to mention GDPR) fulfill most of the privacy and security requirements of HIPAA too.
Anyway, Health is the next up and coming tech market. That's why Amazon just acquired Health Navigator and is rolling it up under Amazon Care (https://amazon.care/). Google [Alphabet] isn't just going to leave money on the table (and healthcare is lotsa lotsa money)
It seems if they buy fitbit is because they are no longer really "scared" of it, they aren't going to buy it just to keep fitbit a completely separate product.
Have you noticed how terribly siloed Google is? How you cannot use Drive to sync Photos, how long it took to get "One Google" subscription that still doesn't cover all that many of the products, how after moving it takes forever to have all the various products to agree on which country you live in? Dang, a few years back every product was separately asking for my age. That's not only because integrations are hard, but most importantly getting access to another team's data is a whole ton of lawyering through the privacy working group.
Now, that is for data that has no special legal protections. Whereas medical data is, for good reasons, subject to pretty heavy handed laws. Differing quite dramatically across all the diverse jurisdictions Google runs in. Sure, I have no clue what my employer's grand plan is here, but it will surprise me very strongly if medical data starts finding its way to established products. And note this is "medical data" according to the conservative common denominator across all the jurisdictions Google has to care about.
It's not like they don't already have health data. Google Fit exists and plenty of people use it - Any android wear devices, but also plenty of third-party devices feed into Google Fit. Any data they'll be able to get from Fitbit they can already get from Google Fit - acquiring Fitbit will just mean they'll have that same data for a whole bunch more people.
What they currently do with the fitness data they collect is probably a pretty good guidepost for what they'll continue to do with fitness data they collect.
> acquiring Fitbit will just mean they'll have that same data for a whole bunch more people
And this is why you have to carefully read privacy policies. Pebble had a clause in theirs saying they could sell any personal data about you to anyone, either as part of a company acquisition or for any other reason. Pebble got bought out by Fitbit. If that data is part of Fitbit's sale then Google will now have all data Pebble ever collected on anyone (which was, at least potentially, a lot).
It's just as likely they want to use fitbit brand to set the bar for android wearable portfolio, like they do with the Pixel for phones, than harvesting your daily steps for targeted advertising.
Could opting into an app that uses heartbeat for non-health purposes (ex. music game with biofeedback) open the door legally for them to use the data for other non-health purposes?
This obsession of pervasive targeted ads, and A/B testing methods needs to stop.
I have stopped using all google services except for search and YouTube. Apple Maps is fine now, if you need a free email account, you can get one on iCloud.com.
Who are these soulless marketing execs that are OK with using this type of extremely personal health data!? There should be a moral objection, which evidently isn’t there. That’s more horrifying.
I guess moral only exists for things which were a problem for a long time. Mass data collection is a relatively new thing. So morals around data collection don't really exist; ask the average person on the street how much they care about this. Result is those non-existent morals weren't able to be codified in law hence no wonder somebody is out there 'exploiting' this.
> I guess moral only exists for things which were a problem for a long time.
If we eliminate homicides in the world, our morals wont change about killing another person. Eliminating the problem or how long it’s been a problem has nothing to do with morality.
Around 2005 or so, Google floated (and let sink) the creepy idea that you should let them listen to your mic, so that they could supply useful info, for instance about the football game you were watching.
This is now the new normal. Pretty sure whatever is now weird will soon be normal too, given a spreadsheet or two to push it through.
(Heinlein was not nearly imaginative enough about the Crazy Years, no one could be. Might as well blame him for not thinking of the "Walk on Your Hands" thing.)
It doesn't always have to be about linking everything to everything. They (Android) needs a decent watch/health device, one that Google has some control over. As it stands today, lack of 'Apple watch' support really kills their Pixel/Android sales.
No way is it simple - there are over a dozen OEMs each competing and advertising their Android phones with the co-branded messaging that they see fit.
The whole strategy behind the Pixel phone was to change the perception of the android brand as a cheap, bloatware'd device for tech dudes. Releasing a recognizable, high quality wearable line fits in with that strategy.
It is simple. Clone Apple's Messages and ship it on Pixel phones. Make it a download so that people can use it with their Google account on other phones.
The hard part for Google is delivering on end-to-end encryption for messages that don't leave their messaging system (similar to Apple's blue bubbles). They really, really want to see what people are saying to each other.
Doesn't have to but could be. And with Alphabet being the giant it is, anything that reasonably could be happening probably is. And I find it a reasonable and scary possibility, even if it's not the primary reason for the acquisition.
Considering that Google's primary revenue is through advertising, and digital advertising's two main problems are (a) identity and (b) context, yes, it is still very much about linking, even if they need to prop up smaller projects or loss-leaders to collect the appropriate data (the secondary value proposition acts as a stepping stone to the first).
the number of fitbit owners <<< number of google identities (for search traffic)
and
data and location from fitbit owners < what they can already get from the andriod phone.
I get the point you are making, I am not denying there is value, but it is a stretch that it is all about data.
In fact, I have heard about companies who had ties with Fitbit to sell location data to third parties. I would much rather have Google be that arbitrator.
I'd definitely welcome this - it seems like Google has been way behind Apple with a solid watch competitors and given they've got the rest of the ecosystem with the Pixels, Chromebooks, and headphones, bulking up their capabilities there alongside the HTC team acquisition seems logical
Ugh... I get how Google's acquisition would make sense, but why does every company have to do everything? I know it's because of walled gardens and "integration" but it really sucks if you really like Fitbit because of some niche feature you're compelled to buy into the whole ecosystem.
After watching what happened to Nest I don't see how any current owner would be excited. I saw a newer, lower priced version released and being forced over to Google services. They used the brand and likely the team to develop more products, but none of them seem very compelling. They're all fairly identical to products other companies make.
Well in this case, Google kind of has to do something with wearables. Apple Watch is pulling people over.
Unless you were suggesting in your comment that Apple should release the AW from the walled garden and allow it to work on Android? In that case, I agree!
> Apple should release the AW from the walled garden and allow it to work on Android
Basically. Sure, I'm generally biased towards Apple products, but it just seems like wasted effort they all develop their own phone, smart speaker, virtual assistant, watch, etc. I don't feel like its doing the traditional "competition making everyone better." Instead it feels more like a checklist of portfolio items.
I do see the value in integrating with your own stuff, but I just don't see these product categories improving that much. When any big company buys one of these smaller companies I feel like the wish is that they stay the same and ignore them. I can't really think of any of these cases where I've been happier at the result.
The best bet is probably something like Withings. It was acquired by Nokia in 2016 and sold back to the founder in 2018. My pre-2016 scale still works and connects great. Sure, we might not have these companies at all if they weren't acquired, but they also wouldn't have been built up the same way if their goal wasn't a big buyout.
I would think that Google's first choice was Garmin. In my personal opinion, they have better watch products.
It was reported last month that Fitbit engaged Qatalyst for a sale. I wonder who leaked the news to Reuters, which did not mention a price: was it Qatalyst, hoping to start a bidding war?
I don't think Google has a shot at acquiring Garmin though. Garmin has no reason to sell.
Garmin has their own growth. In fact, Garmin is the only wearable market that I've noticed growing in the last 3-4 years (Apple is gaining traction obviously, but the Apple Watch is only a small bit of their market). Fitbit is failing, they're in desperate need of an acquisition.
If you own a Garmin watch (Forerunner line for example), you'll understand. It has all the fitness tracking of a Fitbit, an always-on color display, best in class GPS, and several days/a week of battery life. And, their luxury watches are really uncontested for the mountain/marine/extreme market. Frankly, the build quality is better than much of the market as well. The software is less than Apple, but better than Fitbit.
The wearable market is becoming narrower and narrower, and I really think it will come down to Apple, Google and Garmin.
In the wearable space, Apple and Google make flashy gadgets, essentially. This is great for the business people/casuals. But Garmin is capturing a whole different market. I don't see many competitors in the athletic (marathon, triathlete, ironman) market, and even less so in the extreme (mountain, marine exploration) market.
Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt though, I got my whole family hooked on Garmin devices, myself coming from their line of bike GPS. I've also invested in Garmin for several years now.
I also got hooked on Garmin. The functionality on my 645m is good. The battery is great. The device is rugged enough. It has it's won GPS, I don't need a phone when I'm out running. The best part is it looks good enough to wear to work etc without shouting 'Apple watch or Fitbit'.
Perhaps, but Garmin's core business is GPS technology, not smart watches. Buying Garmin for smart watches would be like, I don't know, buying Google to get YouTube.
Garmin does quite a bit of business outside the consumer market which is way outside of Alphabet's wheelhouse.
For example, they have an aviation division which produces radars and glass cockpits for government and defense. If they were having trouble with their consumer lines (which by all appearances seem to be thriving) they might spin it off and sell it, but the whole company seems a bad match for an Alphabet acquisition.
For runners Garmin is far more reliable and superior in every way. Fitbit is cheap. I think google wants data from more people, and Fitbit is a distressed asset, so good opportunity.
I am a happy user of their minimal Vivofit 2 watch. No heartbeat but some nice sleep metrics and the usual step metric. Most important: the battery means no USB charging for a year+; I pretty much never take it off. The occasional sync to my phone and we are good.
Sales numbers talk, happy customers walk. Fitbit sells tons (likely 10x that of Garmin), while they are poorly rated. Garmin really doesn't as much even though their products are quite well liked.
Its closer than you might think - Fitbit did $1.5B in rev last year. Haven't check their filings but presumably thats almost all from their devices. Garmin did $858m in rev last year from their "fitness" segment. Plus some fraction of their $809m "outdoor" segment includes the Fenix line, which is also in the same category. So probably $1B+ total
Fair point actually, it is closer than I thought my apologies.
Garmin makes a lot more money per unit. (Avg selling price of likely over $300) Fitbit sells many more units per year (@~$130/unit), which is scalable.
They're obviously buying it just to harvest the biometric data to build a more accurate synthetic human, which can then click on ads to generate more revenue.
Ah nooo please. Anyone but google. I love my Fitbit charge 3 and was thinking about replacing my Fitbit scale because my original model just died after 6 years. If google is going to buy Fitbit then I’m out.
I've found that Garmin has higher quality hardware than Fitbit anyway. Every Fitbit I ever had ended up being replaced multiple times under warranty because the hardware was very low quality (or badly designed) and broke.
I wore my Charge 2 scrambling and rock climbing, scratched the shit out of the screen, dropped it, wore it to Tough Mudder, and somehow after 3 years of that it still just works.
Garmin hardware is great, but their software is terrible.
My friends and I had been using Garmin cycle computers and watches for a while, but lately we've been moving to Suunto and Wahoo devices - entirely due to software bugs.
My Fenix 5 watch freezes up 2 or 3 times a month. The screen will be frozen at a particular time for 5-10 minutes and it won't respond to any button presses, not even to turn it off. And they don't sync to the app without an internet connection. And the cycle computers freeze up on boot trying to download upgrades, even when you're in the midle of nowhere and haven't had an internet connection in days. Lots and lots of little annoyance bugs like those.
Definitely not designed for offline use, in any case.
Same here. Multiple iterations of the same product and every one of them broke. While it was nice that a few of them were replaced under warranty by FitBit, the fact that every one of them needed to be replaced is asinine.
And this is exactly why any consumer device that relies on the cloud is a bad idea. I would never buy a Ring doorbell or Nest camera for the same reason - I'd always look for a version that can be used locally so I can host the software myself and don't need to depend on a third party that may go bust, or get aquihired and shutdown.
Especially one that I'd have to install into a wall. I mean, I was always thinking that the whole "IOT lightbulbs" were at the wrong spot - that an IOT lightswitch would make more sense - you get all the lights on that circuit in one go, and you don't have the "is the light off because it's set off or is the switch off" thing.
But IOT device lifespan is way too short to be installed into a wall, even something as easy to DIY as a lightswitch.
Insteon has no cloud dependency and has been producing hardware compatible with the ones sold today since 2005, and it used to be backwards compatible with X10, which is from 1975. They use powerline and RF transmission, and interface with computers or hub devices usually via a transceiver.
I would actually recommend a more open standard today, such as Z-Wave or ZigBee, but the point is, plenty of IoT hardware is long-lived, it just isn't as trendy as what's marketed by Amazon or Google.
GE makes in-wall Z-wave light switches that work wonderfully. No cloud dependency, and you can control them with open source software like HomeAssistant.
Was annoying Fitbit started charging for more information on sleep. Paying for details that was included, now they want you to pay a monthly fee. If it was additional details maybe, but to cripple the reports just for profit, is shady as fuck.
Google's corporate mission is "to organize the world's information" - that includes your biometrics - "and make it universally accessible and useful" (for adtech industry).
And let's be clear that by "healthcare providers," we mean insurance companies.
And by "timely advice," we mean notifications that you need to shop for new insurance, because they've detected that you have become a riskier bet and are dropping your coverage.
And higher premiums because they can detect some anomaly in your heart rhythm. Oh sorry we can't insure you because Google sold us your fitbit info and you have a preexisting condition you aren't aware of.
I don't know about selling it healthcare providers but integrating it as an audience with Google Ad's seems like the likely path. They know your location, now it's knowing your body data to target an audience segment.
If you thought Google knew a lot about you before...
There are massive potential benefits to mass medical data collection and analysis. From early detection and prevention of epidemics to individualized, detailed, precise medical advice (e.g. you, specifically, might be fine eating lots of fat, but have an obscure risk factor involving, say, olives or almonds or something.)
To me it seems clearly insane to give that much power to such a relatively unaccountable entity.
There's a competitor to Fitbit and one thing coming down their pipeline can detect blood alcohol level. They are about to enter a market in a staunchly Muslim nation. See the potential for problems?
Given that your EOL'd Pebble currently uses servers maintained by an independent nonprofit using an open source stack, it's about as far from Google's influence as anything can be.
My EOL Pebble doesn't use any servers at all, with Gadgetbridge. Why should moving data from my watch to my phone, over bluetooth, require a server on the internet? Silliness.
An app store, watch face store, dictation, weather. those features are the reason it requires a server. That's what you give up by not using rebble or similar services.
You can sideload Pebble apps AFAIR. I vaguely recall doing that recently to restore the watchface on my wife's Pebble after migrating it to a new phone.
I can't wait for my Pebble 2 I paid for via crowdfunding (shhh I know I got refunded) to get manufactured and shipped before the company decided to go out of business, not delivering the product they hyped, and sell themselves to FitBit.
Yeah I was really excited. I left Apple's ecosystem when I switched to Project Fi and really did find my Gen1 Apple Watch useful, the Pebble 2 looked like it was going to handle the stuff I used the most on the Apple Watch and after having already been disappointed by an Android watch (ZenWatch 2) I was really looking forward to it.
I can literally buy a $30 Chinese smartwatch that does 95% of what Fitbit and their $200 devices claim. The Chinese product spies on me less, has better customer service, and isn't asking me to join their stupid service which just locked up parts of the device that used to come with it. I'm surprised that they haven't imploded already.
My $10 Chinese smartwatch actually does more than my wife's fitbit. The fitbit app syncs with her weight-watcher's
account, which is the only reason she bought it, and is the only thing it can do that mine can't.
Is anyone aware of body-metric-tracking devices that natively allow you to collect your own data directly from the device? (i.e. no clouds, subscriptions, or preferably smartphone apps)
Apple Health seems to allow exporting all the data as a file, including individual measurements from the watch (those come every second some times). Haven't tried it yet though.
I do not understand why somebody would buy a Fitbit... I would never buy one. All the ones I owned were gifts. All the ones I owned broke in a way that showed a flawed process and engineering.
Their Bluetooth stack is sooo broken. The devices cannot sync if there are other Bluetooth devices around or only some very specific phones are supported.
I think the only good things Fitbit has may be the community and that it is not easier to replicate.
I guess Google can buy the company at a bargain price. They could fix up the technical/process problems, create good devices and use the FitBit brand to sell to their user base.
The Ionic was a misstep, but damning the entire brand because of one bad product feels like painting with too broad a brush. Like another user said, I love my Versa. Liked but didn't love the Blaze when I had that. I'll be searching for a wearable from a different company that is comparable to the Versa if this deal goes through.
you're still not thinking in the 21st century mindset: the data is what has the value here, not some mediocre optional hardware. read the thread - people are recommending just the app, which still fulfills the purpose of "hoover up valuable data"
My concern would stem from them attempting to replace the firmware with Android Wear. Because Android Wear is licenced they may feel pressure to use the same os so as not to upset licensees such that any improvements to AW on Fitbit gets shared. Or they may go the Nest route with custom firmware based on Fitbit. It will be interesting
"By requesting your account to be deleted, you will no longer be able to login. Your data will be permanently deleted after a 7 day grace period. Coach Premium plans will also get deleted."
>> Nest seems to have only improved under Google? They were floundering before the purchase
I think OP is referencing that Google itself is the lack of improvement. Who cares how the company is doing if buying its products are out of the question due to privacy concerns.
I’m in the majority here who would never use or buy a product attached to Google.
I deleted everything Google and switched to iOS a few years ago so Google would have less of my data. Now they are going to get detailed location, activity, and sleep history for all of those years anyway. You really can't win can you.
I bet there is no option to download my data and nuke what they have before this happens either.
The only winning move anymore is to not play. Don’t sign up for any service that collects and stores detailed information like that. If that’s even possible these days. Unfortunately the “people who actually care about their data” market is too small to justify making something like a privacy-oriented Fitbit.
You don’t play this game. We are all pawns, you can’t choose to play or not.
You are the product and almost every organization you interact with is trying to get a piece of the action. Some of the worst offenders selling you out are your state and local governments.
Maybe where the data originated? So, if you are a EU citizen, but use a google device in the US on vacation, is the data generated in US bound by US-only regulations, so no GDRP?
"The Guidelines note that the processing of personal data of EU citizens that takes place outside the EU will not trigger the GDPR so long as the processing is not a specific offer directed at individuals in the EU or to monitor their behavior in the EU."
So it may be safe for google...but given it would apply to a user profile in general, including EU, maybe not?
Send a GDPR request anyway. Many companies do not track what region their users live in, or what parts of it came from what regions, etc. They get a GDPR request and they just file it in the queue for processing. All they know initially is your name and e-mail when you send in the request.
When you are geographically in the EU the GDPR rights apply to all your data.
The location of the data does not matter.
The origin of the data does not matter.
Citizenship does not matter.
These are the reasons many US firms tried to call GDPR overreaching. However if it didn't apply in this way there would be too much wiggle room to be effective.
Fitbit has a privacy policy that says they won't sell or transfer your data IIRC, but that does not prevent them from doing so in the case of a sale or merger. I hate those clauses: the hypothetical argument is always 'what if some data miner buys them' ?
Ironically, the security of the data is probably higher when controlled and operated by Google. That protection is at the cost of linkage with the other data which Google has.
> If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we will continue to take measures to protect the confidentiality of personal information and give affected users notice before transferring any personal information to a new entity.
Interestingly, if we had something like the GDPR in the USA, we should be able to force them to delete our data before the merger. I assume people in the EU who may have Fitbit devices might be able to have their data scrubbed from the Fitbit servers. Also they do use open formats if I remember correctly so some people have utilities to extract data and chart it and such.
I don't really get what Fitbit offers to Google...seems like they could easily build from scratch what Fitbit currently offers. And the Fitbit brand doesn't seem particularly strong right now...
Google gets fitness data attached to your profile for incredible insight into ad targeting and profiling. Seems incredibly valuable to me. The actual products themselves are a bit ancillary for google their real value is realized behind the scenes.
Their watches though popular are completely self sustained, as in not connected devices. No link to the phone, cannot install Android on them most likely. So they are buying it purely for their experience making watches and not for their products.
Also, I wonder how much Google will want to invest in devices that are not connected to their ecosystem and might neglect existing products which will simply dilute the brand. Could be a good thing for Fit though, as I don't see that as a growing business over time.
wut? being linked to your phone is literally the whole point of a fitbit. it syncs your recorded fitness data back to the phone, and displays notifications from the phone on your wrist.
You are weirdly offbase. Their most popular product, the Versa, is a connected smartwatch.
It is absolutely about the brand. Fitbit sells like hotcakes despite that their product is remarkably bad compared to others. (The versa is rather badly rated.)
The story here is Google buying them, throwing WearOS on them/a google watch with Fitbit branding, and EOLing the entire Fitbit lineup.
> Their watches though popular are completely self sustained, as in not connected devices. No link to the phone, cannot install Android on them most likely. So they are buying it purely for their experience making watches and not for their products.
Either that changes and Fitbit is tied into the ecosystem (which sucks because I like Fitbit as it is), or the brand (and its products die) as the engineers are put to work building something else.
The Versa 2 has bluetooth and talks to a phone. You can see texts and even send them back (though typing is a pain). There's also Alexa in the watch if you care to enable it.
That said Google has Android Wear and a whole line of watches already so I also don't see the benefit except to squash some competition.
Foothold into wearables market with established brand, manufacturing footprint, and presumably some expertise in regulatory environment. If they can pair with Pixels and stream back raw data, I hear that Google is pretty good with data analysis. Wearables + cloud is in early innings. Apple Watch afib detection is a shiny trinket but, at least to my understand has negligible clinical value in and of itself.
I was not happy to find the Fitbit only works by syncing through their service - eg they get all of your data, and vigorously opposed requests to just link to HealthKit and not upload data.
Now it seems they were deliberately making sure they had your data so they could (in effect) sell it.
I’ve held off on an Apple Watch for the longest time due to battery life and size, but it seems like that is now the only option. You can’t trust any company to have access to your data.
I've been wanting to get some kind of fitness tracker to go with my Pixel 3XL, but it seems like nothing can touch the Apple Watch at this point. So I keep my iPhone around.
If Apple would play nice with PCs and let you type texts from Windows I'd ditch the Android.
So glad I got my GF to get rid of her Fitbit. She had the first two models and both were a nightmare in terms of issues. I got her a Polar Vantage and she just loves the thing. Never had any issues with it and the data you can get out of their apps are incredible.
This makes sense. Wear OS has utterly failed, but FitBit (and the Pebble assets), offer a great experience. Plus, it's cross-platform (important differentiator). I just hope Google doesn't try to kill it/ruin it, the way they have in the past.
I guess I'm not going to buy a new Fitbit device ever again. I own two Fitbit watches (Charge HR 1st and 2nd generation) and the 2nd gen is still ticking along just fine and I use it daily.
I fear that if Alphabet buys Fitbit, then Alphabet will kill of the efforts to keep the Pebble Watches alive, since they then own the various sites and domains necessary. I hope Fitbit stays independent.
Might not be a bad time to request to have all your account data deleted from their servers before Google forces a ToS change and sells advertiser access to users' biometrics.
All the works-with-nest integrations got killed recently. Infuriated me as that was a major selling point of the platform. I used to have my lights rotate evenings when I wasn't home. Also had my outside lights activate based on nest cam motion detection. All that is gone now and they haven't improved the base services for ages. It's too bad since the hardware is all really top notch.
I've been generally happy with Xiaomi Mi Band. I used a Mi Band 2 for a couple years until it died and am using a Mi Band 3 now.
My biggest need was for a "silent" wakeup alarm since I get up so much earlier than my fiance. It does sleep tracking and a lot of phone features that I don't use.
The two biggest wins are (1) the price, and (2) the battery life. I paid like $40 for the watch, and $20 for a better band on Amazon. The battery on my MiBand2 lasted ~month and a half. The MiBand 3 is shaping up to be much less, but still 3-4 weeks between charges.
[Whoop](https://www.whoop.com/) has a lot of buzz right now and offers some interesting looking sleep insight. I haven't used one myself yet so I can't speak from personal experience.
Sleep tracking at $30/month? Are you joking? I don't think anyone moving from a Fitbit is going to be willing for that kind of $$$ commitment to track sleep!
Sorry to post the same link twice here but since you asked... Look at Gadgetbridge and supported devices. I just also posted a link to the new relase... please see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21381818
At what point are regulators going to start denying these bids on anti-trust grounds? I suppose there might be enough players in the "wearables" space but I'd imagine this purchase could potentially be denied because of the risk to personal data being further consolidated? I have no idea if the laws on this actually reflect the problems in the market at this point.
If you have an android device, no explanation needed.
If you use an iPhone, unless you abstain from Google products completely, they have it from maps, wifi AP MACs, etc.
Well, a Fitbit operates the same way your phone does. GPS not on all the time. The battery is much smaller than it is on your phone.
However, Google doesn't need your precise location 24/7. Polling GPS once every 5-10 minutes is more than enough to advertise things in your area or know every place you go throughout your day.
Google isn't just trying to track you for advertising. They also put a lot of effort into creating their maps, and GPS tracks are very useful for that.
A lot of people use Fitbits for workout tracking, so they must have a lot of GPS tracks that could be useful for mapping areas that are currently not so detailed on Google Maps (eg. many hiking trails are missing on Google Maps in my area)
I imagine the more likely story is Google wants the health data for training ML models. No one uses Google Fit, so they have to get this data from somewhere.
Oh i see what's happening...this is Google' play to place microphones onto the wrists of those who don't use android phones - via fitbits - in order to capture ever more info for ads!
Ah-ha google, you didn't think i saw where you were heading did you, eh!?! /s
Damn. I like my Fitbit. I wouldn't be looking forward to having it stop working with no notice because Google decided to just shut down the servers on a random Tuesday and shutter the product line...
Yes, as it works right now. You can't sync it to your phone. (through your phone). You sync it to their server and your phone also connects to the server.
There's presumably some caching on your phone, but the server is the source of truth, and I don't think you can get updated info on your phone without it round-tripping to their server first.
I keep seeing new Apple Watches being released, and I keep seeing them add new features I haven’t seen people asking for instead of focusing on the obvious issue - the atrocious battery life.
Putting a 3G modem in my watch is the antithesis to what I see most people asking for - a watch that can actually last more than 24 hours without having to charge it.
When my phone lasts longer than my watch, there is something fundamentally wrong.
Hopefully this purchase will result in some half-decent Android smart watches - that I’ll never purchase anyways because Google - but for those willing to sell their data out at least they will have the option to do so on decent hardware and hopefully software.
If you are outside running or even in a gym, having a cellular Apple Watch + Bluetooth speakers is a godsend. You don't have to lug your phone around. Many women have clothes without pockets or a convenient place to hold a phone.
Like the Palm Pilot, Fitbit was a great idea in its time, but there are many competitors today that are better built and better supported. For example, Samsung makes a fitness bracelet that Consumer Reports rates as the best of breed, though it's expensive.
After an unsuccessful foray into Android watches a few years ago, I finally broke down and got a $15 remaindered Fitbit Flex on Ebay. It was advertised as "new/other", but the battery is obviously shot and doesn't hold a charge longer than a day or two, so they refunded my money.
But I still wear it occasionally, to understand the user experience, despite the inconvenience of needing to charge it every day. It's a clever design and does one thing pretty well -- recording your motion and sync'ing to your phone when in Bluetooth range.
For a while I toyed with investing more in a new Fitbit that would capture heart rate, but given how much better Apple watches are both in build quality and likelihood of remaining in business, I think I'll just hold out for one of those, for when I switch from Android to an iPhone 11 or 12 next autumn.
Though, Google might reinvigorate Fitbit, who knows. But Google also shelves products with distressing frequency so it might be a meaningless acquisition. Fitness trackers have become a commodity, with a few high end quality offerings from Samsung and others, Fitbit struggling to retain its market leader status, and dozens of Chinese knock-offs in the $8-$20 range that are mediocre but the price is right.
I'd still love to hear a convincing argument from someone as to the benefits of counting steps and measuring heart rate with a wrist band- Are people feeling like they are more fit because they walked to lunch "the long way" so they can reach the 10000 step goal that Fred from accounting has set for them? Do they feel healthier because they were regularly watching their heart rate reading during their hour in the gym to make sure it is in the correct target window, instead of just focusing on working their asses off for the whole hour without looking at metrics?
Convince me this isn't just a distraction and fad with little benefit, besides being an advertising device on your wrist to inform others that you value fitness.
EDIT: OK, looks like everyone here is convinced of the benefits- I'm pretty much on my own in my skepticism, I guess.
It's not going to change your life. Not everybody is going to derive value from it, and that's okay. It's not targeted at everybody. I generally find it quite useful. When running, I can aim at a certain heart rate which keeps me consistent between workouts and gives me a way to quantify if I'm feeling a bit exhausted compared to similar workouts, giving me another data point for planning the rest of my training week. It's also a useful measure of fitness and you can easily track improving fitness with it across workouts across time. It gives me a better sense of where my heart rate is and when, which has given me a bit more confidence in what I can do. It also tracks my sleep, which can also be useful.
There are just a lot of useful, small benefits that easily justify using one. I can easily go without though, so it's not a must-have. If you don't need that kind of detail in your life, just skip the whole thing. I'll sometimes go months without wearing it.
I don't think there's a "killer app" or a "convincing" argument. Rather, either it aligns with your goals and needs or it doesn't.
For me, at least, getting a smart watch with fitness capabilities made me realize how non-active I was before. I wasn't remotely interested in fitness pre-watch, and now I make sure to hit 30 minutes of exercise per day, even if that's just walking around the neighborhood or doing some gentle yoga.
In addition to working in tech, I'm also a certified personal trainer (I got it to volunteer train youth at a YMCA, and have kept at it because I work with a small number of people who are trying to enact transformation in various parts of their health & wellness).
I got an Amazfit Bip (super cheap, with GPS and HRM). I lift (heavy, 5/3/1 style) and trail run.
In short: steps are usually an indication of the aggregate of other things in your life. I leave my goal setting at 8K steps/day. On a 3-4 mile run day, I get it out of the way first thing. Some gym days are good for about 2000 steps.
On other days, I find that I am near the end of the day and I've literally managed all of 500 steps (working at the desk).
I do have more awareness of my distribution of steps/activity throughout the day. If I hit my 8K steps by 7am and have 9K steps at dinner, I know I was pretty sedentary all day.
I like to see 4000 steps at lunch, and 4000 steps at dinner, etc. Getting steps also gets me off the couch if I'm having a lazy day, gets the dog longer dog walks because I see an indicator of what I could give to her, etc etc.
With a busy schedule, hitting 8K steps EVERY SINGLE DAY takes work at least a few days each week. Sometimes my girlfriend needs another 2000 steps for her day, so I go with her too. It's a plus and we get that extra intentional time together. I personally welcome the quantified nudge, and it keeps me and my family out of the ditches of laziness and that lead to more gym, runs, hikes, etc.
Biofeedback has immensely improved my ability to cope with anxiety without needing medication for panic attacks. It helps me spot them as they come on, "snap" my brain out of it, and gives me something to focus on while doing breathing/mindfulness exercises to prevent the worst symptoms from manifesting and requiring more action.
I also find those stats to be gimmicks, but I mostly use my pebble to measure how many hours I work per week (with some simple software I wrote in C, main reason I loved the pebble platform), and since then I stopped working 55-60 hour weeks. In that sense awareness can indeed make a difference.
> Are people feeling like they are more fit because they walked to lunch "the long way" so they can reach the 10000 step goal that Fred from accounting has set for them?
I think it would be hard to argue that it DOESN'T make you more fit? If you normally have say 500 steps in a day, and the FitBit convinces you (through gamification, visibility into the metrics, or whatever it may be) to now take 2,000 steps in a day, then it's not a "feeling like they are more fit", it will indeed make them more fit (assuming nothing else were to change). The health benefit in 2,000 steps vs 500 steps is probably pretty cut and dry.
It's possible that spending time on those 1500 extra steps might help. However, it takes a decent chunk of time to walk 1500 steps, and there are so many forms of exercise you could do in that same time that might be far more valuable for your health... and a lot of them actually could be a lot more fun for most people if they take some effort to discover them.
I worry that these tools perform a sort of psychological trick on people that resembles a "denial of service attack", fooling them into thinking they are using their time wisely by just walking around more, even if the benefits are negligible & leading them to avoid exploring other options.
I think it works for me, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it randomly. I really like having sleep tracking and some relative measure of "activeness." If I want to change up my routine (start walking more) it's good to know roughly how much of an impact it is. I also like getting buzzed every hour if I've been sitting still.
I think it's good if you're otherwise committed to improving on one of those things, but wearing it it wont help you any more than buying dumbbells and leaving them unused int he attic.
My favourite things have been seeing on the daily heart rate graph the moment my favourite band at a festival came on, and the time I had a horrific nightmare.
I also noticed that excercises that I thought were pushing my heart rate to its peak ~180 (i.e. my upwards slog of a bike ride home, or going to the climbing gym) were actually moderately intensive, topping out at like ~130 (although, the absolute accuracy of the cheap HR sensors is questionable: but they're fairly good at detecting relative change). It encouraged me to do more cardio-intensive running mostly just to make the numbers go up.
Also the sleep tracking (again, might not be the most accurate) yields some interesting data. And being able to see the effects of consuming various substances on HR.....
Some of us just geek out over Quantified Self :-)
Also of note: I always felt that the Fitbits are too much of a "walled garden"; the devices' bluetooth communications are locked down and encrypted so only the official app can do anything useful with them. After I went through three broken/lost fitbits I switched to Xiaomi mi bands and the fact that they've had their communications protocol reverse engineered and a really powerful third-party phone app "Notify & Fitness" is great for me as I can play around with the (live!) data coming off the band, without the condition that it touches anyone elses' servers first.
I've also used the band to sync an LED pixel array tshirt I made to my heart rate
I've been wearing an Apple Watch since it launched in 2015.
The activity tracking and workout metrics are useful for keeping track of how active I am. It's not life changing.
The heart rate monitoring has been incredibly useful for me. Over the last year, I've had 2-3 instances where my heart rate got rather high while sedentary. Those moments were times when I was having panic attacks. I could feel my heart racing, my thoughts were spiraling, and I knew something was wrong. When this happens, the Apple Watch notified me that my heart rate was irregular. I consulted my primary doctor about this, showed him the graphs and explained the stressful situations, and he helped get me in contact with someone who could better help me to deal with this.
I know it's a minor thing, but it made a big difference and got me talking with the right kinds of medical professionals for an issue I was seemingly avoiding. Yea, it took almost 4 years of wearing this device, but it's made a difference.
That’s pretty crazy. Anecdotally and what I assumed was the case, everyone I’ve talked to has said the heart rate monitoring is pretty worthless. At least before the last 2 iterations. Maybe they’re better.
The first time this happened, I was wearing a Series 3 Watch, and the last time it happened, I was wearing the Series 5. It's accurate enough to know from daily wearing/monitoring, that my heart rate was irregularly elevated. That's enough for me.
Ah okay. I get incredibly anxious and my heart rate spikes during those times. But Series 1 or 2 (not sure which I have) has never reliably noticed. I might be getting Series 4 this year since they stopped manufacturing it. Will see how it goes then. Thanks.
Have you tried it? I do (or did until a month ago when it got stole at a gym locker room). I have the break alert set so I get a few hundred steps in at least once an hour and I do walk to work once a week or so if my step average has been lower than I’d like during the weekday. I definitely walk more due to my Fitbit. For now I’m checking my phone which is suboptimal.
And you don’t stare at it while working out. You might look at it to see if you’re above or below your target HR if you’re doing long distance running or if you’re doing HIIT. If you’re just trying to get your ass into the gym then yes it’s not that important but if you want to improve your time then it’s great.
I do admit it did give me “sleep anxiety” if my time to fall asleep was a bit longer than usual. The other con was it was a bit bulky so my sleeves would get caught often.
It's probably easier to improve upon a metric if you can measure it. You don't have to suddenly feel healthier, but if you know that your usual daily step count is 7-8k, you know now that walking 10k steps is a slightly more physical activity than usual and that's a good thing.
I'm not a FitBit user, but I think for a group of people (myself included), being able to measure & track the meeting or exceeding (or not) of goals can be a great motivator for continued work/improvement. For example, if I step on the weight scale regularly and record my weight (in a simple app on my phone), I feel more motivated over a longer period of time to make better dietary choices as well as stick to regular exercise. Without doing that, my will-power feels less and it's easier to take the path of least resistance and ignore the consequences of my (lack of) action.
I'm not saying you need a FitBit for this, but if it enables this kind motivation in a convenient way, that could be well worth it.
A couple times I've started to have my heart rate go out of control while not working out, and it's been a sign of not eating enough recently in my case. While not medical-device-level accurate, having a heart rate monitor on hand has been pretty helpful for monitoring that issue and my recovery from it.
I also like sleep tracking, because I don't get enough sleep, and my Fitbit helps keep track of my failure.
That being said, I bought my Fitbit as a smartwatch, not a health tracker. It was the only smartwatch that supported Windows Mobile.
I was surprised how often stress kicks my heart rate to near max for my age. That and seeing how much sleep I get. I don't really care about steps, but 10k isn't that hard.
It works for some people, my wife and daughters like their fitbits, just the encouragement to do something helps. I gradually got rid of all tracking and enjoy my bike rides more.
Heart rate is an interesting way of getting bio feedback for emotions. I am willing to bet that it will be used in future as a way of improving somatic therapy.
TL;DR, for me, the individual measurement is not as important as the quantifiable trend you can gather over time.
I can only speak for myself but for me the gamification of fitness is not in necessarily doing extra things randomly throughout the day just to hit the desired number.
I wore Fitbits for years (before switching to an Apple Watch) to be able to quantify my activity levels on a daily basis. In doing that, I can see trends over time and adjust. I feel that it was very informative to see how my average resting heart rates decreased as I focused on being healthier. I was also able to get a better average of my activity levels and correlate that with how I feel and the average of my weight measurement over time. All of those measurements together is where I see the usefulness.
The value of my Fitbit is not on counting steps, I don't really care about it. I just wanted the smallest device that would be able to wake me up without also waking up my wife and son :).
But I figured it also tracks how many hours I sleep, and I've been using it to try to improve those values. Seeing bad (or good) numbers does affect your motivation to reach the goal.
I got it primarily to track my heart rate while sleeping. It has absolutely helped retain activities that were helping or hurting my heart rate.
For working out, absolutely, if you’re trying to target a specific cardio exercise you want to your heart rate to be in a range and I have used it for that too, though usually a chest sensor which is much more accurate.
most people don't exercise effectively and are too lazy to get a trainer so a workout watch is a good way to know that they didn't really work out as hard as they thought they did.
it's a nice way of tracking your fitness level coz that stuff goes by the wayside in your prime working age 20-50.
if you're a fitness enthusiast then yeah you're definitely monitoring heart rates already with a more expensive watch(more accurate Fitbit matches vs semi accurate Apple)
the value prop exists, people just don't know that much about fitness - there's a reason for the obesity crisis. insurance companies need to start tying rates to medically measured and vetted BMIs
> most people don't exercise effectively and are too lazy to get a trainer so a workout watch is a good way to know that they didn't really work out as hard as they thought they did.
OK, out of all the responses to my question on here, this is actually the only one that sounds like a decent argument to me.
Good lord, must the acquisition offer feel like a relief? Surely, Fitbit wouldn't do a Groupon now.
The article fails to mention Fossil, but Google recently did acquire their wearables research division for $40M [0]. It looks like Google is gearing up to launch multiple wearables. Xiaomi, Huawei, and Huami have really taken the wearables market by storm [1]. If anything, price differentiation seems to be the key. I hope the rumoured Pixel Wearable isn't comically expensive like its Phone counterparts.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/17/18187026/google-fossil-gr...
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191017005172/en/Hua...