Nike today introduced a new fitness tracking bracelet, the Nike+ FuelBand SE. The new band looks nearly identical to the prior FuelBand, but with the addition of some color accents -- yellow, pink and red -- as well as a number of new features.
The biggest technical upgrade is the addition of Bluetooth 4.0, otherwise known as Bluetooth LE. The Bluetooth tech has been built into every iPhone since the 4S and allows for low-power and low-latency data transfer. It also takes advantage of the M7 motion coprocessor in the new iPhone 5s.
The new FuelBand also has a new clock mode that can show the time at the touch of a button.
Other improvements have come to the Nike+ Fuel points system, allowing the band to track more activities and not track activities that aren't actually physical activity.
The company has added hourly reminders asking you to move around for five minutes, in case you're too stagnant too long. You can also now double tap on the device to show the current time, resolving an odd omission from the last model. The app has also been improved, and now has a curve graph that encourages people to move every hour. There's now an intensity level that shows points as users are working out or doing some other physical activity — you can name these sessions, and share what you were doing with friends.
The FuelBand SE will launch November 6th for $149, only for iOS. Apple CEO Tim Cook is on Nike's board of directors.
Top Rated Comments
as a potential first time fuel band buyer, i think NIKE is missing out on the opportunity to break into the smart watch field, i would love to see this with some notification function.
After 2 years, a few new colours and Bluetooth 4.0 doesn't strike me as anything radical.
May look into the Fitbit Force.
IF (a big if) Apple is ever going to launch a smartwatch, it will have its own keynote announcement. Anyway I highly doubt if Apple will release any smartwatch at all.
Of course they're not hackproof.
Take the wristband, tape it to your hamster wheel, and let the hamster generate tons of Nike Points all day while you play video games.
Re: time - the new part is that you can hit the button twice and then it will immediately display the time. Before, you had to cycle through all the different readouts (unless Time was the last thing you had looked at) until you got to the Time readout. I love this change - the old way was so annoying that I only have my Fuelband display Time and Fuel, not steps or calories, because I hated having to cycle through so many pieces of info when I only wanted to know the time.
Re: comparison to iphone5s M7 chip - I also have a 5S; we know part of the answer to this but not all, since the Nike+ Move app hasn't been released yet. If the Move app works well, the 5S should work equally as well as the fuel band and maybe even better, since it should be able to measure movements that the Fuelband on your wrist wouldn't be able to. However, my biggest source of NikeFuel is from running or playing basketball and soccer, and I wouldn't have my phone on me for any of those activities, so this is where the Fuelband shines.
All that said, I was disappointed by the announcement today too - really would have loved to have seen the vibrating alarm function. Hopefully Apple will announce the iWatch a week from today so we can see how that compares.