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Fitbit tracks your steps, wirelessly uploads your data to online tracker

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Clamp Fitbit onto yourself (okay, onto your clothes if you insist), and it'll keep tabs on your fitness, even when you're asleep. Its motion sensor records how many steps you've taken and miles you've walked/run, calories burned, and even shows how well you've slept by measuring your tossing and turning. Then when you get within 25-50 feet of its base station (hooked up to either a Mac or PC), your data is wirelessly sent to the Fitbit website, where you'll be able to graphically keep track of your fitness.

How cool. Of course, step counters have been around for a while, but this one adds a new online dimension to fitness tracking. It's revealing to track how many steps you've walked in a day — for instance, I wore a step counter at CES, and discovered that in a typical day in the huge Vegas convention center, I walked about nine miles.

I also noticed that wearing a step counter made me more eager to walk more, just to somehow impress the thing. This Fitbit lets you impress others, too, where its website lets you make your fitness measurements public to other Fitbit users. The $99 sensor will be released in the first quarter of next year, so you have about three more months of sloth before this tiny trinket starts nagging you about your laziness.






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Via Fitbit

 
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(2) Comments

jellow:
I think KEVINCAL missed a major point made by the inventors of this device, which is its size. Its small size allo...More »


Comments

By kevincal at 4:12 PM ON 12/06/08

It's amazing to me that these companies are still making separate devices. Once all phones have accelerometers / gps devices then this technology is short-lived. Just take a look at the Health and Fitness section of the iPhone store and yo'll see dozens of these types of applications. Our iMapMyRun and iMapMyRide (http://www.imapmy.com) have been seeing incredible demand...

By jellow at 11:43 AM ON 01/15/09

I think KEVINCAL missed a major point made by the inventors of this device, which is its size. Its small size allows and more importantly encourage one to wear it in almost any situation whereas a cell phone is too large, cumbersome, and frankly too fragile. Of course if one is serious about tracking caloric usage, one really needs to wear it 24/7. If one shrinks the cell phone down to the same size, it will compromise its daily function. It is a bit like why laptops cannot shrink in size indefinitely.


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