Remember that Jawbone and Fitbit were suing each other over patents and trade secrets and unfair hiring practices? Jawbone started the fight, but Fitbit's coming out better. A judge at the International Trade Commission yesterday tossed out Jawbone's patents, ruling that the company's patent on the very idea of gathering heath and sleep data is invalid. The ruling weakens … [Read more...]
Fitbit Data Helps Save a Life
The Annals of Emergency Medicine isn't a journal we crack all the time around here, but it carries an article that describes how data collected by a patient's Fitbit Charge HR helped diagnose a life-threatening condition. The article's a bit technical, but the deal is that the patient showed up with cardiac arrhythmia. If the arrhythmia was chronic, one treatment was … [Read more...]
IDC Says Apple Shipped 11.6M Watches Last Year, About Half of Analysts’ Guesses
iCharts Research firm IDC reported last week that Apple sold about 11.6 million watches in 2015, a figure that's about half of what stock analysts had been expecting. For the full year, the company was in third place in the consumer wearables market, following Fitbit and Xiaomi. As a whole, IDC said, the wearables market jumped 127 percent in the 4Q15, and 172 percent … [Read more...]
WSJ Not Impressed By Fitbit Blaze
The Wall Street Journal is out with the first review we've seen of the Fitbit Blaze, and it's pretty meh. Reviewer Joanna Stern said the Blaze, a full-face fitness watch announced last month at CES, is kind of big, kind of ugly, and kind of expensive for what it delivers. Its fitness functions are still better than anyone else's, she said, but not enough better to move her … [Read more...]
Fitbit Introduces a More-Stylish Alta Fitness Tracker
It seems like just last month that Fitbit introduced a new tracker (wait -- it was just last month), but the company is back with another one -- less functional but easier on the eyes. The Alta is a significant and very intentional departure from the previous Fitbit look, reminding us more of a Garmin Vivosmart or a Microsoft Band than anything that Fitbit has sold before. … [Read more...]
NPD Says Fitbit Dominates the Fitness Tracker Market
Fitbit sells 8 out of every 10 fitness trackers, the market research company NPD says. By the end of 2015, nearly 33 million trackers had been sold in the United States, compared to 13 million smartwatches -- a figure that might come as a disappointment to the industry analysts who had been predicting global Apple Watch sales of 21 million last year. However, consumers … [Read more...]
Oral Roberts Students Are Required to Wear Fitbits
Oral Roberts University has long had a fitness requirement for first-year students but a written activity log sufficed until this academic year. Now, all 900 incoming freshmen have to wear Fitbit trackers (which they have to buy) and share the data with the school. The Tulsa World newspaper (Oral Roberts is in Tulsa, OK) reports that professors had previously been required … [Read more...]
Consumer Reports Validates Fitbit’s Heart Rate Tracker
The day Fitbit announced the Blaze tracker at CES, a class-action lawsuit harshed the company's buzz. (That, and an 18 percent drop in its stock price.) The claim was the heart rate monitor on the Fitbit Charge HR and Surge were inaccurate enough to cause harm. Fitbit pointed to its disclaimers, saying the monitor wasn't meant to be a medical device after all. Maybe Fitbit … [Read more...]
Samsung Drops Out of Top Five Fitness Tracker List, says IDC
IDC's 3Q15 wearables figures are out, and Fitbit is the big winner while Samsung the big loser. The market research firm says Fitbit sold 4.7 million devices in the third quarter, twice as many as it sold in the same period last year. It accounts for 22.2 percent of the global market. Apple, IDC said, sold 3.9 million Apple Watches, for 18.6 percent of the market. It was … [Read more...]
What the Misfit Purchase Means for Wearables Startups
Misfit, which began life as a Kickstarter and became one of the best known wearables companies, was bought yesterday by a big public watch company for $230 million. That was probably its best possible end as an independent company. Misfit, over its four years of life, had raised $63 million in three rounds of funding. The products are beautiful and have a loyal following. … [Read more...]