The beauty of competition, when it works, is that the consumer benefits. Speaking of high-tech products, the higher the competition, the better the products, the lower the prices, and the more and more features of the item. Indeed, how can one compete in such a fierce market as smart/sport watches? You can only come up with new features, possibly useful ones, and get noticed for what you offer extra. After all, it must not be easy to go up against a mountain like the Apple Watch, which has dominated this market for years now.
Fitbit is trying, and with its new Sense it has pushed right on the heels of introducing new features that Apple would do well to copy, as noted by the online magazine Input.
Where were we?
Fitbit has experienced and is still experiencing complicated times: after its acquisition by Google, it has continued to develop its products and to nurture and care for its large user base (and their invaluable data) and has suffered heavy losses in both stock and sales. One reason is certainly Apple’s dominance with its Watch but also products that could not compete with it. Meanwhile, the design has changed and moved more and more in Cupertino’s direction, diluting even more the personality of a brand that dominated the market not so many years ago.
Now it would seem that something has changed. Not so much in design-which makes the Sense and other Fitbit sportwatches look like slightly lower, square Apple Watches-as in functionality.
The new Sense does everything you expect from a Sportwatch: you can use it to answer phone calls, listen to music, track your sports activities, etc. All things that aren’t even in the news anymore and that so many other sportwatches have been doing for years.
What sets it apart from the competition and makes it different are two particular features: detection of stress levels and body temperature.
Thanks to a sensor that detects electrodermal activity, Sense can in fact understand your stress levels and suggest meditation activities to calm you down if you are under a lot of tension. Through the stress level it can also guess what your mood is.
The other important function is the body temperature reading, and you know how important this is to know, especially after these last troubling months.
Holistic view
Perhaps Fitbit’s star has shone a little less in recent years, but it certainly has not lost the motivation that has always driven the American company toward a holistic view of life, that is, one built on the balance of different components: not only athletic, but also the quality of sleep (which Sense tracks according to different parameters), nutrition, and well-being in general. Movement, mood, recovery, and rest-this is what Sense and generally all Fitbit products take care of.
What’s more, which is not insignificant, it has batteries that last 6 days and recharge in 12 minutes.
