While Nike has unofficially abandoned its FuelBand SE fitness tracker, another sports gear manufacturer is looking to enter the rapidly growing wearable fitness market.
Adidas took to the Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to launch the first official appearance of its new fitness device, the miCoach Fit Smart, a successor to its much more expensive older brother, the Android-based miCoach Smart Run.
So what makes this new device potentially appealing in a market that is increasingly growing more cluttered? Unlike a good host of wearable devices being marketed, the Fit Smart isn't designed to be a device users can slap on their wrist and forget about as they go about their daily activities while it goes ahead and tracks fitness information such as calories burned, heart rate, pace, distance and stride rate.
The Fit Smart can do all that, but Adidas is marketing the device as something that is worn during exercise and not throughout the entire day, kind of a training coach more than an all-around data collection device that can also push all sorts of notifications from a smartphone.
The device comes in black or white and features a colored LED strip on the side that serves as an effort-tracker to tell the user how intense his workout is. But first, the Fit Smart runs its wearer through a baseline workout that measures his heart rate threshold and evaluates his individual stamina level, then lights up through various intensity levels of blue, green, yellow or red during the user's subsequent exercises, with green signifying that the user is working out at an optimal intensity level for his heart rate threshold.
The Fit Smart also comes with Adidas' miCoach Train and Run app, which will be updated in August for Fit Smart's release. At the center of the updated app will be the user's ability to set and track weekly fitness goals and get access to "hundreds" of training plans for a variety of workouts.
"What we did, by working with elite coaches, was bring an experience to help people set weekly goals and training plans," says Paul Gaudio, general manager of digital sports at Adidas. "We took the things that have been very successful and implemented them here with the Fit Smart. It is about encouraging people to get active and stay active. It can also be a motivational tool; it can coach you to be better."
The miCoach Fit Smart by Adidas is set to ship to Best Buy stores late next month with a price tag of $199, with availability in Adidas' stores and other retail stores to follow.
