If you manage to keep up with your #fitspo-loving friends for Christmas, you should certainly have a gift for them to help them keep on running, cycling, jumping, or whatever other kind of active -ing they’re up to. These are our picks!
Jawbone Up Move
The $69 Jawbone UP Move is the cheapest fitness tracker to come out of the San Franciscan gadget company’s offices yet — it’s a full $80 cheaper than the $149 UP24, and still a fair amount cheaper than the now-outdated original UP. Despite that big price difference, the UP Move has the vast majority of the feature-set of the UP24 — low-power Bluetooth, a tri-axis accelerometer to track movement, all the power of the UP By Jawbone app hidden away inside its circular metallic chassis.
Your mileage may vary, but the UP Move handles the basic aspects of fitness and sleep tracking admirably, and for the vast majority of users, those are the only aspects they need.
Adidas Fit Smart
The Adidas Fit Smart might seem like just another fitness tracker, and in many ways it is. But the app-and-watch combo also features a handy a colour-coded gauge that shows just how hard you’re exerting yourself. No more slacking, slacker.
Combined with Adidas’s mobile app, the Fit Smart promises to help athletes set and track progress toward weekly goals and long-term training plans. The miCoach Train and Run app connects via Bluetooth LE.
Fitbit Charge
We loved the Fitbit Force when it came out last year, but it was recalled after more than a few problems. Fitbit worked hard on the device, and came out recently with the Fitbit Charge, which is awesome. The Charge’s existence means that once again you can buy a Fitbit wristband with an integrated screen and that can tell when you’re climbing stairs. Plus, the Charge can now tell you who’s calling (with Caller ID) when you pair it to a smartphone, and automatically detect when you go to sleep instead of requiring a button press. Fitbit says it will get a full seven days of battery life, on par with the original Force.
Jabra Sport Pulse
If the only thing you like to take running with you is your headphones and a music player, you’re not alone. It’s can be the most obnoxious thing to have something around your wrist while you try to work out, so Jabra decided to put a nifty pulse tracker inside your headphones which can feed data back to your phone. Clever!
Android Wear Smartwatch
Android Wear is the platform for Google-powered smartwatches. It incorporates everything from heart rate tracking through to counting your steps via a pedometer. These are basic functions of any Android Wear-powered smartwatch, but we know our favourite.
Something like the Moto 360 would be a great gift. The Moto 360 is a smartwatch that works with Android phones (version 4.3 and higher), essentially acting as a second screen for your device. It displays your incoming calls, texts, emails and allows you to reply to them by voice. It displays your Google Now cards to keep you up to date on the things that theoretically matter to you, it gives you turn-by-turn directions, it allows you to translate words and phrases, and it has a suite of sensors that help keep you in shape.