EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Fitbit announced its first smartwatch Monday as it looks to expand beyond the fitness band category it helped to pioneer and better compete with competitors, such as Apple and Garmin, that have been pushing their own health and fitness agendas through smart devices.
The watch, called Fitbit Ionic, has more advanced sensors and built-in GPS, which Fitbit Senior Product Marketing Manager Daniel Shaw said are “more accurate” than Fitbit’s competitors and its legacy product line of fitness trackers.
It’s also waterproof up to 15 meters and has built-in tracking tools for swim workouts. Apple Watch similarly offers swimming workouts through the third-party app MySwimPro.
“We feel strongly that smartwatches are a platform for us to deliver the most advanced health tools that the market has seen,” Fitbit CEO James Park said last week at an exclusive media event in Montauk. “We’ll be launching into a market that’s large and fast growing.”
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Fitbit Vice President of Design Jonah Becker said the device was designed with practicality in mind. It has a larger screen that enables Fitbit to use more advanced graphics and sensors, as well as GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi antennas. At the same time, it’s thin enough to fit under a shirt cuff and has a battery life of more than four days with GPS usage, triple the life of Apple Watch.
What really differentiates the Ionic from Fitbit’s legacy products, however, is software. Built into the device is Fitbit Coach, a personalized guided coaching experience that provides users with workout recommendations based on their previous interaction with the device.
A real person (as opposed to a stick-figure cartoon or graphic) will emerge on the Ionic screen to show users how to do certain exercises. It will analyze biometrics to determine whether the workout was too easy or too hard and then adjust based on personal goals.
The watch is also compatible with near-field communication (NFC) chip readers, the same technology behind Apple Pay. With the Ionic, Fibit is launching a competitor service called Fitbit Pay, which is the result of its May 2016 acquisition of mobile payments startup Coin.
The watch will launch with partnerships from a few third-party apps, notably Starbucks, AccuWeather, Pandora Music and fitness social network Strava. It has 2.5 gigabytes of storage, which can be used for offline music listening, either by adding music users have previously purchased (roughy 300 songs), or through Pandora Premium via downloadable playlists.
Fitbit is launching a developer’s kit so that additional apps can be built specifically for the watch that leverage its GPS, heart and motion sensors.
When the watch launches worldwide in October, it will retail for $299.95. Fitbit is also launching a set of Bluetooth headphones called Fitbit Flyer, which compete with Apple AirPods, that will retail for $129.95.