Developer David Smith has expanded his lineup of ++ apps for the iPhone and iPad (Pedometer++ and Sleep++) with the addition of Activity++, an iPhone app designed to help you make the most from your Apple Watch fitness data.
But wait, why on Earth would you need another app when the built-in Activity app's rings provide an at-a-glance overview of your Move, Exercise and Stand goals?
Wearable maker Fitbit on Wednesday announced a brand new activity tracker with fashionable design that gives you the ability to swap bands.
Featuring five days of usage on a single charge and a selection of bands, including leather ones and a stainless steel bracelet, Fitbit hopes to appeal to the burgeoning market of stylish tech gadgets that are worn on one's body.
The Alta has the usual assortment of movement-tracking sensors and includes a slim touchscreen OLED display that shows basic stats and notifications relayed from a smartphone.
Wearable devices maker Misfit at CES 2016 announced new products that build on its expertise in health and fitness tracking. A new activity tracker from the company, called the Ray, tracks your movement and sleep and resembles a bracelet with a cylindrical aluminum body.
Another new product from Misfit, a first for the company: the Specter in-ear wireless headphones with dual driver technology and a built-in accelerometer sensor for tracking your activity and sleep when worn.
Wearable company Fitbit at CES 2016 in Las Vegas announced a brand new lineup of fitness-focused smartwatches, marketed under the Blaze moniker. Featuring a sleek design and easily interchangeable accessories, the Blaze lineup offers an enhanced fitness and workout experience with advanced coaching and other features.
All devices are outfitted with a color touchscreen, have a built-in heart rate tracker and SmartTrack exercise recognition and support interchangeable bands and frames.
Pedometer++ is one of the best step-counting apps in the App Store, with its developer David Smith managing to keep it alive with meaningful updates. In fact, Apple's 2013 introduction of a dedicated motion coprocessor in iPhones that tracks movement in a power-friendly manner has helped breathe new life into Pedometer++.
Ever since the watch's April 2015 debut I've been wondering how the app would fit into my fitness routine.
My primary concern at the time was whether or not a dedicated step-counting app made sense given the Apple Watch's robust fitness and motion tracking capabilities.
But as it turns out, a bright future lies ahead of Pedometer++ and today's feature-packed update proves my point. The new version fully embraces the Apple Watch with a comprehensive, fluid and native watchOS 2 app, complications, more accurate data sync than Apple's Health app and more.
Runkeeper has refreshed its iPhone application with a fully native watchOS 2 app so you can record your runs and heart rates directly on your Apple Watch, without needing to bring your iPhone with you. If you typically go running with an iPhone strapped to your arm, you'll appreciate phone-free jogging with the new Runkeeper.
In other changes, new post-activity music analytics will create a full rundown of your playlist and your pace for each song after you've finished your run.
Misfit, the maker of sleek wearable devices, yesterday unveiled a second-generation Shine activity and fitness tracker and sleep monitor.
The Shine 2, as it's called, improves upon the original Misfit, which debuted more than two years ago, with more accurate fitness and sleep tracking capabilities.
The accessory sports enhanced touch responsiveness with capacitive sensing technology, longer Bluetooth range, inactivity alerts, multicolor LEDs built into the face of the device and much more.
Among the small things Apple's added to watchOS 2 is a new switch allowing you to mute Activity reminders for the rest of your day.
To be clear, hourly alerts to stand up and move a little, as well as other coaching reminders on your Apple Watch, can help a great deal when it comes to meeting your personal fitness goals.
But not everyone is a fitness buff.
If you yourself aren't exactly an active person, you might find Activity alerts a bit distracting, if not downright annoying. But worry not, you can suspend coaching alerts for the rest of your day with just a few taps. Let me show you how.
Now that the days are getting shorter, your morning run (or evening jog) might take place while the streetlights are still on. You could carry a flashlight, or wear a headlamp, or you could let your iPhone keep you safe.
The SuperCase armband holds your iPhone 6s securely on you arm while providing a bit of nighttime protection in the form of a reflective strip to make drivers aware of your position.
Moving over your existing Health and Activity data from your old iPhone to a new one can be a tricky business unless you know exactly what you're doing. The problem stems from the fact that Health and Activity data is not stored in regular iTunes backups, which are unencrypted by default, unless you remember to turn on encryption manually. It's a security precaution to prevent malicious users with access to your computer to mine your sensitive medical data from unencrypted iTunes backups.
The approach also poses a major challenge to folks who log their fitness and health data in Apple's Health and Activity apps. Surely you don't want to start from scratch and lose all the Health and Activity data that you'e amassed in the past year or so.
As it turns out, there is a way—actually, two ways—to preserve your complete Health and Activity data logs when you switch to a new iPhone.
Folks who track their workouts with the Apple Watch or a third-party fitness accessory tend to analyze their logged history in the iPhone's Activity app in order to gain a valuable insight into when they have—and more importantly, have not—met their personal goals.
Realizing you're consistently failing to hit your set workout goal on weekends, for example, is the first step toward changing your routine, working out more and leading a healthier life overall.
Though largely unchanged from its iOS 8 counterpart, Activity on iOS 9 has gained a useful, somewhat hidden toggle for switching between displaying Move, Exercise and Stand rings and highlighting the days you completed dedicated workouts.
Runtastic on Friday announced the Moment, an analog watch with fitness tracking features. The maker of popular mobile fitness apps, which was recently acquired by Adidas, says the device has the potential to disrupt the wearables market because of its unique blend of traditional timekeeping and technology.
Like most fitness-focused wearables, the Moment is capable of tracking steps, distance, active minutes, calories burned, sleep cycles and goals. But unlike other trackers, it's waterproof up to 300 feet, so it can be used to track swimming, and it runs on a standard watch battery, so it doesn't need to be recharged.