For the fitness band user and Android owner there are a few options not available to you as some products are only available for Apple’s iOS app platform. But in this emerging market but one of the stalwarts, Jawbone, has just made the transition to supporting Android in its most recent release.
A few months after Jawbone released an Apple version it has released the UP 3.0 app that brings Android support to the UP24 fitness tracking band, opening up a much bigger market.
The new app enables users to track a wide variety of physical activities up to and including sleep, food, and drink nutritional data. It is designed to enable a user to both set goals and milestones and to track progress towards achieving them. Users can log workouts, team with friends or rivals to establish competitions.
It has an array of alerts that a user can customize from ones that set nap time and lengths to ones that alert you to any time that you have been inactive too long and this can be set for different levels at different times of day. The app supports a wide number of languages including English, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
The fitness band space is increasingly competitive as sports watches seemed to pioneer this space but a number of the lightweight and flexible bands have started to emerge as a viable and easier to wear alternative.
There are also a number of fitness bands such as the Nike + Fuelband, the Fitbit Flex that are strong players in this space and larger, more dedicated watch like devices that originally started out as single sport appliances have pioneered this field but it seems likely that the emergence of Android and probably other OS wearable devices from Google Glass to a possible Apple iOS-based watch will start to compete here as well going forward.
