Fitbit announces new style-focused Luxe smartband - Ars Technica

Enlarge / Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Luxe.

Fitbit

Fitbit has just announced its first fashion-focused, bangle-style tracker—the Fitbit Luxe. True to its luxurious name, the stainless-steel Luxe will come in a $200 special edition, styled with gorjana jewelry as its band (coming in June) but the $150 silicon band version is available for pre-order now.

Both will come with six months of the Fitbit Premium membership (usually $10 a month or $80 per year), which affords users some guided fitness programs, over 200 workout videos, deeper sleep analysis, about 60 nutrition articles and recipes, and other resources to learn about and improve health and wellness. Of course, getting people healthier has always been the name of the game for Fitbit, so with the Luxe, the company is attempting to strike a better balance between style, price, and casual activity tracking.

The Fitbit Luxe is the company's jewelry-inspired fitness tracker.
The special editions comes with a gorjana jewelry bracelet instead of a silicone band.
You can also get a metal mesh band.
Or a snaking, double-wrapped leather band.
The Luxe can track over 20 specific workouts.
It can also guide you through meditations and breathing exercises.
And of course sleep tracking.
As well as menstrual cycle tracking in the Fitbit app.
The Luxe also can receive notifications from your smartphone.

Sporting an OLED color touchscreen, the Luxe is the company’s first fitness band, not smartwatch, to add this bit of flair and functionality. You can swipe through your latest activity metrics, notifications from your phone (you can receive texts, calls, emails, etc. but cannot reply to them on the band), stress stats, menstrual cycle information, or do guided breath work and start tracking a workout.

The Luxe tracks sleep, offers more than 20 different exercises (some automatically), and boasts 5ATM waterproof resistance for use during swims. If you want GPS tracking, you’ll need to bring your phone along, though, as the Luxe doesn’t have GPS built in. Otherwise, the heart rate monitor, blood oxygen sensor (functionality “coming soon”), and accelerometer will do the rest for your fitness-tracking needs. Skin temperature sensors also help measure your stress levels, along with data from your breathing rate and heart rate variability.

All of this is used to provide context for your fitness, whether it be through measuring your activity minutes for the week, seeing if you're hitting recommended goals, or letting you know your stress levels and offering you guided meditations from Deepak Chopra, among others, to impact it. The Luxe introduces deeper insights into this with seven-day trends that were previously reserved for Fitbit Premium members, and subscribers will still get longer 30-day trend reports. Logging other health metrics manually, like blood glucose, in the Fitbit app is an option, and such metrics will then be included in your reports.

Like almost every Fitbit, the Luxe is rated for multi-day battery life, up to five days. This should help facilitate its endeavor to be worn casually and not thought about daily. With its light fitness character (perhaps more accurately described as “wellness”-focused), the Luxe is aimed at taking care of the basics and doing so stylishly. It’s not the tracker you’ll want to train with for a half-marathon, but its standard-level activity tracking paired with Fitbit’s well-organized app and wellness insights therein should be enough to satisfy those looking for a more “set it and forget it” (and then check in on and learn from it from time to time) approach to wellness tracking.

If that’s right up your alley, then all you have to do is forget that it looks like a medical bracelet (a very fancy one, especially with optional gorjana metal and leather bracelet-styled bands) and place a preorder on Fitbit’s website. Orders start shipping “this spring” for the Luxe and in June for the Luxe Special Edition.

Let's block ads! (Why?)