Amazon's new Fitbit competitor has a color screen and video workouts, too

Speaker 1: Amazon's got a whole new fitness band and an upgraded fitness service. What is Amazon halo view? I'll explain. Speaker 1: So last year Amazon entered the fitness market with the halo band. This didn't have a display, but this fitness tracker contracts sleep. It could track activities. It had heart rate. It could even do some really weird things like with an always on microphone. It tracked your emotional tone and the connected [00:00:30] app could do body analysis by scanning your body for fat. Now, a year later, Amazon is kind of dialing back. Some of those weird features with the halo view, halo view is a color screen fitness band. That looks pretty much like other fitness trackers that you've seen out there. Um, you look at Fitbits, recent trackers, including the looks and the charge five. There are a lot of other color screen fitness bands out there. You can look for them on Amazon for instance. Well, the halo view is going very competitively priced. [00:01:00] It's $80 and it comes the year of Amazon's halo subscription service that's right subscription Amazon's halo band leans on a subscription service to make the most of its features, which is an ongoing trend in fitness trackers. Speaker 1: For instance, Fitbit as a $10 a month premium service, that's not necessary, but really you should get it to advantage of some extra coaching and long term stat tracking, similar things going on with Amazon's halo subscription service, [00:01:30] which has a lot of different things like meditation, body analysis, uh, longer term sleep analysis. And there are a couple of new things that are being added at the end of this year. One, one of them is fitness videos now much like Apple's fitness plus, which is a video service that provides videos that you can work out to that pair with your apple watch and show stats on screen. A similar thing is coming for Amazon's halo bands that will have hundreds of [00:02:00] videos that you can work out to, and also see your heart Aiden stats on your screen, whether it's phone or TV or tablet, but that feature is not coming until the end of this year. Speaker 1: And the onscreen readout stuff may not be coming until early 20, 22. Sometime the second part that's being added is nutrition tracking, not just nutrition tracking, but I a nutrition planning. There's gonna be hundreds of recipes through different, uh, partners, such as weight Watchers and [00:02:30] yes, whole foods that will be pulling together. Also the ingredients list, depending on your requested diet and helping you compile a meal plan, which could then be synced with Alexa and your Alexa devices and taken with you while you shop. So it does seem like a way for Amazon to kind of connect its various, uh, services, including whole foods into your healthy lifestyle. Those two things are not gonna cost anything extra. They're gonna be included in Halo's subscription plan, which is $4 [00:03:00] a month, but you get a year of that subscription plan when you buy the halo view, which is $80. Speaker 1: So overall that's a pretty competitively priced package. So let's talk about what the halo view has. It has that color ed touch display, which looks bright and you can look at it, you can full up through it and you can check out things like your fitness stats, your calories, your steps, uh, the time it really looks very much like a Fitbit. And it also has a couple of extra app features [00:03:30] like, uh, starting a timer or stopwatch. It's not very much of a smart watch. It seems, although it we'll get text notifications and the halo view is water resistant to 50 meters for swimming. It has a seven day battery life and apparently 90 minutes of charge to get it up to full capacity, um, when you need to recharge it with it's included adapter. So all of that sounds a lot like other week long fitness trackers, uh, pretty competitive. Speaker 1: [00:04:00] The onboard features also include the optical heart rate monitor, which will also allow sleep tracking and blood oxygen. It also has skin temperature, which is something that we've seen on a couple of other fitness tractors out there, the ING and Fitbit sense, and a couple of other Fitbits have the ability to look at relative change in temperature from night to night. So not taking like your temperature with a thermometer, but seeing if there are any fluctuations and for the Amazon halo band, [00:04:30] much like other devices that use that type of temperature, it's used as a way to, uh, analyze how well you slept. And if anything changed, it could unlock some others things in the future. So it's a pretty fully featured fitness tracker. Although keep in mind that the way that Amazon tracks overall fitness is a little bit different than other bands. Halo looks at 150 weekly minutes of activity versus daily goals as the metric, which, [00:05:00] uh, Amazon we'll say is a better way of looking at your weekly activity. Speaker 1: That's one perspective because certainly other fitness bands out there take a different approach and you can still see steps in calorie burn over the course of a day and there's nightly sleep analysis, but it's that weekly goal. That seems to be a big part of what halo is going after. As long as you know that the other things are still there too. There are these peripheral features that are within the halo app, that emotional tone analysis [00:05:30] that listens to how you talk and suggests better tone for how you live your life, which is very weird. Uh, that feature is now available in the phone app. If you wanna use your phone microphone to try that for a while, it's no longer, uh, on the halo band itself for halo view, there isn't always on microphone. You can toggle it on and off, but it's, it's always on with the emotional analysis on the original halo band. Speaker 1: I found that future really strange. I'm fine that it's gone. [00:06:00] Other than that, the halo view looks like a much more fully featured tracker and the ability to start workouts right on the band itself. And also check to see how you're doing. That's how I use a fitness tracker. Anyhow, the halo view has a really big package here. You know, coaching, there are workouts, there's nutrition, there's body analysis, uh, it's all in there. And the question is, are you okay with Amazon as you're fitness and health ecosystem provider? You know, [00:06:30] there are all these different data bubbles all over the place. You've got Fitbit, you've got Google fit, which are kind of maybe gonna come together are you've got apple health, you've got Samsung health, you've got Garin, Amazon promises, privacy with the way that this data is handled. And for things like body analysis and voice analysis that is meant to be contained on your phone itself and not shared up to the cloud. Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know, long term how this stuff is all going to play out. Uh, stuff is definitely very Alexa connected and [00:07:00] you know, they're not as proven as other people in the landscape, but it looks like it's going to be a very competitive price package for a fitness tracker. The Amazon halo view does not come out until the end of the year. We don't know exactly when, but probably around Thanksgiving holiday shopping season along owes new additions to the subscription, service, nutrition, and fitness. I'm curious to check it out and you might be too check below for some other information on how [00:07:30] to buy and where to buy. And if you have any other questions or comments, please leave them for me below I'm Scott Stein. Thanks for watching.