Thursday, October 30, 2014

Microsoft Health app goes live ahead of Microsoft Band [UPDATE]

Everyone's getting into fitness these days, which is a good thing of course, from actual fitness companies to tech giants like Google and Apple. Microsoft, who is increasing its efforts at remaining relevant, naturally doesn't want to be left behind. It has been known, or rather leaked, that Microsoft is working on its own fitness-centric wearable, and part of that plan has already gone out today in the form of the Microsoft Health app.

As a fitness app, Microsoft Health might not be too impressive. You've got your usual assortment of activity and health tracking, including steps, calories burned, quality of sleep, and heart rate. There are also extra features like Guided Workouts, e-mail previews, and calendar alerts. Basically your essential functionality to monitor your moving, and sleeping, activities and progress.

Perhaps more interesting is what the app almost doesn't mention: The Microsoft Band. This is the expected Microsoft-branded fitness wearable. Although there is no actual device yet at the time of this writing, this is confirmation that there will be one soon. From the feature set given above, one can deduce that the Band will also have a heart rate monitor. The app is cross platform, available also on iOS and Windows Phone, so you can expect the band to work with almost any device in the market. For Android smartphones, they should be running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean or higher. And it is courtesy of the iOS version that we are able to take a glance at what the Microsoft Band might look like.

It's not exactly impressive but is quite in line with almost every other smartband in the market today. The app notes that users will be able to personalize it, probably with color schemes or wallpapers. Aside from the time, there is a possibility that the display will also show notifications from paired smartphones. It will be interesting to see what other features Microsoft has for the wearable device and, more importantly, if it will be able to make a dent in a quickly saturating market.