With its 1.5 release, Nike had shown its unwillingness to go all the way, further evidenced by the continued failure to acknowledge that half of mobile users actually existed.īy the time a FuelBand app for Android arrived in July 2014 (two and a half years late), the writing was already on the wall. By time the SE rolled around, there were more options out there from the likes of Fitbit, Jawbone and Misfit, geared towards fitness buffs as well as casual users. However, while Nike was treading water, the competition was powering forward. It wasn't fully waterproofed, thus remaining useless to swimmers, but it did have additional social features. The follow up Nike FuelBand SE, released in late 2013, added Bluetooth 4.0 for real-time syncing with the iPhone app, better battery life and an attractive colour line up, but it wasn't the leap it needed to be. It wasn't perfect, but the FuelBand seemed primed for greatness, with just a little tinkering plus the addition of some new features and the then-missing support for Android. Need to complete your goal a few minutes before bed? Just take the dog for a walk or do a few sit-ups. Heck, even if you were rolling out pastry, or curling your bicep to facilitate the secure transportation of beer into your mouth, you were racking up the Nike Fuel.Ĭoloured LED lights represented progress towards simple, incentive-based targets without the need to mess with or open up your iPhone app. While the original Jawbone UP was quietly snaring tech enthusiasts embracing a new era of the quantified self, Nike was putting a globally recognisable face on the movement. You could sit at your desk waving your hand to ramp up your score and that built-in micro USB charging port felt like the genius moment from Nike until it stopped working and you had to get replacement after replacement. It felt personal, refreshing… revolutionary. While every device reports back on your activity, this was the first time we'd experienced that insight. It might have launched after the first ever Fitbit, but this was the fitness tracker that got people comparing Fuel Points, even though no one ever really knew what Nike's metric meant or how it was calculated.
Despite leaving this mortal coil so soon (two versions, three years) the FuelBand fitness tracker was undoubtedly a pioneer.Īnd while the wristband won't be remembered as a sales juggernaut, its importance as a transformative product can't be understated.Įssential reading: How does a fitness tracker work? It's four years since the first Nike+ FuelBand went on sale in the US.
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