BARCENA—Simply tracking steps estimating calories burned isn’t enough to wow in the wearables space anymore. Sony teased the SmartB at CES, but fleshed out the fitness tracker at the company’s Monday press conference at Mobile rld Congress. It looks acts like a Fitbit Flex, with a rubber wrist strap that contains a little dongle Sony calls the Core. But the difference is in the app, called felog.
felog is like the activity-tracking app Moves, only turned up to 11. Moves tracks your daily treks, it knows when you’re in the car, walking, running, or biking, providing a map a timeline of your movements. felog does that too, while also mixing in fitness data from the SmartB, as well as an automatically generated record of pretty much everything you do with your phone—the games you play, your social media activity, the books you read, the music you rock out to, so on.
Image: SonyThe SmartB looks pretty generic, but the felog app for Android has style.
l this data is presented on tiles at the bottom of the app’s beautiful interface, you can see them update as the day goes on. But the really neat part is the richly illustrated timeline along the top. Scrub through a previous day with your finger, you can relive everything that happened—where you went, how you got there, what you listened to, every photo you took, how many hours you spent playing Cy Crush. It’s a neat effect—as long as you aren’t horrified to learn how much time you really spend at your desk or just how much Cy you did or did not Crush.
You don’t actually need Sony’s SmartB to use the felog app. But the waterproof, wearable SmartB does provide more accurate fitness data than the phone’s sensors can. It also has a button on the side to quickly add a “bookmark” to your day—any moment you want felog to remember. It could be a first kiss or your dog learning a new trick— whatever happens that your phone doesn’t already know about.
Image: Sony also showed a concept image for a wearable camera to send zillions of images to the felog app.
The SmartB can also act as a remote for the phone’s music player, but since it doesn’t have a screen, you just press the button tap the b. ke the Fitbit Flex, the SmartB can vibrate to wake you up at the least-jarring part of your sleep cycle, it can also vibrate to notify you of new emails, calls, tweets, likes, texts. wish you could customize those vibrations to distinguish between texts emails, for example, but that’s not supported right now.
do have to give Sony props for not locking SmartB felog into its Xperia line of phones. felog simply requires Android 4.4 support for Bluetooth . Sony is also working with design partners to develop other ways of wearing the SmartB, including more fashionable bracelets pendants. At launch, the rubber wrist strap will come only in basic black, with more colors coming later, including a green yellow version to celebrate the 2014 FIFA rld Cup.
Image: unching in basic black, the SmartB will get colored wristbs later on, you can switch the Core unit between them.
Our hs-on time revealed a lot of promise—the felog app is beautifully designed—but the big question we’ll have to test is how hard all this constant logging will affect your phone’s battery life. Moves, for example, can really tax the battery life of both Android iOS devices. Since felog is designed to track your activities 24/7, it would be a shame to have to toggle it off every time you’re in danger of running out of juice.
Sony plans to launch the SmartB felog app worldwide this h, but prices exact availability won’t be announced until closer to launch.
