Fitness tracking is nothing new – but fashionable fitness tracking? Now that’s something gaining traction and worth talking about!
The Misfit Shine is a full fitness-tracking suite complete with tracker, mobile application and a bunch of accessories. The focus of the Shine is to look more subtle and hence blending into outfits that would otherwise make a fitness tracker look odd.
The Shine comes in four elegant colours: Grey, Champagne, Topaz and Black.
The Misfit Shine doesn’t need charging either. It has a user-replaceable button cell battery which is claimed to last four months. Whilst powered up (the only way to turn it off is to pull out the battery) it uses a 3-axis accelerometer to record your movements, bluetooth to connect to your smartphone and 12 LED lights to display useful information including the time!
It comes boxed with a wrist-strap, clasp, getting started guide and battery. Other accessories (socks, necklaces etc) are quite pricey and can be bought from the Misfit store.
At the time of writing the Shine is best at recording activities such as swimming (yes, it’s waterproof up to 150m), tennis, football, walking and running. It collects data of your physical activities and then syncs with the app on your smartphone to show you how much you’ve done. Though there is currently no support for other every-day activities including working out and the Gym – it seems something is under development in the pipelines to add support for additional activities.
A double-tap on the beautiful, smooth face of the Shine and you’ll be shown the time followed by a representation of how much of your target you have fulfilled.
The attention to detail on the Shine is exquisite. The face has a matte feel which is smooth to the touch and the LEDs are hidden behind the colour giving the button an equal colour and texture. Though the Shine itself is incredibly light and easy to forget about – it feels very solid and premium and I have no fears of wearing it in testing conditions.
The application is not perfect, but it’s a great start! It shows a break-down of how much of your goal you have achieved and how much you have left to go. It’s smart algorithm are supposedly able to determine what physical activity you are taking part in and even give you an indication of how many calories you have burnt. Mind you, it did tell me I had taken 256 steps and managed to burn 2288 calories which is absurd!
The Shine alongside the application can also intelligently track your sleep and report how many hours you have been sleeping. It can also be used to set an alarm and awake you only in a light phase of sleep to ensure you wake up feeling refreshed. As a heavy-sleeper this feature seemed to work well for me during my nights of testing; though not always on point.
Other features in the application include a food journal and weight monitor. These seem to be areas that Misfit will develop further and deepen the integration with the Shine so it can become an all-round fitness tracking, monitoring and improvement tool.
To conclude, the Misfit Shine seems to have a lot going the right way. It’s aimed at tracking the right things, and tracks more than most other ‘fitness’ trackers and so I would dub it the lifestyle tracker. However, many of the features seem a little inconsistent and under-developed. If Misfit have left space in the button tracker and application for future updates, I am sure with a month’s work they can bring about more consistent reports and more intelligent algorithms that can detect exactly what you’re doing.
For example, instead of intelligently selecting what physical activity you’re participating in, you should be able to have twelve presents and tap the face to select a preset activity using the LED lights as indicators. From there the Shine could begin to record patterns in activities and use this data to create a timetable of physical activity and ultimately make a better calculated guess on what activity it is measuring.
If you’re looking for a fitness tracker – get the Shine. If you’re looking for a lifestyle tracker – get the Shine. If you’re looking for swagger – get the Misfit Shine!
UPDATE: After a few full days of using the Shine 24/7 I can say that tracking is fairly accurate when it knows what activity you’re participating in. Tapping the face to show the time was a little irresponsive at first, but now that I’m used to it checking the time is like second nature. I also loved it’s accuracy and ability to track my sleeping pattern which helped me ensure I was getting the right number of hours of kip every night.
