Review: Under Armour HealthBox

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Under Armour is a leading maker of performance sports clothing and shoes but has also a stake in various health tracking and fitness apps having purchased MapMyFitness, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal and the company has brought all the key features of those apps into the UA Record app which is designed to connect to the Under Armour HealthBox system.

The UA HealthBox system is the most comprehensive and user-focused set of tools that merges an app, fitness tracking technology and connected devices with big data and cloud computing. It is composed of hardware built by HTC including the UA Band, the UA Scale and the UA Heart Rate monitor.

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Review: Moto 360 (2015)

Text and photos Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Surprisingly light for its size, the Moto 360 feels like a quality product. I like the semicircular display as this seems to work well with many third-party watchfaces. One advantage of Android Wear is that anyone can make a watchface for the devices that support it and changing these watchfaces is super easy.

I’ve held off reviewing Motorola’s latest Moto 360 for a number of months because I’ve been waiting for Android Wear to offer something new worth covering, but seeing as how development of Google’s smartwatch OS seems to have been stunted, I will proceed to give my thought and impressions on the hardware aspect of the equation.

The Moto 360 version 2, Is a refinement of Motorola’s relatively successful wearable. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the 2014 and 2015 variants, even the charging docks look identical, _­but they are not.

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CES 2016: Fitbit looks to pick a fight with smartwatches with new Blaze wearable

Fitbit has all but dominated the wearable health tracking game and has largely stayed away from going full smartwatch with devices that could co-exist with smartwatches or even analog timepieces. The new Fitbit Blaze revealed at CES 2016 is a departure from the companys original ethos. This looks like a smartwatch and could quickly be mistaken for a Samsung Gear device.

Priced at CAD $249.00, the Fitbit Blaze has a large colour touchscreen, a pulse monitor, all day activity and sleep tracking, music control capabilities, plus basic call, text and calendar alerts. Fitbit Blaze also has a fashion angle with various materials and coloured straps. With companion apps available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, Fitbit Blaze is as cross platform as they come, it is supposedly compatible with over 200 devices.

Source: Fitbit

TomTom launches Spark fitness wearable with music, GPS and 24/7 tracking

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Toronto - TomTom launched its 4th generation fitness wearable in North America today with an event in downtown Toronto. The TomTom Spark is the latest sports and fitness tracker since TomTom collaborated with Nike + Sportwatch GPS years ago before the deluge of fitness trackers hit the market.

While it can be paired with a smartphone or a PC for tracking stats, the strength of the TomTom Spark is that it can run fully independent of wired and cumbersome smartphones. Runners, for example, can use the Spark to measure their runs via GPS, track their heart rate with the built-in heart rate monitor and play up to 500 songs streamed to a Bluetooth headset.

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