Nike has come out with the first big update to its activity tracker that it originally unveiled earlier last year, the Nike FuelBand SE. On Tuesday the company unveiled the second generation of its popular fitness product and showed off some of its new features that are meant to improve fitness tracking and encourage exercise.
"Everything you know and love remains the same," said Stefan Olander, Nike's VP of digital sport, at a launch event in New York. "But thousands of activity hours went into refining [it], to make it smarter... to make sure you do get credit for deliberate movement and it filters out the activity that shouldn't [get credit]."
According to Gigaom, the new device, which will retail for $149 is better able to separate actual exercise from general movement. This means that people will have a much more difficult time trying to "trick" the device into registering more "Fuel," the company's measurement for user's activity.
The new device is also more water and dust resistant and provides the person wearing it with hourly reminders to get them moving more and lets them tag their sessions so they can better track their activity in real time.
The FuelBand SE offers a bit of fun for those wearing it. When paired with the Nike+ app, users can group multiple people together to compete or share accomplishments with friends or others who might be training for a similar event.
The device, which comes in a variety of bold and exciting colors, comes during a time when wearable technology is a hot ticket item with Apple's iWatch expected to come out in the near future and Samsung having recently released its smartphone accessory the Galaxy Gear Smartwatch. However, these devices are meant to augment a smartphone and weren't designed solely for fitness tracking like Nike's FuelBand SE.
