CES 2016 – Fitbit Blaze Is A Fitness-Focused Smartwatch

Fitbit has revealed a stylish new smartwatch as it looks to pull customers away from the Apple Watch with a purely fitness-focused device.

The Fitbit Blaze packs in a colour touchscreen, the ability to personalise workouts, and notifications for calls, texts and calendar appointments when paired with a smartphone, however there is no GPS included.

Available in three colour schemes and a range of personalisable straps that make it ideal for work and home use too, the Fitbit Blaze will cost £159, with pre-orders open now.

Blazing

Featuring a hexagonal display which helps to give it a slightly widescreen feel, the Blaze contains a wide range of sensors to gather data.

These include a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, an optical heart rate monitor (that takes a reading every few seconds), and altimeter, all of which can track daily steps, sleep, calories burned, and 15 different types of exercise.

Battery life is an encouraging five days, and the device is able to store information for up to a month without syncing, automatically detecting a range of different sports such as running or cycling based on a user’s activity pattern.

As for sleep tracking, the Fitbit Blaze is able to know when the user is sleeping, based on monitoring your movements and heart-rate tracking, so will automatically switch into sleep mode at night.

Fitbit is currently the world’s second-largest smartwatch maker behind Apple, thanks largely to its Surge line of devices. According to data from market research firm NPD, the company currently makes up 88 percent of the health and fitness wearable market, thanks to sales of more than 30 million devices worldwide to date.

Recent estimates from analyst firm IDC estimates that smartwatches will make up nearly a third (34.3 million) of the wearables shipped in 2016, up from the 21.3 million units expected to ship in 2015.

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