Amazon is continuing to expand its hardware offerings, this time with Halo. Which is a new fitness tracker from the e-commerce giant.
Now, Amazon is heading straight for Apple and Google (which owns Fitbit too). As the Apple Watch and Fitbit has been very popular in the fitness tracking space, but Amazon is aiming to take a chunk of their market share and thus profit.
This isn’t your typical fitness band
To start things off, this isn’t something you pay for once and it’s yours forever. Instead, Amazon is embracing a subscription model with the Halo.
For early access users, which starts today, you can get it for $64.99. That includes the price of Halo and six months of service. It will go up to $99 at some point. And it’ll cost you $3.99 per month to keep the service going.
There are also some additional bands that can be purchased. So the fabric brands will be $19.99 and sports bands will be $15.99. These prices are also going to go up once the early access period has ended.
The app is also pretty different from Fitbit, and Apple Watch. It does the usual stuff like tracking steps and sleep. But it also does a lot of other things and even uses AI to do it.
It can measure your weight, in which it uses body fat content as the main metric. There’s also Labs, which has workouts, challenges and more to help encourage healthier habits.
But the really impressive feature is Tone. And yes, its using your voice for this. As you may or may not know, your voice reveals a lot about you. And by listening to your voice and using machine learning to analyze how you sound, Halo is going to be able to see how stressed you sound.
The microphones in the Halo band will listen in the background, sampling speech samples every 10 minutes or so. You can also turn these off at anytime, but long-pressing the button on the band.
There is also Live Mode. This can analyze your tone in real-time, and give you feedback on how you’re sounding. Which can be useful if you are preparing to give a speech.
This data is not sent to the cloud, something Amazon is really stressing here.
It’s only available in the US… for now
As with a lot of new things that Amazon and other companies launch, Halo is going to be exclusive to the US. At least for now.
You can request early access starting today. And you can do that here.
