Under Armour and HTC team up on connected fitness
LAS VEGAS — Under Armour chief digital officer Robin Thurston says we know more about our cars than our bodies. To change that, the company best known for its athletic apparel and footwear is running hard into the connected fitness arena.
“Facebook is synonymous with social. LinkedIn is synonymous with business. We really believe that we can be that destination for all things health and fitness,” Thurston says.
During the Consumer Electronics Show, Under Armour and partner HTC announced UA HealthBox, a handsomely packaged $400 red box that includes a Wi-Fi scale (for measuring weight and body fat), heart rate chest strap and removable sensor, and a shower-proof dimpled fitness band to track your workouts and sleep.
The information collected by these devices is meant to be stored on a freshly designed UA Record app on your Android phone or iPhone.
Under Armour and HTC are accepting preorders for HealthBox now at HTC.com and UA.com; the product starts shipping in the U.S. on Jan. 22.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether consumers, even avid workout warriors, will fully buy into the Under Armour/HTC connected fitness ecosystem, especially given the substantial investment. Thus, the companies are smartly selling the scale, band and heart rate strap individually.
The new fitness band lacks the GPS location tracking feature that was in HTC Grip band that it now replaces. That Grip band was also the result of a collaboration between Under Armour and HTC.
Meanwhile, Under Armour on its own unveiled new smart footwear called UA SpeedForm Gemini 2 Record Equipped, which tracks time and date, duration, distance and splits, without a runner having to carry other devices. The shoes will cost $150 a pair when they go on sale at specialty stores and UA.com on Feb. 29.
Under Armour hooked up with yet another partner, Harman, on JBL wireless headphones that are designed to never fall out of a runner’s ear’s. The headphones are expected out in late spring, including a $250 version that can also measure your heart rate wirelessly.
It was one year ago at CES that Under Armour launched the original UA Record app. At the time, company founder and CEO Kevin Plank told me that it was his intention to play nice with everybody. "Everyone is operating in a silo," he said. “No one has done a great job of aggregation. We operate in an open platform."
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Indeed, despite pushing its own new connected products, the UA Record app remains open and compatible with a gaggle of popular wireless devices and wearables.
The new app design is built around a circular dashboard with four main quadrants: as a repository for sleep, fitness, activity and nutritional information. On a scale of 1 to 10, you can also report to the app how you feel each day. And you can also build a community and challenge friends in UA Record to various competitions, such as seeing who will burn the most calories, who will go the longest distances and so on.
Thurston himself is an ex-professional cyclist who co-founded MapMyFitness, which Under Armour subsequently acquired and which still is available as a stand-alone app. He says Under Armour now boasts the world’s largest digital health and fitness connected audience, with 157 million unique users on its platform.
“Our intention is that Record will be the one app that everyone has on their phone,” Thurston says. For now Record is free, though Thurston indicated that there could be a subscription offering in the future, built perhaps around training and coaching.
Under Armour also hinted at employing machine learning tools to mine data and to provide useful insights back to users, maybe helping some lose weight.
Thurston believes Under Armour is nowhere near the finish line when it comes to connected health. “We truly believe that every product that we make is going to be connected."
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter.
