Microsoft Band

By  Jonah Comstock 02:37 pm July 30, 2019
A new patent filing suggests that Microsoft, which seemed to have definitively abandoned health wearables with the shutdown of the Microsoft Band in 2016 (and the decommissioning of its corresponding software program earlier this year) may be at least thinking about getting back in the game. The patent filing, first spotted by Neowin, is for what the writers call a "multidimensional optical...
By  Laura Lovett 11:12 am March 4, 2019
Microsoft announced that come the end of May it is shutting down its Health Dashboard and offering refunds to Microsoft Band users. This news comes two and a half years after the tech giant discontinued its fitness tracker offering.  Until the end of May, users will be able to transfer their data using a Microsoft export tool; after that, all the data will be deleted. Existing Bands will still...
By  Heather Mack 05:29 pm May 25, 2017
The proliferation and ever-increasing sophistication of wearable activity trackers makes clear that we have come a long way from analog pedometers and clunky heart rate monitors, but new research suggests those metrics may be the only ones modern wearables can accurately track. Stanford researchers took a hard look at seven different consumer wearables with a group of 60 volunteers, who wore the...
By  Jonah Comstock 03:19 pm October 4, 2016
Dig another grave in the fitness tracker cemetery, next to the Bodymedia Core, the Nike FuelBand, and the Basis Band, because it looks like the Microsoft Band is dead. ZDnet, which broke the news last month that Microsoft had disbanded the Band team and had no plans for a Band 3, reported yesterday that the company has removed the device from its online store, taken down the Band SDK, and has no...
By  Aditi Pai 08:10 am July 13, 2015
Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue three of its MSN apps: MSN Health & Fitness, MSN Food and Drink, and MSN Travel, which are available on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. The shutterings will not affect Microsoft Health, a separate app that connects to the Microsoft Band. "We regularly evaluate our business to ensure we’re focused on the areas where our users find the most...
By  Aditi Pai 09:17 am March 25, 2015
Microsoft has updated the Xbox One console's fitness app, called Xbox Fitness, to sync with Microsoft Health, the cloud-based health integration platform that Microsoft launched with the Microsoft Band. Xbox Fitness launched with Xbox's newest console, Xbox One, in November 2013. By early January 2014, the company reported that nearly 1.5 million people used the fitness app, which offers users ...
By  Aditi Pai 03:56 am February 24, 2015
Microsoft has updated its wristworn fitness tracker, called Microsoft Band with new functionality to track cycling and an SDK for Windows and Android phones. The company says iOS integration is coming soon. Microsoft also launched an online dashboard to track health that it first unveiled in October 2014 when the company launched the Microsoft Band. The wristworn wearable, a small, plastic, black...
By  Jonah Comstock 09:56 am January 21, 2015
Microsoft is increasingly moving into the world of wearables, both through conceptual moonshots like the smart scarf recently presented by Microsoft Research and through a hefty update, released last week, to the fitness tracking functionality of the Microsoft Band smartwatch. According to MIT Technology Review, the scarf was the brainchild of University of Maryland graduate student Michelle...
By  Aditi Pai 05:45 am October 30, 2014
Microsoft has officially launched a fitness-focused smart watch, called Microsoft Band as well as a new health tracking platform, called Microsoft Health. This announcement came just a week after another report leaked about the device. The product has been in development since 2010 when Microsoft launched the Kinect motion sensor for Xbox, Microsoft explains in a feature post. Microsoft Band, a...