While there is a plethora of fitness and activity trackers available, like the Fitbit and the FuelBand and the Striiv, each and every one of those has a serious problem: They're just not very stylish.
Misfit Wearables' new Shine activity tracker wants to save you from both a sedentary lifestyle and fashion faux pas. The Shine is a small, round metal device with a minimalist, jewelry-like design. It feels much like a smooth pebble, but it's useful for more than just skipping stones—the Shine acts as an activity monitor, sleep tracker, and cool, futuristic watch all in one. It also comes with a variety of accessories ranging from a versatile magnetic clasp to an alluring necklace, so you'll never have to worry about it clashing with your outfit.
Unfortunately, while it delivers on the fashion front, its functionality leaves much to be desired: The syncing method is inconvenient, it doesn't always register the taps that are the only way you interact with it, and its accuracy is questionable. While these things could in theory be fixed with firmware updates, what's here today could be frustrating for people who want their activity trackers to do more than look good.
The Shine has design first in mind.
The hardware
The Shine is definitely the most attractive activity monitor I've ever seen. It looks more like a piece of jewelry (albeit, a strange, avant-garde piece of jewelry) than a wearable tech device. And that's kind of the point—Misfit boasts that it's "the world's most elegant physical activity monitor." That's not wrong, but it's not like the Shine has a lot of competition in the "elegance" category, either.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon