Oliver Haslam·

Amazon Announces Halo: A Fitness Band And App Combo That Scans Your Body, Listens To Your Voice, And More

Everyone wants to have some sort of fitness band present right now and while the Apple Watch is ahead of the game in many ways, it isn’t cheap. Amazon has a different approach with the new Halo, a fitness band and service that claims to be able to keep track of your important health data. Including a 3D scan of your body.

Oh, and it’ll listen to the emotion in your voice, too.

The band itself will cost $99.99 and if you want to enjoy the full suite of features you’ll also need the $3.99 per month subscription as well. And no, that isn’t part of your Prime subscription, unfortunately.

You can’t buy it yet, either. Right now it’s available by invitation only and will cost $65 with six months of the service thrown in.

The band itself is an interesting idea. There is no screen, with the theory being that this is just there to measure everything. You interact with it via your phone instead. You’ll still need to wear it around your wrist, like a watch.

There’s no GPS or WiFi here, so it really is all down to your phone. Bluetooth is the order of the day here. and Amazon says that the band itself can be used when swimming without too much trouble. Battery life is impressive – because there’s no screen, of course – at around a week between charges.

The most interesting aspect of Halo is the 3D scanning thing. It’ll use your phone to create a 3D image of your body and then work out what percentage of it is fat. A microphone built into the band itself will also keep tabs of your emotion via the tone of your voice, too. Amazon says it won’t be listening all the time and you can mute the microphone if you want some privacy. Nothing is ever uploaded to Amazon’s servers, the company points out.

Halo will track sleep and activity. as you’d expect, but we’ll have to see how that pans out when people actually get to use it.

On the face of it the Halo band seems like an interesting departure from the bands we’re used to. We’re still not sure we’re sold on the lack of screen, especially given the $100 price, but we’ll reserve judgement for now. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for early user experiences.

Buy: Amazon Halo Band: $64.99 | Original price: $99.99

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