Sean O'Reilly: So, what's up with Fitbit? Talk to me.
Dylan Lewis: Fitbit was one of the first big headlines coming out of CES this year. They
unveiled the Fitbit Blaze, which is basically an update to their line. It's a new product.
It's really kind of like an Apple Watch in its design. When you look at a Fitbit--
O'Reilly: Does it still look ... I don't want to say rubbery, but do you know what I'm talking
about?
Lewis: Oh, no, it's a departure from that design, and it looks much more like a smart
watch than a fitness tracker band.
O'Reilly: [COUGHS] Apple Watch.
Lewis: But, the company is calling it a fitness watch rather than a smart watch, and we can
get into some of the things that it can and can't do, and maybe why they're doing that,
as an explanation. But, some highlights. There's a five-day battery life on the product.
O'Reilly: What.
Lewis: Which, obviously, compares very favorably to the Apple watches.
O'Reilly: I want one of those batteries in my computer, jeez.
Lewis: I think Apple Watch has like a 24 hour life.
O'Reilly: At best.
Lewis: Yeah, about a day. It retails for $200. It's kind of on the expensive side for Fitbit,
but it still cheaper than the Apple Watch. I think there's one product in Fitbit's line
that's more expensive than that.
O'Reilly: Can I get the Blaze in gold like the Apple Watch, and pay like $10,000?
Lewis: They were saying--
O'Reilly: Are you serious?! I was joking!
Lewis: No, not that premium model, but you can accessorize the Blaze a little bit more
than the other Fitbit options, and you can put the display out and sub in other holders
for it.
O'Reilly: I was telling a joke, and here you go and ...
Lewis: That's the beauty of not overly-scripting the show, we get moments like that. But, I
think, when you look at the product, there are some major design whiffs here, and I've
seen some chatter online about it. The product does not support third party apps. And this
is something where it's very clear, they're calling it a fitness watch rather than a smart
watch, when you're using a smart watch, you expect to be able to have 3rd party apps come
in--
O'Reilly: That's, arguably, why the iPhone beat out Blackberry in the early days, because
they were so app-friendly. People love apps.
Lewis: Yeah. And you can build out the ecosystem in a much more scalable way if you allow other
people to play in your sandbox. And you can have people interact with stuff they're already
using on your platform. So, that's kind of a curious thing, a bit of a head-scratcher.
O'Reilly: Was that a conscious decision? Were they incapable of doing that? You see what
I'm saying.
Lewis: I don't know if the thought there was like, by not allowing third party apps on
there, we'll insulate ourselves, but I don't know why they would have done that. It seems
like a limiting move for the product. One of the other weird things it was, there's
a lack of GPS connectivity. So, the next step up product that Fitbit has--
O'Reilly: That's important for running, right?
Lewis: Yeah. It's something that, with the Blaze, you can sync up to the GPS tracker
on a smartphone, but it is reliant, it's a secondary device because you're relying on
the smartphone. And one of the other things, and I think this is another item that makes
it clearly a fitness watch and not a Smart watch in and of itself is, users can receive
text call notifications, but they cannot respond to them on the watch itself.
O'Reilly: Well, I mean, you could get a health alert or something.
Lewis: But you could be aware that you're getting something. But I think part of the
beauty of the Apple Watch and things like that is--
O'Reilly: It's got the little scrolling thing.
Lewis: There's a little bit more buildout there. So, the market ... it didn't ...
O'Reilly: This was bad. This was the bad part, ladies and gentlemen.
Lewis: No, they didn't respond very favorably to it. I think the stock opened at like $30
in 2016, and it's now around $21, $22. Which is a huge haircut. Granted, we are in a pretty
big contractionary period over the last couple days.
O'Reilly: Yeah, which China and everything.
Lewis: Huge China concerns. So, there's been a market sell-off anyways.
O'Reilly: The Blaze wasn't the only problem to the market for Fitbit, though.
Lewis: Yeah, there have been a couple other issues. I think one of the things that people
who really like Fitbit were curious about is, they broke out this new product, and it's
in this go-between area--
O'Reilly: And it looks like the iWatch.
Lewis: And it looks like the Apple Watch. But they didn't add any refresh the Charge
HR devices, which are their flagship-- like you talked about earlier, like the rubber
band products that they're really known for.
O'Reilly: And you would expect a tech company to regularly update their stuff.
Lewis: Yeah. I think those products are more than a year old at this point. If you're going
to make a splash with a product unveiling, it's got to be something like that. So, not
really paying attention to their core products quite as much maybe worried some people. But
there's also the news that there's a class action lawsuit against Fitbit coming, and
I believe, I saw the news coming out of San Francisco, I don't know if that's where the
suit will actually take place or if that was the news organization that was breaking it.
But, basically, it has to do with the heart rate monitoring on the Fitbit Charge HR and
Surge models.
O'Reilly: Is it too fast or too slow?
Lewis: The plaintiffs are alleging that it was under-counting their heart rate, which
is something that is probably not, right?
O'Reilly: Yeah.
Lewis: If you think you're at ... I don't know what a reasonable heart rate is. But
if you're 40 above what you should be--
O'Reilly: 120 or something like that.
Lewis: Yeah. There are some heath risks there.
O'Reilly: Was it off by 5 or 50?
Lewis: It was off pretty significantly. Someone cited 40 as an example of what it was off by.