When was nike fuel band release

The Apple Watch was greeted with much anticipation, but overall, the wearables niche has mostly turned out to be a disappointment. Apple, for instance, doesn't even break out its watch sales numbers in its public releases. According to research firm Canalys, Apple sold That may sound like a significant number, but even so, the device provides just a small portion of the company's revenue. Other players in the wearable space have disappointed the pundits as well.

Fitbit NYSE:FIT has seen its sales growth turn into sales contraction, its shares have plummeted, and the once-profitable company is now operating at a loss, even though it remained the top seller of wearables in Device sales were down by a third year over year in the first quarter of CEO Kevin Plank has argued that those acquisitions were as much about data as building a separate business line, but the numbers are disappointing nonetheless.

Tech giants like Apple, Samsung , and Xiaomi have been gaining market share in wearables, and it seems only natural that they would have elbowed a sportswear specialist like Nike to the side had it tried to keep the FuelBand going. After all, when Nike discontinued the device, it only laid off about 55 engineers. Tech companies have much bigger engineering teams to put to the test. Nike clearly recognized it was out of its element.

The watch offers a sweat-resistant band, and much better run-tracking capabilities than the traditional Apple Watch. The possible move out of hardware comes at a time when existing mobile device makers are looking to the wearable market for new opportunities. Google's Android Wear -- an operating system designed for wearable devices -- has attracted a bevy of partners, including Motorola and Fossil, which have both announced Android Wear-powered smartwatches. Samsung, which introduced its first smartwatch last year, continues to update its Gear watch line and its Gear Fit wristband.

Apple will reportedly enter the wearable market later this year with a smartwatch dubbed the. Today, Nike announced that the platform has grown to 28 million users since then. The FuelBand was released in February to large demand and strong reviews.

Nike also earned raves in November with its SE upgrade. With the FuelBand -- which compressed all the bells and whistles of higher-end fitness devices, like step-counting and calorie burn, into an affordable and sleek form factor -- Nike turned its product efforts around.

The FuelBand became the poster child for new lifestyle products revolving around a wrist-based device capable of capturing user-generated data, as well as the services that orbit around that activity.

That strategy seems to be paying off. The company has its sights set on leading with software, making its FuelBand and smartwatch efforts that much more peripheral to delivering on what those devices were meant to facilitate in the first place: a Nike ecosystem that starts with the apps on your phone and ends with the shoes on your feet and the shirt on your back.

Now that smartphones can do much of the intensive tracking these devices used to do exclusively, it's no longer necessary to have a fitness tracker to remain relevant in wearables. In the post-FuelBand era Nike will go back to providing consumer-facing fitness data platforms, and Nike Fuel is available to developers through an API, but the days of the Oregon-based giant building tracking hardware are over for now. Considering Nike did such a good job setting the pace, it's a shame the firm is dropping out now the real race is underway.

It seems like such a missed opportunity. It wasn't just the incremental SE update or the lack of Android support, Nike just didn't put the machine behind the FuelBand in the way it could have.

It was really the first high profile marriage of consumer tech and fitness, which is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Sign In. Nike FuelBand: The rise and fall of the wearable that started it all On its 4th birthday, we remember the tracker that kicked off a billion dollar industry. Wareable is reader-powered. If you click through using links on the site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more. Monday February 22, By Chris Smith bychrissmith. By Chris Smith. September iPod Nano adds pedometer.

In , the iPod Nano got its own built-in activity sensor, and Nike wasn't forgotten. Users no longer needed a special shoe or, more accurately, a sensor tucked into a special shoe pouch to track their workouts. Following the workout, users could track how long they ran in their target heart rate zone and track heart rate trends over time. Why the delay? Embracing an app that didn't require a special external sensor was an important shift in Nike's corporate identity.

Although Steve Jobs announced the iPod Nano's pedometer back in , it wasn't until that they began recommending using the Nano to track workouts without the shoe sensor. Around the same time, people started to wear the new miniature iPod Nano on their wrists, spawning the some of the first predictions that Apple was headed to the wrist in future iterations.

In early , Nike launched the FuelBand, a wristworn, smartphone-connected activity tracker. At this point Jawbone had just launched and almost immediately recalled the first generation of the Jawbone UP and Fitbit had three devices on the market, its original Fitbit, the Fitbit Zip and the Fitbit Ultra, none of them wristworn.

At the same time the company introduced it's Nike Fuel, a virtual health currency that has continued to be a big part of Nike's market strategy. At a hackathon, the company opened its programming interface for developers to create music apps that worked with the FuelBand.

June GPS app launches for Android. However, the FuelBand companion app for Android did not emerge, and the company has said that it has no plans to support the FuelBand for Android devices. July Sensor-embedded shoes. Even with a move toward wristband trackers and apps, Nike, of course, hasn't given up on shoes.