The company today launched
a Developer Preview SDK for its wrist device that is the Microsoft Band. The
motive behind this is to bring third party apps to the wearable band. The
Developer SDK will allow to create apps for it apart from the usual apps like
Map My Fitness and more.
With the opening of the
Microsoft band to third-party apps not only makes possible for devs to build
apps as per requirement but also it provides an opportunity to Microsoft in
building a library of apps for the future wearable devices. Thus, getting more
customers being interested in this generation and whatever will be coming next in
the future of the band.
Apart from this, there are
many other functions and features that are making debut for the Microsoft Band
which also a new Bike Tile for tracking indoor and outdoor rides, heart-rate
monitoring, GPS, recovery, revelation tracking, speed analytics, web dashboard
are to name a few. There is also a new feature called Quick Read, that gives
you easier reading notifications just at glance and there is also a new virtual
keyboard that uses Microsoft’s Word Flow Predictive Technology and also includes
a voice assistant i.e. Cortana, although both of the above functions require a
Windows 8.1 OS on smartphone device.
Today another feature also
got updates and that is the Microsoft Health, which now includes a dashboard
for the web that uses the data manipulated by the Microsoft Band to populate
and updates for Map My Fitness and Health Vault integration.
The Microsoft Band costs
around $199.99 and is available in the United States through Microsoft Stores.
Microsoft has a special feedback team for the Microsoft band that constantly
monitors for the feedback from its customers and act accordingly to accomplish
the needs of the customers, says Microsoft’s General Manager of New Devices
Marketing, Matt Barlow.