The Halo is a tracker for fitness with an innovative design. It doesn’t have a display or a vibration motor. This makes the Halo a great choice for people who want their wrist to be clear of distractions.
It provides a range of workouts and sessions to help users improve their overall health. It offers meditation, mindfulness, as well as tone-focused content.
Tone of Voice Analysis, which focuses on improving vocals, analyzes how you sound when speaking in public or during interviews, is its best feature. The app also allows you to take a "voice selfie", which helps to assess your voice clarity and tone.
This is a great feature, especially for interview situations where it can be difficult to get your voice right. You can also listen back to your own recordings to see how you sound and make improvements.
The Halo's data-centric approach for fitness tracking includes sleep monitoring. It records your sleep from start until finish and scores you based on each of these cycles. It can also monitor your body temperature. This is useful in determining how rested you were at night.
Amazon has committed that the Halo will be kept private, and users can opt in to use its voice tone analysis and body scan features. The company explains that it processes the body-scan photos in the cloud and automatically deletes them when they're no longer used. However, privacy concerns are raised by this.
The body-scanning is done via the paired phone app, and it asks you to take a photo of yourself in skivvies (it's limited to those over 18). To get a precise reading of your body's fat percentage, multiple photos will be required.
This adds complexity to your fitness tracker, since it isn't comparable to traditional metrics like calories burned or steps. It does, however, provide a better overall picture about your activity and your health over time.
The voice tone analysis, meanwhile, uses two microphones on the device to listen to your speech and assess how you come across. It's an extremely useful feature for anyone looking to project a positive image in social situations or at work.
You should note that this feature is not available without a paid subscription. You'll need to pay $4/around PS3 / AU$5 a month after six months to continue using it.
The Body Composition feature is also a notable feature. This uses height and body data, as well as photos taken from your body, in order to calculate your overall body composition. Although it is a more sophisticated method of measuring body weight than Withings bioimpedance-based technology (which requires photos), there are privacy concerns.
As far as fitness tracking goes, the Halo doesn't offer much that the Apple Watch or Fitbit don't. It will show you how you are doing and if your weekly goals have been met, but it does not offer the same colorful graphics as other fitness trackers. You will need to subscribe for access to the best features such as voice tone analysis and body scanning.