Sony SmartBand 2 comes with Heart Rate Sensor

Sony’s SmartBand 2 is now official, it’s a multi-sensor fitness band that has a heart rate sensor, for deeper insights into your fitness, well-being and even stress levels.

As with other fitness bands like from Jawbone or Fitbit, and even Xiaomi, the SmartBand 2 is able to automatically track your walk, run activities, and now with the heart rate sensor, log the corresponding heart rate too. There’s also automatic sleep detection, to monitor and analyse your sleep cycles. It will be interesting to see how Sony puts all these information together, and if Sony can indeed deliver ‘meaningful’ insights on the user’s heath and stress levels.

Like the previous SmartBand 1, the new SmartBand 2 will ensure you never miss a call, message, email, whatsapp or tweet with subtle vibrating notifications and bright pulsing RGB LEDs. It also allows you to easily control the music on your smartphone or tablet, with simple taps to play, pause and skip through tracks. There’s an alarm pairing feature, where the SmartBand 2 will vibrate to alert you when you’re more than 10 meters from the connected device.

One disappointment element was the two day only battery life. That does seem a little low compared to other fitness trackers.

Price and Availability

SmartBand 2 will be available in Black and White at launch, and two additional vibrant colours shortly after – Pink and Indigo. As it retains the same compact “core” footprint as SmartBand, you can wear the technology with original first and third party bands for greater choice.

SmartBand 2 launches across 60 countries worldwide, from September 2015. Pricing to be announced later. It will be compatible with any device running Android 4.4 (KitKat) onwards and iOS 8.2.