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Fitbug Orb tries to take down activity tracker rivals with Bluetooth scale and blood pressure monitor

Fitbug Orb tries to take down activity tracker rivals with Bluetooth scale and blood pressure monitor

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We're sure to see plenty of activity trackers here at CES, and tonight one smaller company here is releasing a new line of equipment to try and win over a few users. The company's called Fitbug — yes, they compete with Fitbit — and it has a new Bluetooth tracker called the Orb. If you've used a Fitbit One or a Jawbone Up you'll be familiar with what's on offer with the Orb, though Fitbug does change it up by offering three different syncing modes — one for real-time updates for use during workouts, another for syncing in 30-minute intervals, and a last that updates on demand.

The Orb offers many of the same features that we've seen on other devices, like like keeping track of how many steps you've taken, how far you've traveled, how many calories you've burnt, and how you've slept. The app, which is for the Galaxy S III or the iPhone 4S and up also allows you to record what food you've eaten throughout the day. Unlike its competitors, however, the Orb is a tiny coat-button sized device, and Fitbug is offering an array of accessories to help you mount it in different spots. There's a watch-like accessory, as well as a belt clip, lanyard, sleep pouch, and a magnetized clip for connecting to a bra, but the CEO told us it's most accurate when mounted on your waist. It's worth noting that it uses a watch battery rather than a rechargeable one, but that's somewhat expected considering the Orb will only cost $49.99 when it launches sometime this spring.

Fitbug Orb, Wow, and Luv hands-on pictures

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In addition to its new activity tracker, Fitbug has also shown off a Bluetooth scale and a Bluetooth blood pressure monitor, called the Wow and Luv, respectively. The former is very similar to the Fitbit Aria, though it doesn't measure body fat percentage and it doesn't sync to the cloud over your Wi-Fi network — it must sync to the iPhone or Android app directly. It'll cost $79.99 when it is made available by the end of March. The blood pressure monitor, meanwhile, will measure both systolic and diastolic pressures, as well as your heart rate. We're told it should be available in June, but there's no price yet.