What to Know About luna Band launches globally to rival Fitbit Air
After being announced earlier this year with invite-only access and a waitlist, the Luna Band is now readily available to buy and is shipping worldwide, giving it a proper release date of today, 4 September.
Just like the Fitbit Air, this is a screenless fitness tracker designed to offer tailor-made advice based on your daily routines. The brand has already shown off how the Luna Band can be used to guide you throughout your day, suggesting the best time for a workout, when you should eat certain meals and when you should refrain from drinking any more caffeine.
It’s a more schedule-based system than the Google Health Coach, which works in tandem with the Fitbit Air, but what’s crucial is that, unlike the Fitbit, the Luna Band gives you all of these insights without a subscription in sight.
Priced at just £129/$149/€149, the Luna Band could end up becoming a more preferable option for folks who would rather avoid long-term fees that come with existing fitness trackers, including the Whoop Strap 5.0.
Credit: Luna
Working against the Luna Band, however, is the fact that the screenless wearable market is now more crowded than it’s ever been. After all, we’re not that far removed from the launch of the Garmin Cirqa, which benefits from the copious amounts of data that Garmin is known for, which can also be accessed without a subscription (although there is one available).
Something which could help the Luna Band to stand out is its push towards user-generated content, which the company is labelling as ‘Micro Apps’. Within the LifeOS software that powers the Luna Band ecosystem, users will have the chance to make their own mods which can expand the wearable’s abilities beyond the core experience.
If there’s a specific type of workout that the Luna Band doesn’t automatically cover, then it might be possible for users to develop their own Micro App to bring it into the fold. Of course, time will tell if there’s enough functionality available for users to make such a change, and community interest will play a big part in whether the idea is a success or not, although Garmin has shown that there is an appetite for user-generated content through its Garmin IQ Store.
Stay tuned for our full review of the Luna Band coming very soon, but check out our breakdown of the best fitness trackers currently available to see what the wearable is up against.
