Gadgetory

hey guys it's Lauren good with the verge reporting from CES in Las Vegas and I'm here with James Park he's the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit hey James thanks so much for being here with me early on a Friday morning kind of a lot I think we're the last day here towards the tail-end for sure yeah some people are pretty tired I really appreciate you being here this morning let's get right into it the most serious question I have to ask you about this week is how many steps have you taken it's interesting because I was actually doing a step challenge with Gary Shapiro who runs the CTA and I think this week I've been averaging between 20 and 25 thousand steps a day so yesterday 125 thousand how many miles is that you know 2500 steps so yeah 10 10 miles a day that's really impressive but in in all seriousness you did have a pretty big week here at C at CES you introduced a new smart Fitness watch called the blaze you're wearing it yeah wearing it yeah we we announced this Tuesday Tuesday morning so this is the Fitbit blaze so I'll take it off at this point so it's it's what we call a smart fitness watch it's really focused on Fitness first it has the right set of smart features such as caller ID text notifications calendar reminders music control etc the right set that don't really overwhelm users because I think the common knock against general-purpose smart watches today is that they're very overwhelming they do too much etc cuts in their battery life the device is actually modular so you can actually transform the entire look of the device so we have different frames different frame styles colors etc that will be launching personally I mean it you know we've talked about this eyewear and try a lot of wearables and I thought and I thought it doesn't support third-party applications it has much longer battery life you know so I didn't see it in the same category as Apple watch but what what is your response to that when people say that's that's where you're going with this I think that's a very logical superficial observation but I think there's been a lot of trade-offs for the product and you know balances that we've made to really cater towards our core audience which again is that active user who wants a little bit more smart capability and it's not a general-purpose device I mean obviously as you said there's no third party apps but the trade-off there is we get you know five days battery life which is what our active users really like because look they want to wear a device 24/7 including when they're sleeping and this device really allows them to do that did you consider making something that would support third party applications you know the hardware on the blaze actually is pretty capable so I think for us is we do expect blaze to get smarter features over time but we still want to be a little bit selective because not just from a power perspective but I think people appreciate the simplicity and ease of use of the blaze and our other products and we don't want the device to be too overwhelming that makes sense but it's possible in the future you're saying the hardware the hardware spec technically it can do it yes interesting ok so let's talk about heartrate because also on the heels of you introducing this watch if it was hit with a class-action lawsuit from some consumers that were complaining that the heart great accuracy of some of your other devices wasn't as accurate as maybe they'd hoped or they feel the company had said what's your response to that you know my response is we have a pretty extensive Rd effort around our pure pulse heart rate technology we've done a lot of internal studies around testing and validation so we really stand by our pure pulse technology and you know for the lawsuit you know we don't really feel that it has any merit you know for us look it's a huge advancement in convenience for people I mean before really if you wanted to get continuous heartrate the only way you could do it is you know wearing an uncle chest strap exactly so look this is the logical progression of technology you have to start at some point and then the technology always improves over time but in general right now look we stand by our technology we're gonna vigorously defend the lawsuit we don't feel that it has any merit and there's gonna be continued Rd so but you do feel there's room for improvement or advancement in a software um look it's with any technology I think if you look the original iPhone and the camera on it I mean it was okay but it wasn't fantastic and look at the progress that all the smartphone makers have made in the camera module to the point where a lot of people you don't you know don't even think you need the SLRs anymore so for us pure pulse was a technology that we launched last year and look there's a lot of things that pipeline R&D wise for us that we're really excited about interesting James they've one more question for you what is the weirdest or most bizarre thing you've seen here at CES so far this week I'm asking everybody this it's really fun I think for me it's it's actually kind of useful but maybe not practical and it's also very weird it's the I think it was called the laundry it was the laundry folding robot there actually is a laundry folding yes I'm here yes and I've seen that I'm on YouTube before it was a huge cabinet and you'd put all your your laundry in this in the big shelf at the bottom and I think after like some period of time it just opens up and all your laundry's folded how does that happen it's mysterious it happens in the cabinet that they're faking it until they make it and then they have this this television running the I think the benefits of you know how many hours in your lifetime do you fold laundry and you know how many days will you recover I was like oh that's a pretty interesting proposition so but I think they got the company laundry oh right yeah right laundry James Park wants your product so you should send him a loaner if you can thank you so much for taking the time to chat this morning for more YouTube videos on CES please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a youtube.com forward slash The Verge