Music Control

Keep your smartphone in your pocket and control your music playlist directly from your fitness tracker. The Band’s 1.26-inch 320 x 128 curved AMOLED full-color Gorilla Glass 3 touchscreen displays music control icons and the song title, allowing you to play, pause, skip forward or back, and adjust the volume of your tracks. The music control works via Bluetooth with Spotify and any other music app.

Activity Reminders

The fitness tracker’s new Activity Reminder will alert you when it thinks you’ve been parked on your rear-end for lengthy periods. You can specify intervals and days when you want to receive the reminders and also times when you don’t want them, such as when you’re asleep, driving long distance, etc.

Improved Exercise Tile

The Exercise Tile now enables you to select and name different activity types if they aren’t already included in the app. Heart rate, calories burned and duration data for on-the-spot exercises such as sit-ups, weights, elliptical, etc, is now grouped by exercise type into the Microsoft Health app.

It looks like the update is only for the MS Band 2 as there’s no information about the original MS Band gaining the new features.

The Microsoft Band 2 is the most feature-packed fitness tracker out there. There’s a built-in GPS, continuous heart rate monitor, notifications for calls, text, email and social apps, skin temperature sensor, UV sensor, galvanic skin response, haptic vibration motor and more.

All the Quantified Self essentials are included: steps taken, distance travelled, calories burned, automatic sleep monitoring. There’s also a built-in microphone and Cortana, Microsoft’s digital voice assistant is onboard at your command if you are running Windows Phone 8.1 or higher.

The Microsoft Band 2 is compatible with Windows Phone 8.1 + | Android 4.4 + | iOS 8.1.2 +

The Microsoft Band 2 battery life is up to 48 hours, which isn’t great compared to some other fitness trackers, but on the whole the others don’t feature a color touchscreen, GPS and voice command.

If you’re using GPS and Cortana, expect considerably less than 48 hours between charges.

• Microsoft Band 2