The Misfit Shine is one of the world’s best-selling fitness trackers. There are some good reasons why it’s so popular: It is user-friendly and simple to navigate the app, it can be clipped onto clothing aswell as worn on the wrist, it doesn’t need to be charged and it’s safe to use in the swimming pool. Misfit, being a trendy brand, also adds appeal to their wearables.
Misfit Shine Review Hands-on
In The Box
The Misfit Shine comes with a modular tracker, an adjustable silicone wrist-band, a silicone clothes clip with a magnet for attaching a CR2032 coin cell battery, a shiny metal tool for opening the module (changing the battery), and a quick start guide.
Looks
The Misfit Shine has some charm about it. It’s not at its most glamorous when it’s sitting in the standard silicone band, but it becomes a trendy little accessory when you clip it onto your clothes. Also, you can bling up the Misfit Shine with accessories like the Swarovsky collection.
Just in case you’re selective about what color your wearables are, the Misfit Shine is available in 10 colors with some rather exotic names: Gray, Jet Black, Topaz Blue, Champagne, Storm Blue, Coral, Wine Red, Sea Glass Green, Coca-Cola® Red, and Pure (silver).
Comfort
The Misfit Shine weighs all of 9.4 grams, you can easily enough forget you’re wearing it. When it comes to sleeping, I’ve slept with numerous wearables on my wrist and the Misfit Shine is the one that bothers me the least.
Design
The Misfit Shine is made from anodized aircraft-grade aluminum. It’s a solid little device and can easily withstand bumps and bruises.
Display
The display is comprised of twelve LEDs. A double tap on the top makes the ring of LEDs light up and show you how close you are to your daily fitness goal, each LED represents a percentage of your goal. The display also tells the time, the LEDs representing clock hands. When you double tap, the time is displayed before or after the goal meter, you choose which.
The best-selling Fitbit Flex uses the same principle, the way the basic LED display shows you how much of your daily goal has been completed. But, The Fitbit Flex doesn’t tell the time.
Fitness Tracking
The Misfit Shine is pretty basic compared to some of the fitness trackers I’ve been using, such as the Basis Peak and Fitbit Surge. It counts your steps, distance travelled and calories burned.
It uses a points system with a daily goal of 1,000. With each activity, you are credited with more points towards the 1.000 daily goal. The more vigorous the activity the more points you get. It allows you to tag different activity types so you can be awarded the correct amount of points. The list of supported activities are: walking, running, cycling, swimming, soccer, tennis, basketball, yoga and dancing.
So, for instance if you’ve been running for an hour, and tag (select) running as your activity, you will accumulate more points than if you tag walking. This system also helps the Shine calculate your calorie burn. Unlike some of the more pricey fitness trackers, the Misfit Shine doesn’t automatically recognize different exercises and sports.
If you want to log your food intake you’ll need to integrate the Misfit app with the weight loss app, Lose It by FitNow Inc. However, if you’re using an Android phone you may find that there’s no sign of Lose It in the Play Store! It’s supposed to be there and I can find it on my PC, but not on my smartphone! This doesn’t bother me too much as logging calories is just too damn time-consuming.
Sleep Tracking
The Misfit Shine Features automatic sleep recognition. There is also the option to enter sleep mode manually, which I prefer with Garmin fitness trackers because they don’t seem to work well for me. The Misfit Shine auto sleep mode works well, so you can nod off knowing it’s got you covered.
Within the Misfit app a graph is displayed that shows you night’s sleep in three shades of purple; dark sections indicate deep sleep, medium light sleep, and light for periods when you were awake. Below are screenshots of a night’s sleep, the first from my Android smartphone, the second on my desktop/laptop
There is a smart alarm, however, it’s for iOS only and will be arriving for Android soon.
Overall the Misfit Shine’s sleep monitoring is pretty impressive.
App
The Misfit app isn’t as feature packed as some others, such as Fitbit. However, it’s user-friendly and easy to navigate. There are two different ways to view your stats, either a circular graph or a bar chart.
Android
Desktop/Laptop
The Misfit Shine syncs manually to the app. The lack of automatic syncing doesn’t bother me at all, actually I think I prefer manual syncing, especially if it works as well as the Misfit Shine. It takes 10 – 15 seconds to sync, which is quicker than most other fitness trackers I’ve tried, and it’s synced every time without any issue.
Within the Social section of the app you can find your Facebook friends and share activities. You can also compete with Mr or Mrs. Fit, depending on if you’re a man or woman. Mr. Fit is Misfit’s cyber male whose fitness level is based on the average statistics for men within the Misfit community.
There aren’t a great deal of customization options with the Misfit Shine. You can set sleep mode to auto or manual, choose to display clock or progress when double tapping, and choose your preferred wearing position, i.e wrist, waist, chest, etc.
If you are the owner of a Pebble smartwatch, or plan to be one, you can sync your Pebble to the Misfit app. This integration now works for iOS and Android.
The Misfit Shine uses Bluetooth 4.0 LE to sync to its companion app. The Misfit app is compatible with iOS 7 and higher, Android 4.3 and higher, and Windows Phone 8.1. You can also access your Misfit Dashboard on your desktop/laptop.
Battery Life
The Misfit Shine has my favorite kind of battery; one that doesn’t need to be charged.. It’s a coin cell battery that needs to be replaced every 6 months or so.
Water-Resistant
The Misfit Shine is water-resistant up to 50 meters and can be used for swimming. It doesn’t have dedicated swim modes that will count and recognize strokes, but swimming is included in the activity set, giving the Shine the ability to calculate your points and calories burned based on a swimming session.
Verdict
The Misfit Shine isn’t the most feature packed wearable in the Quantified Self arena. It doesn’t have a built-in heart rate monitor, GPS or voice coaching. But, for keeping tabs on general activities and sleep, along with keeping things simple, it’s probably my favorite so far. It’s very easy to use if you’re not the most tech savvy, the software doesn’t crash when it’s syncing, the battery never needs charging, and you can use it for swimming… Oh yeah, and it’s cheap.
• Misfit Shine
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