I guess this was inevitable: with fitness the focus of so many gadgets these days, it was unlikely that bargain retailer Kogan would stay off the bandwagon. It has just launched its own fitness brand, Fortis, including a fitness-tracking wristband, exercise gear and yoga mats.
At $69, the TrackFit is a lot cheaper than most big-brand fitness trackers. Note, however, that you can only sync with a Windows PC — no smartphone integration here.
The rest of the range seems reasonable, though shopping around will probably find you similar deals (like much other Kogan product, this will be largely imported from China and rebranded). Right now there’s no shipping charge, which is helpful if you’re ordering free weights by mail.
Comments
6 responses to “Kogan Now Has A Fitness Brand Called Fortis”
I feel the same way about buying Kogan-brand stuff as I do buying electronics from Aldi. 10% will probably be pretty good, 30% utter rubbish that you can readily return instantly, and the rest will be sufficiently good that you will keep it and be frustrated with the poor performance until you finally throw your hands up in the air, chuck it, and buy something decent.
Not all kogan stuff is like that… the action camera is pretty good
The same holds for Aldi electronics. I had a heart rate monitor with chest strap from them which worked really well. It was a rebrand of a generic (as so often happens) but it was great. I’d put it in the 10%. Same with a power monitor: it was clearly cheap, but worked well.
I also bought a Wifi range extender which was a rebranded Edimax and it was fine until there were 4+ clients on it, then it would bomb. That I’d put in the 60% of ‘sufficiently good to keep but regret’ (except that having experienced that before, I just returned it). An action cam from Aldi was likewise: it has terrible rolling shutter and awful anything-but-good-light performance, but it is mostly good enough for the price I guess.
Then there have been a few things that have been terrible and had immediate return: an iPod case with speaker which sounded unbelievably awful. An FM radio with an rotary encoder volume dial which skipped all over the place. LED globes that died within 2 seconds.
What I’m saying is basically that I think buying Kogan-brand electronics is a gamble, and made worse by the fact that they will not be as popular as big-name brand devices so not have the same level of community support, nor the consumer pressure to provide ongoing updates.
I think that every device in the exercise/workout space needs more time to mature a little. Samsung had a good crack at it, solid hardware, but the software just made it a lame duck. All the problems are easily fixable, they just wont spend the money/time to fix it and actually make it work.
I don’t think the Apples iTime/iWatch/iThingy will make the market any different than what it currently is now. Because you have Suunto/Garmin/TomTom/Addidas with their running and activity watches already with phone integration. These are solid platforms with software that actually works and have your workouts sync to their respective websites automatically through your smartphone for later viewing on the website or with the app on the phone.
The plus side is the GPS on these dedicated devices is far more accurate than your average smart phone.
There is an installation CD? How handy.
How archaic do they want to be, the better way would be to have a flash drive that emulates a cd rom that has the software on it, and while they are at it put a 64gb flash drive chip in there for portable storage.