The Best Thing About Microsoft’s Health Platform Is That It’s Not Microsoft-Only

Microsoft’s new Band works with its cross-platform tracking app Health. Microsoft

With Apple Health and Google Fit offering a centralized fitness and wellness-tracking platform for iOS and Android users, did anyone really expect Microsoft to sit quietly and leave its mobile OS lacking?

Of course not: Microsoft has been working on a health tracking platform of its own. It’s called Microsoft Health, and there’s a wearable called Microsoft Band to go along with it. Both are available starting today available in Microsoft retail stores and online starting today for $200. You can’t buy on online yet.

While Health and Fit are locked into their corresponding operating system silos, Microsoft hopes to ford digital and hardware divides by making Health and its hardware constituent the Microsoft Band cross-platform. This is a smart move for a company whose mobile OS still only retains a four percent marketshare in the U.S. By packing the wearable with a handful of unique features like UV monitoring and guided workouts, the device could attract health-focused folks who might not otherwise go for a Microsoft product, and thus introduce them to the company’s ecosystem just as the iPod did for Apple back in the early 2000′s (“If you like the features and quality of this product, why not get even more by switching to a Windows Phone device?”). It’s a long shot, but perhaps one of the best chances in years Microsoft has of luring people into its mobile world.

Microsoft Health functions as you’d expect. The service collects data from your smartwatch, smartphone, or activity tracker, and can help you monitor your sleep quality, which of your exercises burn the most calories, and how much recovery time your body needs after training. It uses this data to provide suggestions that can better help you meet your fitness goals. Health is cloud-based, with big names like MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, and Jawbone Up on board as initial launch partners.

The Microsoft Band fitness tracker, the company’s inaugural device in this space, resembles the Samsung Gear Fit or Garmin Vivofit in that it features a slim, full-color touchscreen display. It tracks the usuals—steps, sleep quality, and calories burned—as well as performing 24-hour heart rate monitoring and GPS tracking. The Band tracker also delivers smartphone notifications to your wrist, so you can get email, text, phone call, and calendar alerts. For Windows Phone users, it offers access to Cortana. It also has timer and alarm features.

The band has two abilities that set it apart from existing activity trackers, at least for now: Through partner apps, it can offer guided workouts, which seems like an incredibly useful application for a wearable. It can calculate the current UV index when you’re outdoors, helping you discern whether or not you should be wearing sunscreen.

If you’re not already overcome by fitness-tracking fatigue, Microsoft’s offerings, while coming a little late to the game, do sound promising. The software side aims to be more than just a storage container of pretty graphs.