Fairfax Digital
Louisa Hearn
March 13, 2008
There was a time when our favourite gadgets were content to laze around phoning friends, playing MP3s, and shooting down zombies. But now they also want to stretch out our triceps, flatten our tummies and teach us yoga.
In the last week alone, Nintendo rolled out the Wii Fit, a new game for its popular gaming console dedicated purely to lounge-room fitness, and Samsung introduced the miCoach mobile handset in partnership with adidas.
To encapsulate the dual function of these high-achieving hybrids, new product categories such as "exergaming" and "sportronics" have begun to emerge.
Hailed as the "first true sports mobile", Samsung's new handset falls under the "sportronics" label and is the first real challenger to the iconic 2006 alliance in which Apple and Nike created the Nike+iPod SportKit - a wireless system that relays data between a Nike running shoe and Apple's iPod Nano.