Getting started

One of the best things about the iOS Health app is just how much data it collects in one place. With deep nutrition metrics, lab results, body measurements, fitness, and sleep data, this virtual file cabinet keeps everything organized. You might know what the Health app can do by itself and with additional apps, but if you're really serious about monitoring your health, you might want to take things to the next level and invest in a wearable or other additional device.

Sure, you could weigh yourself every day and enter that data manually. You could write down the time you fall asleep and the time you wake up. You could hope that the 10-year-old treadmills at your gym give a reasonably good estimate of your workout. You could use the free blood pressure cuff in the drug store and enter that information manually.

Or you could pick up one (or more) of these cool gadgets. We spent weeks wearing fitness trackers, monitoring our heart rate and blood pressure, and even took devices to bed with us, all to capture as much health data as possible. Here are our findings: 11 devices, compatible with the iOS Health app, that you can count on to take fitness monitoring to the next level.

Jawbone UP24

Jawbone has been one of the best-known names in this field since 2011. With a wide-open API, the Jawbone UP24 fitness tracker (see full review here) can be paired with other services in literally hundreds of ways. Integration with the Apple's Health app could be better, though: currently, it only shares sleep-analysis and step-tracking data. Data in the Up app is presented in a pleasing, vertically scrolling icon arrangement with Sleep and Steps at the top of your day's view. Silent vibrating alarms can be set to remind you to get up and move around during the day, or to wake you in the morning. Smart alarms can even analyze your sleep and buzz when you're in a light sleep stage near your set waking time.

Additional third-party apps can feed nutrition information to the UP, but calories, weight, and moods - while able to be logged in Jawbone's app - don't make their way back to Health. If you're looking for ease of use or fantastic ways to pair with smart-home options, then Jawbone's UP is a serious contender. But if you're looking for deep Health logging, you may want to consider another band.

Price: $129.99/£125/AU$180

Polar Loop

The colorful Loop, from the Finnish company Polar, is waterproof, so you can log swimming data without worry. (This is rare for a band with a charging port instead of a long-life battery.) The Loop's band needs to be trimmed to size - it took us a couple attempts but once we got it right, we were solid. The band saves battery life by going dark until you tap the touch-sensitive button near the screen. Brightly colored LEDs show the time, your steps, calories burnt throughout the day, and how close you are to completing your activity goal.

The Polar Flow app syncs with a web portal and your device, but the app's visualization of a clock broken into color-coded segments is a bit hard to translate into activity level. If partnered with one of Polar's heart rate monitors, the Loop can send your beats along to Health as well as convert that data into workouts. (Actually, a heart rate monitor is almost a necessity with this band if you want deep data.) The Loop tracks sleep, or periods of inactivity as shown by the reclining figure in the app, but doesn't pass that data to the Health app. Overall, the Polar Flow app is fairly single-minded in its workouts approach, so the Loop will best serve that market.

Price: $109.95/£84.50/AU$179

Garmin Vivofit 2

The Vivofit 2 (see full review here) is a nice, mid-priced workout band that pushes active calories, steps, and walking/running distance to Health. It runs strictly off a common watch battery (boasting a 1+ year battery life), which makes it more waterproof and enables uninterrupted tracking. Backlit only when you briefly hold the button, the LCD display delivers date and time, steps, steps remaining until goal (which updates daily based on previous activity), distance traveled, and calories burned.

The Garmin Connect app delivers a no-nonsense display of your data. Through it you can customize what counts as a workout using the device's stopwatch function, and you can pair with a heart rate monitor to quickly check your pulse while working out. The Vivofit 2 also tracks sleep and can report your level of movement as you slept, but it doesn't push this data to the Health app (we're told this is under consideration). One of the device's best features is the customizable chirp it emits when you sit still for too long, reminding you to get up and get moving throughout the day.

Price: $99.99/£89.99/AU$139

Misfit Shine

The most futuristic-looking tracker, the Shine (see full review here) is a minimalistic aluminum disc with small round lights in its face for feedback purposes. These lights tell time in analog format to the nearest five-minute mark and will light up to show any progress to your daily activity goal. Available in 10 colors, the quarter-sized Shine can be worn on the simple strap provided, on a clip you can fasten to your lapel or your shoe, tucked in your pocket, or dropped in a necklace clasp. Like the Vivofit 2, it uses a common watch battery, and once you've installed it and snapped the Shine shut you needn't worry about power for a reported six months.

The Misfit app is relatively stripped down, as is the data it collects (steps and sleep), though you can add in your weight and food eaten (only via photos to pair with Misfit's calories burnt calculation), and set it to track you during specific fitness activities such as swimming, soccer, yoga, dancing, and more. Water resistant to 50 meters, the tightly closed Misfit can stay on your wrist no how much you sweat, swim, or shower. Currently, only steps go through to Health, but we've heard that sleep-data integration is under consideration.

Price: $99.99/£80

Pebble Steel

Of all the fitness trackers featured here, the Pebble Steel (see full review here) comes the closest to the Apple Watch in offering features that go beyond fitness tracking. But for fitness purposes, the Pebble has a wide range of apps to track your body. Your first step is to download the Pebble Smartwatch app to your iPhone; the app is used to manage your watch and contains its own built-in Pebble App Store. Pebble devices can load up to eight Pebble apps and watch faces at any one time, though in the iPhone app there is a Locker where you can store many more apps and faces to quickly swap in.

There are plenty of free choices for step tracking like Pedometer or Movable, though both need to be active to actually track, and Movable requires a companion app on your iPhone. For workouts, Endomondo (free) is a good choice (which also requires a partner app on your iPhone), while there is also a Pebble version of Misfit, which can track data in the background. Our favorite Pebble app is SmartWatch Pro ($3.99), which captures step data and can export sleep data through another app called Morpheuz (free), on top of sending your calendars and reminders from your phone to your Pebble. If you're the kind of person who has a workout mix, the Pebble's ability to control music (even in third-party apps) and to dismiss phone calls at your wrist is a blessing when you'd rather not fumble with your phone.

Price: $199/£179

Beddit

Beddit, a thin strip that you tape in place under your fitted sheet, focuses on one particular aspect of your health: how do you sleep? It grabs your heart rate, tracks your sleeping respiration rate, and uses your iPhone's microphone to note when and for how long you snore.

The Beddit app shares your heart rate (a measure every five minutes) and your sleep and waking times with the Health app. The Health app only logs total time asleep, but Beddit's companion app takes all the data - plus movement in bed to map out how much you toss and turn - and then scores your sleep. The app has four alarms that can be set to wake you either at a specific time or close to your waking time when you're sleeping lightly. For weekends, you can choose "No Alarm" and Beddit will log you without waking you. As a bonus, there are even built-in ambient sounds to help you drift off to dream land.

Price: $149/£106.71

Lumo Lift

For specialized activity tracking, the folks at Lumo are carving out their own little niche. The Lumo Lift (see full review here) is a handy little gadget to measure steps and posture, so if you want to stand and sit straighter for better spinal health, this could be your ticket. Simply charge up the magnetized Lift in its USB-powered cradle, then attach it and the other half of the two-part clasp to your shirt at roughly the collarbone. We worried the Lift would be dislodged by daily activity, but the strong magnets held it tightly in place. (We did find that seatbelt shoulder straps press uncomfortably against it, though.)

The Lift app shows how well you're doing throughout the day, and lets you adjust settings. Turning on Posture Alert, for example, will cause a buzz if you're out of proper posture for a selected period of time. While the Lift tracks steps and posture, the latter data doesn't have a measure in Health (though it'd be a nice addition) and the former logs in the companion app but is not currently sent on to Health. As with other trackers, we're told Healthkit integration is on the roadmap, so if you want good posture, this is a solid option with more to come.

Price: $79.99/£80

Withings Smart Body Analyzer

A wide variety of tracking devices count steps, but all of them require you to manually input your weight. The problem is that this data can come from multiple sources: at home, the gym, the doctor's office, and elsewhere under different conditions, using different kinds of scales. For consistency, it's best to stick to a single scale and to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, without clothes. The Smart Body Analyzer pairs with your phone through the Health Mate app and will push your weight to Apple's Health app, along with your body fat percentage, BMI, and heart rate. And since this tracker stays put, it can recognize up to eight family members' profiles on their own devices, so everyone in your house can weigh in.

Ideally, you'll want to keep the scale in your bedroom so the built-in sensors can measure room temperature and air quality (which is most beneficial if you also use the Withings Aura sleep monitor). However, despite promises from Withings, we never got anything close to accurate weight measurements when using the scale on carpet, even with the provided feet adapters. For best results, place the scale on the hardest floor surface in your home, such as bathroom tiles.

Price: $149.95/£129.95/AU$239.95

QardioArm

If hypertension is something you're concerned about and want to keep track of, good news: the QardioArm makes it easy. Unwrap the blood pressure cuff entirely to turn it on, then wrap it around your arm and tap the big green Start button on the Qardio app. The Bluetooth-enabled cuff will measure blood pressure and heart rate, log them in the app for your history at a glance, and send both along to Health. For more accurate results, there's an option to allow the cuff to take three measurements with 30-second breaks in between and average out your numbers. You can also select the option for a picture slideshow of built-in nature scenes or your own photos for something relaxing to look at while you measure.

Price: $99-$109/£99/AU$169

iHealth Wireless Blood Pressure Monitor

iHealth Labs is a known name in the health field offering not only blood-pressure cuffs, but also glucose meters, activity trackers, and scales. Unlike the QardioArm's convenient one-piece design, the electronics of iHealth's Wireless Blood Pressure Monitor can be disconnected from the cuff proper, but can be tricky to reattach and sometimes had to be held in place while measuring.

The Bluetooth-enabled cuff pairs with the companion app, iHealth MyVitals, whose dashboard includes space for your blood pressure and other data tracked by the other devices in the iHealth line. Measuring is done easily enough: slip the cuff on, press the Test button at the app's bottom, and blood pressure and pulse are taken in short order. Tapping on My BP Trends in your dashboard takes you to more-detailed results including graphs of your BP over time as well as a list of results and your averages over the last 3 and 10 measures. The app also allows for manual input of blood-pressure data after doctor visits, though this information can also be easily added through Apple's Health app.

Price: $99.95/€99.95

Wahoo Tickr X Workout Tracker with Memory

You can count on your workout equipment to give you a measure of calories burned or you can rely on apps to approximate that data, but best of all is getting your own accurate, personal measurements. Strap on the Wahoo Tickr and fire up the Wahoo Fitness app to log your workouts with far more precision. You'll keep track of your heart rate, including an average and maximum rate, and also get a more exact calorie count, plus you can set Burn and Burst rates to log more intense parts of your workouts and see what your running cadence is.

Wahoo Fitness comes with plenty of built-in workouts including cycling, spin class, swimming (due to the Tickr X being waterproof up to five feet; just don't take your iPhone in the pool with you), skiing, skating, weight lifting, golfing, running, and loads more, plus your own custom workouts. Data is also stored locally on the device, so you can leave your iPhone at home if you like and sync later. You can export active calories, cycling distance, walking and running distance, heart rate, and workouts data straight to the Health app, or you can use a variety of third-party apps. Wahoo partners directly with the Garmin Vivofit 2 mentioned earlier, and you can export your workout data in several formats to be imported elsewhere.

Price: $99.95/about £65 with free standard shipping/about AU$128.49 plus $9.99 shipping

Pre-orders, apps, Amazon and MacBook

Apple just held an event for the Apple Watch. But as it launched the thing last year, we got to hear about much more than just a few of the flimsy things Apple's great wrist-worn gadget will do.

Yes, we now know when the Watch is coming out, and how much we'll have to pay for it, but there's even more interesting stuff in store too.

How about the brand new 12-inch MacBook that's even thinner than the MacBook Air? Or the iPhone-led medical platform that Apple thinks is going to revolutionise medical research? As ever, Apple has big plans.

• Hands on: Apple Watch review | Hands on: New MacBook review

We'll be looking at everything Apple showed off at the event, but first a bit on the Apple Watch.

Apple Watch is on pre-order and sale in April

The Apple Watch goes on pre-order on April 10. And in the usual Apple style the actual 'on sale' date lands two weeks later on April 24. This is the standard delay Apple puts into its mobile devices. It's enough of a gap to get you ravenous with excitement, no so long you forget you even made the pre-order.

Just to get those anticipation juices flowing even more, you'll be able to check out the Apple Watch for yourself in Apple Stores from April 10. That's a little longer than we normally have to wait for a pre-order, but it's just a quick between then and the Watch landing in your hands.

This is a totally new category for Apple, and there must be thousands, millions out there who are on the cusp of convincing themselves they might need a smartwatch. And even more that just want some first-hand experience so they can ridicule the thing to friends.

Three different models, three very different prices

We always knew that Apple was planning a few different variations of Apple Watch, but now we know exactly how many there are. The answer? Six, if we forget the different straps and colours - and an awful lot more variations if we don't.

Neglecting the peripheral style choices for a moment, there are Sport, Steel and Edition series in the Apple Watch family, and all three come in two watch face sizes, 38mm and 42mm. These roughly equate to the 'male' and 'female' standard watch archetypes, but let's not put a gendered label on these, eh?

The one we imagine most people going for is Watch Sport. It's the cheapest of the three, with an aluminium alloy casing and fairly normal-looking straps: three colours plus white and black. It's $349, £299, AU$499 for the 38mm edition, $399, £339, AU$579 for the 42mm one.

Have a bit more cash? The Watch Collection get you an upgrade to a shiny steel body. There are also much fancier straps, including one woven out of wafer-thin metal wire that feels like fabric.

Prices for this version start at $549, £479, AU$799 and rocket up to $1099, £949, AU$1629 if you pick the fanciest strap. That's right, you can double the cost by picking a different strap.

Are you a rapper? A millionaire? Or a normal person with extremely misaligned priorities? The Apple Watch Edition is the 18ct gold version and starts at $10,000, £8,000 AU$14,000, creeping all the way up to $17,000, £13,500, AU$24,000.

It's to be sold in limited numbers to make it all the more attractive to hardcore consumer types, although it will be available across the world according to Tim Cook.

Apple Watch apps are parasites

There will be loads of Apple Watch apps available on launch day by the sounds of it, but they don't really have their very own space. You'll browse through, use and download Watch apps from your phone rather than directly from the watch itself.

We pretty much knew this would be the case as it has been common knowledge for a while that Watch apps don't run entirely independently and are highly reliant on a connection with your iPhone. It's another confirmation that your Apple Watch is not going to be much use if you take it too far away from your phone.

Some of the apps Tim Cook and co. showed off during the Apple Watch event include Uber, WeChat, Instagram, Shazam and a home security monitor. Expect to see these plus a boatload of others, including plenty of dross, come April 24.

Don't expect anything too in-depth, though. Apple VP of Tech Kevin Lynch says most of the Watch's applications are "really about brief interactions… many of these are just a few seconds long."

Apple TV is playing hardball with Amazon

Think Apple TV is the runt of Apple's litter? Tim Cook is doing his best to change that this year. Not only has the set top box been give a price cut to keep it competitive with rivals like Amazon Fire TV, it'll also get a brand new streaming service that you won't be able to get elsewhere. For a while at least.

But first, the price. It now costs just $69, £59, AU$109 bringing it just-about in-line with alternatives from Amazon, Roku 3 and others. No, it's not as cheap as Chromecast, but then few things are, and Apple TV does also include a remote.

This big push is going to happen alongside the launch of the HBO streaming service in the US, which is to launch in April exclusively (to begin with) on Apple devices. That means iPads, iPhones and Apple TV.

It'll cost you $14.99 and there's no word of a UK or worldwide release yet. Why is it so much more expensive than the much more content-rich Netflix? HBO has complained for years that the low prices of things like Netflix mean they'd never side with one of the core streaming services. They'd see it as a devaluing of their content.

We're not sure about splashing out that much cash for one network's goodies, but, they certainly have some classic shows and plenty of people are head over heels for Game of Thrones. They're sure to pick up a few subscribers. Or a few million, more like.

The MacBook has a new baby

Without any real warning, Apple just announced a totally new MacBook. "We challenged ourselves to reinvent the notebook," said Tim Cook.

What the MacBook does is to really suck the most it can out of Intel's new Broadwell M architecture improvements and recent screen innovations to make an incredibly portable device.

Apple says it's the "world's most energy efficient notebook." It also makes a MacBook Air look chunky, at just 13.1mm at its thickest point. That's 25% thinner than the Air.

The brains of the MacBook are 67% smaller too, letting Apple jam-pack the rest of the body with battery. You'll get up to 10 hours off a charge even thought the thing doesn't weigh all that much more than a first-gen iPad at 900g (2 pounds).

It has a Retina 2304 x 1440 pixel 12-inch screen too. Where you pay for all this tech is connectivity. There's just one USB-C and a headphone jack on the MacBook. The USB-C port can be used for everything from charging to outputting video to connecting a hard drive, but there's only one of them.

Bear this in mind before you bin your MacBook Pro. It's currently listed as 'coming soon'. We'll be back with release date updates soon.

This is clearly just a first-gen go at a new laptop format too: the Air and Pro lines aren't going anywhere just yet. And on that point…

More MacBooks, new technology and Apple love

MacBook Air and Pro are getting a quiet upgrade

Don't fancy the new MacBook? Some of the Pro and Air models have just been given a light spruce-up too.

The Air models and 13-inch MacBook Pro have been bumped up to Broadwell-generation processors. Until now they've been using Haswell CPUs: a bit slower, a bit less efficient. Along with this, you now get Thunderbolt 2.0, which is a whole mess faster, with up to 20 Gbps bandwidth.

The Pros and the 13-inch Airs also get much faster SSDs, completing the a trinity of pretty standard, pretty unimaginative, but also pretty important annual updates.

Lucky 13-inch MacBook Pros get one extra new feature. They have been given the new ForceTouch trackpad seen in the new MacBook design.

Apple just redesigned its keyboard and trackpad

Call us big old nerds if you like (well it is our job), but two of the most interesting things at the Apple Watch event were not to do with the Watch or how slim the new MacBook is, but its keyboard and trackpad.

Apple's engineering bods have redesigned both to try and get rid of two niggling problems with laptops: trackpad dead zones and wobbly keyboard keys. Now, you may not have thought of these as problems, but your current MacBook Air might just feel rubbish as a result after you've tried the new MacBook.

Instead of having a 'scissor' mechanism under each key, the new MacBook keyboard has a butterfly one. This makes the key more stable, and means the key moves straight down even when you apply pressure at its edge.

Don't care? Well how about the ForceTouch trackpad? Rather than using a hinged pad, this new one has four pressure sensitive pads at each end of it with the action relayed using 'Taptic' feedback motors.

Now, the current MacBooks using this sort of software-based feedback already, but this means you can use the entire TouchPad as a button, including the top inch that at present does zilch.

Pressure sensitivity also allows for different button effects depending on how hard you press. It's a trackpad gesture without, well, the gesture.

Still not impressed? How about the new keyboard backlight? It now uses separate LEDs for each key to get you more focused light. It also is part of the MacBook's super slim design style. If that doesn't do the trick, we give up.

Apple is getting into medial research

As well as the bonus Watch details and the new MacBook, Apple just announced ResearchKit, a platform that can help patients log data about their conditions for research and monitoring. It's open source too, which is about as un-Apple as moves get. It's brazen altruism at it's finest, not that this'll do anything to harm Apple's public image.

It has been working with a whole bunch of medical research institutions, including Oxford University, on creating apps that patients can use to log data. We heard about heart health monitoring, diabetes, asthma and breast cancer, but it was the Parkinson's app that showed how it'll work directly.

It'll let patients perform the sort of status checks that you might normally go to a GP for. Your iPhone's accelerometer/gyroscope will check your gait while you walk 20 steps, and monitor for tremors in your voice as you say 'Ahhhhh' into the mic. "We're incredibly confident that ResearchKit is going to transform medical research," Apple said during the talk.

Oh, and we're promised "Apple will not see your data". Although we await with dread the day ResearchKit gets hacked.

Apple has sold an awful lot of iPhones, again

As ever with an Apple event we got to hear a few facts and figures on top of the hardware and software bits. Apple has now sold 700,000,000 iPhones. That's roughly one for the each person on the Earth circa 1750, or 29 for every person living in Australia (well, according to the census records anyway).

Tim Cook boasted that this was a growth of 49 per cent on the year before.

It also makes the 25 million lifetime sales of the Apple TV box look pretty puny, but perhaps that'll change now that it costs just $69, £59, AU$109.

Everyone loves CarPlay, sort of

For a while it seemed like the fuss around CarPlay had been and gone in an instant when it arrived a year ago, but apparently it's going great guns according to Tim Cook.

He boasted that "every major car manufacturer" has signed up to the platform, and said we'd see 40 new CarPlay models by the end of the year.

While we imagine those 'major' car brands may be heavily US-skewed, we hope to see Apple's connected platform start to drip down to base models. Not just for those who could splash out for a Apple Watch Edition on a whim. We'll see, eh?