Unfortunately this did not happen with most fitness trackers. There's no successful reverse engineering of Fitbit's, Misfit's or Jawebone's Bluetooth protocol yet. Although the user base and interest may be much higher than that of spectrometers.
I joined the work on reverse engineering Fitbit's protocol but the encryption isn't hacked yet.
I second that! It's an unnecessary date of expiry for hardware. You see that in every fitness armband and more and more apps. In two years ahead it could end up as a useless piece of electronics.
In the past we used cloud features for offline tracking in AR applications because an iPhone 3GS wasn't capable of real time pose reconstruction. But today it seems more like a lock-in and a way to collect data. A quad-core cpu on a phone should do most tasks offline.
No, I'm not saying it does. Single fixed function devices seem to have a longer Mean Time Between Replacement.
I would argue that you're comparing apples to oranges here. Say Fitbit (of which I'm a user) came out with a new improved version that's more accurate, lasts longer between charges and tracks more aspects of my health. Would I replace it - yes.
When the device is part of a service, when you look holistically at the product as a service then I believe concepts such as 'date of expiry for hardware', 'it could end up as a useless piece of electronics.' are moot.
When you upgrade to the lasted version of an installed software application, and the previous .exe can't read the new file format is it 'a useless piece of software?'. Technically yes, so what is different here?
BTW: Surface / PixelsSnse was the most horrible purchase i / my university ever did. Bought a Samsung SUR40 in January 2012 for about 8000 €. Received it two month later. Another 3 month later Microsoft renamed it to PixelSense and stopped the development. No Windows 8, no Internet Explorer 11 Touch. We use it as a table.
