Yes, you can tell Apple Watch what kind of workout you're about to do and it will record it. But what's described on that page is automatically detecting and recording a type of workout based on motion. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer.
Yes, you can track sleep with a third-party Apple Watch app if you're careful about when you recharge the device. But that page says "your Fitbit tracker can record your time spent in light, deep & REM sleep, as well as your time awake, then distills that information in easy-to-reach graphs in the Fitbit app."
There have been niche products that supposedly tracked sleep stages but they've been reviewed as inaccurate. Fitbit has unique ownership of this technology and major players haven't even claimed to compete with it.
That page doesn't say specifically, but my recollection is that it's otherwise every 10 minutes if you're still. In non-workout mode they don't measure heart rate if you're moving; presumably not accurate enough.
All-day heart-rate monitoring can only be claimed by devices with a battery life of at least a day.
They swooped in but wouldn't say that they won. At least in the UK I seem to see more people with a Fitbit than with an Apple Watch.
When the iPhone first came out, the way you measured your heart rate was by putting your finger over the camera on the back of the phone.
Right, but that's why the products become commoditized. The inventors get an early burst of success and easy money, but everyone else figures out how to make similar products very quickly.
Even smartphones are commoditized. The iPhone and the Samsung phones are the rare examples of commodity hardware that can beat the competition on the strength of their software experiences. The other companies are fighting tooth and nail in a textbook example of a commoditized market where the profits are difficult to eke out.
Actually, no. Pulse-oximeters were always quite cheap. Also, Casio had heart rate (although not continuous) monitors on some of their watches for many years.
The technology component of Jawbone or Fitbit was, even in 2007, very very basic and hardly novel. There is literally nothing in Jawbone or Fitbit that is super novel: their sensors aren't ground breaking, their algorithms are (presumably) meh, etc.
VC's hope that these companies will mature to become superstars and achieve the level of tech quality of Qualcomm, FB, GE, Intel, Google, etc. in their respective markets. This didn't happen with Jawbone or Fitbit.