Basis B1 Watch

» see mybasis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the basis b1 was the kind of thing american tech reviewers bought at launch and turkish tech buyers read about a year later. it landed in late 2012 at two hundred dollars, a chunky black plastic wristwatch with a green led on the underside that read your heart rate continuously. by then i was twenty eight, in ankara, not spending two hundred dollars on a heart-rate wristband when a cheap step-counter did the shallow version of the same thing. the b1 was for the audience that read techcrunch daily.

what made the product actually interesting was the sensor stack. the wristband carried an optical blood-flow monitor plus a three-axis accelerometer, alongside a perspiration sensor and skin-plus-ambient temperature reads. this was more sensor variety on a single wrist device than jawbone or fitbit was shipping in 2013. basis science had spent seven years getting it to work, having started as pulsetracer in 2005 and rebranded in 2011.

the b1's audience was small (early wearable adopters mostly in the US and canada) and the price kept it that way. what pulled it into the historical record was the intel acquisition. in march 2014 intel bought the whole company for a reported hundred million dollars and folded basis into its new devices group. the b1 kept shipping as the intel-owned product for another year before the peak launched to replace it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch story is more complicated than the marketing suggested. basis science had announced the b1 in january 2011 and then spent almost two years failing to actually ship it, partly because of an unresolved patent lawsuit from bodymedia, partly because the sensor stack was harder to productionize than the demo showed. paying customers started receiving units in late 2012. the product finally reached retail in early 2013.

reviews at retail were generally positive on the technology and generally critical of the software. the mybasis.com web dashboard was the only way to see your data at any real depth. the mobile companion apps for ios and android were later additions and never had feature parity with the web. this was a common shape for wearables of the era.

~ the inheritance ~

intel replaced the b1 with the basis peak in november 2014 and quietly stopped promoting the older device. the b1 kept syncing through 2015 and into 2016, but the peak recall in august 2016 pulled the entire mybasis backend into its wind-down. the sync service went dark 31 december 2016 alongside the peak's own kill date. b1 units still on wrists became clock-only devices from that new year's day forward. offline reconstruction efforts by former users have kept some units running with local sync workarounds, but there was no official afterlife.

the technical dna outlived the product. continuous optical heart-rate through a green led became universal within two years, first on apple watch and then across the industry. the basis b1 was arguably the first mainstream wristband to try it as a core feature rather than a spot-check. by then intel had exited consumer wearables entirely and moved on.

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