14 DAY TRIAL // This week, Microsoft released a dedicated MSN Health & Fitness application that integrates with Apple’s HealthKit framework (while at the same time rivals Apple's own Health app) and delivers a massive array of features, perhaps one too many, allowing users to stay in shape and eat healthy foods.
MSN Health & Fitness is admittedly nice to look at, but it’s hardly intuitive. In typical fashion, the Redmond software company crammed in one too many features, making a mess from what is otherwise an admirable effort.
Packed to the rafters
The free app lets you find more than a thousand exercise and workout videos, nutritional and medical references, diet trackers, exercise counters, and pretty much everything you can think of to help you stay in shape and lead a healthy life.
There’s a nifty medical section in there that offers the human body as an interactive 3D model, which you can expand and zoom into for a clearer view of different organs and such.
Again, the effort is worthy of our appreciation, but the implementation isn’t exactly top-notch. Not even the blazingly-fast processor inside an iPhone 6 Plus can cope with the app’s pretentious graphics, resulting in a sluggish experience whenever the user wants to interact with the anatomy feature.
The medical area lets you punch in symptoms to see possible health conditions with the Symptom Checker, which, sadly, does the same thing you would: look stuff up (on Healthline Networks). Don’t be alarmed if it turns out you need to see the doctor. That’s basically what anyone will tell you no matter what symptoms you think you may have.
HealthKit Integrated
In addition to allowing you to automatically sync your trackers across MSN Health & Fitness with your health apps (and the web), all your tracker data is stored in HealthKit. Needless to point out, MSN Health & Fitness rivals Apple's own Health app.
The built-in pedometer uses the iPhone’s M7 coprocessor to “continuously track, analyze and receive insights on your daily steps taken,” and the run tracker “records your time, distance, pace and calories burned while you run, bike and do other outdoor activities.” Both these features are iPhone-only.
MSN Health & Fitness is supported in English, Bokmål, Norwegian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.
Download MSN Health & Fitness through us using the quick QR code tool we’ve set up for you on our mobile reviews section. Test the app yourselves and let us know what you think in the comments section below or on Twitter.
