Earlier this Summer, I received a HidrateSpark PRO water bottle as a gift. It is a fascinating piece of “smart” technology. The bottle itself is a decent piece of engineering and a somewhat practical product. But the overall product concept just strikes me as mostly contrived. The associated app is almost comical in its attempts to turn a piece of hardware into a “service”.
Nice Bottle
The black bottle both looks good and feels good to the touch. When standing, it is a bit wobbly due to its rather narrow base, but not so bad that it is a problem on a stable flat surface. In general, this bottle prefers stable flat surfaces, it turns out.
The bottom of the bottle holds the glowing light that is used to remind the user to drink, as well as for some other purposes. It seems to light up when put down after taking a sip of water, but that behavior does not appear entirely consistent. The light is quite strong and can be programmed with a variety of colors, including animations.
The bottle is insulated, even though at first glance it might not seem that way since the walls are actually quite thin. For comparison, my Kleen Kanteen insulated tumbler and thermos mug have much more substantial walls that clearly scream “insulation”. I made a single unscientific test to see how well the insulation works: in normal room temperature (about 25°C), cold water went from about 7°C to 15°C in eight hours. Basically, it was still cool at the end of the experiment, which is decent enough. Additionally, when filling the bottle with ice water on a really hot summer day (30 degress or more), you could still find ice in it after several hours out in the sun. Conclusion: the insulation works well enough without creating a clumsy thermos-style bottle.
However, I do find the plastic cap a bit questionable. It is quite sturdy, but it is plastic. When you drink, you nose goes straight into the opened lid in way that just feels slightly off. The lid is spring loaded, so that it opens all the way by self when you press the open button. Nice. The lock function on the lid is easy to operate and prevents accidental openings. The lid does let the insulation down – it is clear that that is where the majority of the heat gets into the bottle.
Honestly, the bottle itself would make for a good product even without its “smart” functionality.
Smart Measurement
The point of the bottle is that it can track how much you drink. You connect the bottle to a smartphone over Bluetooth, install their app, and now you have a smart bottle! Every time you put it down after taking a drink, it will detect how much you drank, and tally it up. It appears the bottle is doing the accounting on its own even if the connected phone is not around.
The method used to measure the amount of liquid in the bottle is honestly clever. It is a scale. Weight translates directly to volume for water, and anything you would put in a water bottle like this for tracking would be of density very close to water (the instructions even note that you should avoid “pulpy drinks”). In this wat, nothing has to intrude into the water container, and it is hard to imagine a simple and robust system that would measure the height of the liquid (such a solution would be more general, admittedly).
The drawback of the sensing method is that requires a stable, flat, and even surface for the measurement to work, which does impact the usability a bit.
It strikes me that it would have been fun to also have a temperature sensor – but I can also see that it might be hard to do a reliable external measurement of the temperature inside an insulated vessel. The intrusion might kind of defeat the purpose of the insulation.
Companion App
The companion app makes the most out of the simple idea and single sensor. It asks for some basic personal data like age, height, weight, and level of activity, and comes up with a daily goal for “hydration”. It then measures progress towards this goal, like any other “health measurement” app.
However, I think there is a missing function in the app – why doesn’t it display the current volume of liquid in the bottle? Given all the other more or less pointless numbers displayed, this would be an obvious addition.
Since you might not be drinking from the tracked bottle all the time, it is possible to manually add additional drinks to the app logging:
If the app sees that you are not drinking enough (from the bottle), it will start to pop up alerts on your phone. The messages are quite varied and funny, at least the first few time. The bottle will also glow to give you a non-phone-based reminder.
However. In the end it is just too much.
The app takes the tracking and goals concept to a level that goes beyond the reasonable into the silly and hilarious. It appears to want to make drinking into the primary goal of the day, with lots of different scores (unclear what they mean) and even gamified trophies. Please.
And a social function? Come on! Even though that last one could be used for some interesting drinking competitions, I guess…
It gets worse though, as the app locks anything beyond the basic functionality behind a subscription. A subscription that costs something like 20% of the price of the physical item per year. I guess that is roughly the classic price for software maintenance for a perpetual license back in the days we sold such… but this is a consumer product, not business-to-business critical software.
A subscription gives you the ability to add more different types of drinks in the manual tracker. And access to more variations for the glowing ring at the bottom of the bottle. Some kind of unspecified “hydration score”. And a bunch of wallpapers. Ridiculous!
Overall, the app just totally overdoes it and is trying hard to do an upsell to new features and additional bottles. Just tacky. It should offer a simple mode that only reports the liquid intake and removes all the other distractions. Indeed, that is all the app ever needs to do in my opinion.
Product Concept
The subscription component of the app brings me neatly to the overall product concept, which seems contrived and forced. For me, proper product innovation is about solving real problems for the customer. The process starts by finding the problem, and then coming up with a solution to the problem.
In this case, it seems that the process started with the solution – “let’s make a smart water bottle”. With an app. And a subscription model. And gamification. Fitting in with the whole trend of measuring people’s health. Fully hype-compatible. Hit all the boxes in buzzword bingo. I guess next step is adding AI in some form… Once the product concept was done, the designers appears to have looked around for a problem to attach themselves to.
Admittedly, this would not exactly be the first time consumer goods are sold by creating demand for something people had no idea they needed. There is an obsession with “hydration” in the US (we get quite a bit of that in internal newsletters at work), but I find it hard to believe that people forgetting to drink is a major problem. Admittedly, I have read some online reviews for the Hidrate products online that do indicate that this has helped a few users.
It is not a problem that I have, but I am not all people. Also, I do not find measurements/quantification like this particularly interesting. I believe in just listening to your body and following what it tells you. I am not a super-athlete having to optimize intakes and outputs to achieve peak performance, but a regular person who tries to keep reasonably fit and healthy.
Practicality?
Having tested the measurement functions for a few days, I can only conclude that it requires some special circumstances to work well.
Working from home is a good fit for the bottle. It is easy to use the bottle as the primary water intake method at home – it just replaces another bottle I usually use for that purpose. The office has a nice even desk to put it down on, and the measurements worked perfectly. Manually adding additional drinks like coffee to the liquid count is easy, since I use a thermos mug of a known size for the working day’s coffee.
Working from the office is less practical. You need to take the bottle along on the train and back, and use it for all drinking. Which is harder since we have this nice fridge with drinks in the office, and any time you take a can from it you would have to add it manually in the app. Drinking coffee from the coffee machine requires estimating the size of each cup. Going out for lunch to a restaurant requires even more manual entry of estimated water glass sizes. Conclusion is that this works quite poorly.
Using it while working out did not work out. First of all, turns out that the slightly angled bottle holder on an exercise bike is not to its liking and will not result in any measurements. This means that it cannot track the intake during a run.
Second, if I just go from the bike straight to filling the bottle, it will miss that it ever emptied out as there was no measurement point. To work correctly, the bottle requires you to follow its usage protocol and put it down on an even straight surface before you refill. And preferably after every usage. It was quite happy at the weights, as the floor there was sufficiently even for it to work:
Finally, I took the bottle with me on our vacation cruise to the Mediterranean. I ditched the app as it seemed pointless, but the bottle worked very well. Filling it up with ice water in the morning before going out on a city excursion, it provided refreshingly cool water at least up to lunchtime or later (in weather where the temperature often rose above 35 degrees C). It is a good thermos bottle with a very practical wide mouth that makes putting in ice a breeze. My Kleen Kanteen thermos mug could have done the same – but with less liquid in a bulkier form factor.
Conclusions
The smart bottle idea is contrived and the execution, in particular the app, is just too over-the-top to be possible to recommend. The bottle is good as a physical design, but you should be able to find just as a good a bottle without the overhead of the smart functionality. For some narrow use cases and needs, the smart water bottle might make sense, but in general it is just too much of a bother to keep accurate track of water intake.