This Fitness Tracker Is a Selfie Button for Some Reason

YOU’RE ON A run and your iPod is strapped to your arm when a slow jam comes on. That tempo won’t do, so you skip to the next track. Instead of blindly swiping at the touchscreen, you press the button on the Misfit Flash on your wrist. Or, you’re traveling with friends and you want to take a group photo—but a good one, not a throwaway selfie with your arm in the frame. You prop the camera phone up nearby and push the Misfit Flash button. Click, flash—photo taken.

This is the world of gadget interactivity as imagined by wearables company Misfit, whose latest product offering is the $20 Flash Link. The Misfit Flash Link and companion Link app use Bluetooth to essentially turn the plastic diskinto a one-button remote control for anything your phone or computer can already do. Soon enough, it’ll also use IFTTT(chains of conditional statements) to let users program even more specific actions, like pushing the Flash button to fire off an email or tweet when you hit a mile mark on a run.

That may sound sound like feature creep for a company founded on the premise of keeping fitness tracking simple—the Flash only contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth chip, and a battery—but for Tim Golnik, Misfit’s VP of product and design at Misfit, it’s part of a strategy to win the war for the wrist. “You could have an Apple Watch, or wear jewelry to express yourself,” he says. “We know people are looking for extra functionality to interact with the world.” Misfit’s designers know some of this because users are literally asking for these features, through Twitter and the company’s online community. Misfit already had the hardware in place; they just needed to build software and an app to go with it.

Adding functionality sounds tech-y. But Flash Link is also about the satisfaction of pushing a physical button. Controlling music, taking a photo, and jumping to slides in a presentation are all actions that once required the push of a button but now entail tapping a touchscreen. And the easy click may inspire selfie-haters to jump on the Kim Kardashian bandwagon, Golnik says: “You can fight it, or you can join them."