I recently acquired a HidrateSpark smart water bottle, and while it’s been fun to experiment with, I’m not sure I’m 100 percent sold on the concept of a water bottle tracking how much liquid I intake.
The bottle itself is straightforward. You need to charge a smart puck device in the bottom, and then it can read how much water you’ve drunk from the bottle each time you take a sip. It also features a light on its base that flashes a custom colour. So far, I’ve found it to be quite accurate, but of course, if you want to track all the liquids you’ve consumed, you’ll need to either enter them into the connected app manually or intake them via the Hidratespark.
The connected app is laid out well enough, but it won’t win any design awards. Still, it’s functional and easy to read, so it has that going for it. The main page shows you how much water you’ve drunk in a day and how much you’ve swallowed over the week.
At the bottom of the page, you can see your water drinking goals and how many bottles you need to make that happen. You can also dive deeper into your drinking history and see how much water you’ve drunk compared to your friends if any of them also have these bottles.
On the ‘Bottles’ page, you can add more bottles to your account, snooze your reminders or change the colour of the reminder. You can change the hue to either be a rainbow or one of five preset options: white, teal, green, orange and magenta. If you want to customize it any further, it will cost you $7 for the ‘Glow Studio’ upgrade.
I don’t hate this since functionally, nothing about the bottle is really behind a paywall. That said, it feels a little scummy, especially since this is a $70 USD (roughly $90 CAD) water bottle, which, in its own right, feels like a little much for this product.
The last thing I’ll mention is that the bottle feels fairly premium; it’s got a nice rubber bottom and a robust lid, plus it kept my water cold all day long. I’ll also mention that this large bottle takes up nearly as much space as a litre bottle, but it can only hold 620 mL.
However, when it comes down to it, this seems like an outrageous price to pay for a water bottle, let alone one with an app that looks like it came out ten years ago. Previous to this, my water drinking goal was to get down to a one-litre Nalgene bottle per day. This was a lot less of a hassle and cost roughly $16.
Update 31/01/2022: I’m still using the HydraSpark weeks later. However, I’ve stopped using it to track my water intake, and instead just enjoy using the nice lid. It’s got a nice sized opening and locks down making it safe to use at a desk.