So I did receive a Jawbone Up wristband for Christmas! Yay! So far it has not suffered a fate of death as experienced by some people. Apparently issues have arisen after 10 or so days of use - more info about the Jawbone Up issues and no questions asked refund. I have only had it for just under a week but I have charged it fully and it appears to be maintaining its charge so fingers crossed it keeps on working!
Initial impressions from me are that it is a lot bulkier than I thought it would be. OK it's not massive but I notice it. When putting on long sleeved shirts or jackets, or gloves - again I notice it. It gets in the way. I am getting more used to it, and I have been wearing pretty much well 100% of the time but initially, as I don't wear a watch, I think I have noticed it more than I should have. Rest assured this is not a show stopper ;-). My personal issue only!
In terms of functionality. You put it on, you walk about, or sleep, and then you sync the data to you iPhone so it can be used within the free Jawbone app that you install on your phone. It couldn't be simpler. You can set goals, such as the number of hours you wish to sleep, or the number of steps you wish to take in a day, and after syncing data with your phone it then provides you nice daily graphs of your daily activity, as can be seen below.
The above screen shot shows you the daily breakdown of your sleep, activity and food consumption. I find the food section of the app a little limiting so I don't actually use it. You can basically track the food you are eating by taking photographs of it and uploading. I would use the food consumption functionality if there was a little more science behind it, as an example highlighting the number of calories you have probably consumed. Below is a more detailed breakdown of the daily activity graph. This is only until 11:02 am as I was testing the accuracy of distance within the app against RunKeeper. More on this later.
Battery life seems really good, assuming that it continues to maintain it's charge! It takes roughly 80 minutes to fully charge and so far I think I should get about 7 days on a single charge.
What is really missing from the application though, or a browser based interface, is access to export your data so you can track trends and reports across time. Within the application you only have access to a timeline where you can scroll left and right to see your previous days activity. It I want to compare the activities I did 4 weeks ago with what I am doing now, there is simply not an easy way to do this. It would really be great if I had access to reports over time, such that I could really see that I was becoming more active, or whether or not I have activity spikes that drop back in time. This should not be the goal of the Jawbone Up, rather it should encourage you to remain active and become increasingly more active. Weekly reports and monthly reports, highlighting continued progress, would allow me to do this. I think this is really lacking from the application.
I have been a huge fan of RunKeeper for a year and a half now. In fact RunKeeper was the first thing I blogged about on this blog. I don't use it as regularly as I have previously, but I did use it the other day to test the accuracy of the Jawbone Up. I performed the following walk:
Along the following route: (as RunKeeper uses the GPS they can provide very nice route maps in the summary reports of your activity)
and as it turns out, even though the Jawbone Up doesn't use GPS it is pretty accurate with respect to distance travelled. The above Jawbone Up activity picture shows 4.85 kilometers distance travelled and RunKeeper shows 5.25 kilometers. The Jawbone report is for the whole day up until 11am, however most of the activity is from the walk measured by RunKeepr as well. So distance covered is reasonably accurate. I much prefer the under reporting within Jawbone Up compared to if it reported figures more than they were!
Another odd thing about the Jawbone application is that your activity data is stored in the cloud as opposed to within the app. OK so there are community features with the Jawbone Up App, so I can understand that data will have to maintained on a server somewhere in order to share it with others, but why on earth, if I scroll back through my time line of activity does the app have to download data from a server. Surely the data should be cached within the application so I can look at my activity without any data access? Not sure why they would have designed the app this way? But if I put my iPhone into flight mode I cannot look at any of my historical data within the app. The data has been there previously as it is synced from the wristband itself. This is really odd.
This may have sounded negative on the whole, however all in all I am a fan of the Jawbone Up. Once on your wrist you don't have to do anything for it to track your activity. Unlike RunKeeper where you have to activity start and stop the application prior to, and after, each activity. The Jawbone App just silently collects data. however what it does need to make it far better and a much stronger product on the whole is:
- Offline access to your data! Why on earth do I need a data connection to look at my timeline within the application?
- Far better reporting options to allow me to monitor my health progress.
- Better food resources. Allow people to track calories consumed as opposed to simply photograph food and tag restaurant locations.
So I am a fan and I will continue to use it. I hope to see product improvements moving forwards, but given the Jawbone Up hardware issues, they might be a while away!
So definitely worth a try if they fix the hardware problems! Right now I definitely would not be buying one off eBay or the like. you have no idea if you would be getting a broken one or not. If you want to try, wait until they start shipping them again and get one from a retailer with a returns policy, just in case!
Cheers
m
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