Personal anecdote: I had three Jawbone fitness trackers that stopped working within months. Granted, two of them were replaced by Jawbone, but after a third I stopped bothering. The bracelet design was thin and elegant as opposed to the bulky Fitbits. Inside, jawbone bracelets had several very small PCBs arranged in a row, connected by wires, with a protection layer of epoxy glue or something. The whole construction was flexible but - I imagine - pretty prone to wear and tear. Whereas Fitbit went for hard casing design that was inserted into the rubber strap. To me it is a story of finding the right balance between aesthetics, reliability, and functionality
I can also attest to the poor quality of the UP bands. I'm currently on my 5th band in 3 years. One lost band and 4 replacements later, I'm really only using them to continue with the sleep tracking.
I discovered early on that the step counting wasn't really that great of a feature or selling point. I made it a habit to inform people around me that really the best feature and the only reason why I continued to use the UP was for sleep tracking.
To me, the perfect balance between aesthetics, reliability and functionality is the Withings Activité. I've used both Fitbit and jawbone up previously. And I'm incredibly satisfied with my Withings watch.
If it's breaking just because it was flexed or got wet, they're doing something wrong. Flexible printed circuits [1] have been around for decades. The problem may be that they had to use commodity surface mount ICs, instead of getting ones with bigger pads that could take more stress.
Same here, I got one, it broke, got it replaced, and the replacement broke. At that point I just gave up, but my spouse has gone through about five of them. To be fair they do keep replacing them, but it has to be just about the worst quality product of anything on the market.
For Jawbone, Fitbit et al. the hardware has been commoditized, the software has limited utility and the whole 10,000 steps a day seems like a fad. It's incredibly hard to maintain users once the honeymoon period ends.
Personally, I'm long on UA, but I still have some lingering doubts about their acquisitions with ConnectedFitness and the their Healthbox or whatever.
I'm a pretty competitive triathlete and all of my gear is Garmin or some other niche specialty company. I love it and it works but the market space is limited to athletes like me.
lol... every triathlete is "pretty competitive" ;). My wife and I switch to running and are using garmin vivoactives. The battery life is amazing and works great swimming (no gps)
My non-active friends mostly ditch their fitbit style devices after a few months. Its either an apple watch, microsoft band (not joking) or some type of running/multisport watch.
The Microsoft Band 2 is actually extremely nice. It isn't tied down by being forced to run Android Wear or Apple Watch OS or Samsung Gear, and instead runs "Microsoft Wearables" which is closer in design and lightness to the kind of realtime OS design you see in Pebbles.
It has decent battery life (48h claimed, meets the requirement of >24h real world, but not >7 days real world), it is physically small and light, but is also a typical smartwatch.
It has the right blend of both being an activity tracker and a smartwatch, but the only reason I won't buy one is it is insufficiently water proof. The only devices that will survive true day to day wear are currently being made by Garmin. Nothing that Fitbit or Jawbone makes is beyond IPX7, and all of Garmin's stuff (coming from the professional competition device pedigree that they do) has actual water rating marks (at least 50 meters, some models exceed that).
So yeah, I've been recommending Garmin gizmos lately. Vivofit 3, $99 without heart rate tracking, battery life of a year with a standard coin battery, or Vivosmart HR, $149, battery life of 5 days, has heart rate tracking, both support Garmin Connect, thus every major app and ecosystem.
I think the only uncompetitive triathlete is someone who goes for a ride, takes a tumble into a wet ditch, and has to walk their bike back onto the road.
Every single triathlete I’ve met has been fixated on gear, performance, and age-group rankings.
Fitbits been aiming for the fitness watch market, recognizing that's where a lot of people will go, for some time. Sure they still have simple trackers like the Flex, but the multifunction watches (Surge and now Blaze) have been around for a while.
Ok, I bough a suunto last year, and I have been hesitating between it a a garmin. It's not a big deal, eventually what ever does the job is good enough, I just want to run. But as a geek I like gadget review :) So, why do you prefer garmins ?
Wondering about the 10k steps. I'm not hitting it everyday, but I feel that if I consistently did, I'd be a fit person with enough activity to be healthy from that angle.
How's that a fad? Is there any research showing otherwise?
Heart rate is the main thing that matters from a health perspective. The 10000 step thing didn't come from any research, it was probably a guesstimate about how much you should power walk to get your heart rate high enough for a high enough period of time. Personally I've been power walking about 8km a day for a few months, and it's doing wonders. But what's important is the pace and your heart rate (mine peaks at 160, which is okay considering that I'm not running). Oh, and eating well is a must. Personally I don't crave junkfood and shitty soda anymore.
Apparently, that number doesn't have any real research behind it to begin with. What's being questioned is the seemingly arbitrary number itself, not the concepts, as far as I can tell.
Of course getting out and walking is good for your health. Keep it up!
I am a bit of a tech nerd and I like trying out different options. I had a fitbit for a year, and thought it was cool but pretty useless and unused after 2-3 weeks...
A few years later I decided to try another one, I tried the jawbone (this was 3 months ago). The experience was terrible. The app was really buggy, the connecting to my bluetooth never worked (arguably bluetooth the protocol's fault, but then again my fitbit circumvented that by having a dongle), and after only ONE week it stopped working entirely. This was the jawbone UP3.
I am not at all surprised that they are losing in this very competitive market. Fitbit is doing a great job, hiring great people from what I can tell, and Jawbone just cannot keep up.
I was astonished when I visited their site a few months ago and saw almost nothing but fitness trackers. The earphones that made them famous were almost completely unmentioned!
Commodity fitness trackers are a terrible business to be in, I almost fell for the hype a few years ago. As a user I never saw it, couldn't even get myself to use them consistently and I really liked the idea. And I even heard an investor say (regarding FitBit), "After 3 months they [the customers] just stop wearing it."
If you're not top 2 or 3 you're probably toast.
> Jawbone raised a new $165 million round of funding in January. The company's CEO Hosain Rahman told Tech Insider a few months ago that the company plans to use that money to develop clinical-grade fitness trackers.
If the financing is going to help them lead to a major pivot, that's great. I don't know what "clinical-grade fitness trackers", but if they want to redirect their resources and expertise towards a market where they can charge more for hardware, that'd be a smart move.
Maybe they can contribute to elder care somehow. Fall detection has been done, but how well? I always thought physiotherapy could be a decent use case. After a shoulder injury I remember being able to move my arm 10 degrees above parallel, then 15 degrees the next day, etc etc. Could have probably helped my therapist optimize treatments and physio routine while communicating this data over the internet. Maybe "e-physiotherapists" could be a thing.
Anyways I hope the company finds a better product/market fit, and survives long enough to do so.
To answer your question about the difference between "clinical grade" and "consumer grade" hardware, consider [1] - where FitBit-measured heartrates differed from actual heartrates by about 30bpm. As a doctor I looked into getting a fitbit but realised they could not live up to the ideal of heartrate tracking that I wanted.
To be fair this is a hard problem. Even the pulse oximeters we use in our hospitals have a hard time picking up certain heart rhythms. The only way to be sure is to get an ECG done!
I wouldn't necessarily say that the fad has ended. I would say that since fitness trackers were introduced several years ago, early adopters were quick to realize the limitations of them. However with marketing/advertisements, they became more widely visible and available to the main market. A new pool of consumers opened up but came to the same realization of the poor quality and commoditization of step counters/fitness trackers.
I see it as some combined effect that is manifested in GoPro/FitBit stock (i.e. tanking). The reality is that the average person doesn't do any amount of extreme activity such that the step counters provides any additional value. But the lifestyle aspects shown in the ads convinces people that getting one will change their lives.
Not OP but I personally use Strava [1] for Running/Cycling and a Wahoo HR Monitor [2]. Strava works on Android and iOS and is free. Wahoo HR monitor is only $50 and works great.
Given that their fitness trackers routinely stopped working after 3-6 months and had to be replaced by them at their own cost... not surprised.
It's a dying bit of kit, easily replaced by more capable smart watches, and while single-function tools can be great there isn't enough they can do to compete at a high level, they'd have to make them almost disposable in cost.
I loved my UP24. Then it died after six months. But then I loved my replacement UP24... until it died after a few months too.
The beauty of a single function device is that I didn't want a watch or an Uber app or whatever on my wrist. And better yet, without all those things the battery lasted two weeks at a time, and it was a nice unobtrusive non-statement on my wrist. I really didn't mind the price, if only they could've made the damn thing work for more than a few months...
Sort of off-topic, but what fitness gadgets do you all like?
I used a FitBit One for many years until I washed it recently and it died. Honestly, I never really looked at the data unless I expected it to be anomalous, even though I religiously carried it with me at all times. I bike 8-10 hours a week, so a few steps aren't really making a health difference for me.
The big thing that annoyed me about FitBit is that Apple has a reasonably useful thing for collecting all your health information on your iPhone, but FitBit refuses to participate (no doubt because it would cost software engineering time and reduce the number of "premium" subscribers).
All-day heart-rate tracking would be interesting, but I already wear a watch and I'm not going to wear a second one. (And I doubt you'll talk me out of wearing my Speedmaster. Maybe Patek makes a fitness-tracking watch :P)
Everything sleep-tracking related has terrible reviews, from my research. I would love to know exactly how much time I spend in bed, but nothing will collect the data for me without buggy apps and overcomplicated made-up analysis and whatnot ("you spend 3.7 minutes in REM" uh huh.)
I'm strongly considering just putting a pressure sensor under one of my bed's legs, connecting it to some WiFi-enabled resistance reader, and using that. It's surprising to me that nobody makes a product in this space that does one thing and does it well. I am also surprised that people like wearing things to bed. Like I'll remember to do that.
For biking, I think I already own every gadget there is. I've seen that there are now muscle oxygenation sensors (presumably for measuring when you're riding at lactate threshold), but the reviews say the devices basically just return random numbers and you might as well use a power meter and do an FTP test every couple months (which is good, but some days I feel like I can ride at my FTP forever, so I wonder how accurate these 20 minute tests are).
All in all it seems like people are interested in collecting data about themselves, so companies are racing to build devices to fill the gap with random numbers :P
The most frustrating part is the isolation of the different fitness social networks. I have family and friends using Runkeeper, Strava, etc whereas I have to use Garmin Connect with my Garmin device(s).
I have found Tapiriik[1] to be invaluable in keeping these different apps/fitness networks synchronized.
Garmin Connect devices are supported by the major ecosystems, Runkeeper, Strava, the MyFitnessPal/MapMyRun ecosystem, and the Runtastic ecosystem.
It also connects to both Google Fit and Apple HealthKit to do cross-ecosystem syncing when there isn't native support.
Generally, if your app/ecosystem doesn't support Garmin, Fitbit, Jawbone (which is now dead), and Google Fit/Apple Healthkit/Microsoft Health (for phone driven pedometer), you don't exist.
Also, Tapiriik is basically pointless: Google Fit/Apple Healthkit/Microsoft Health were all invented to break up the closed ecosystem bullshit. The data is mine, either give it to me via a public major API, or I'll let someone else track it for me.
Garmin Connect can auto-upload to Strava and TrainingPeaks (which are what I use). I have an Edge 1000 and my ride is on all three sites before I even make it up the stairs to my apartment.
But yeah, the isolation is annoying. I don't really mind for cycling, Strava is the social network everyone uses, and the analysis tools are pretty good. (I like TrainingPeaks because you can download a ZIP file with every ride ever for further analyses you may come up with in the future.)
Battery is good, since the most recent update, previously it was terrible.
FitBit's sleep tracking is pretty accurate in my experience. It even gets my naps. It doesn't do REM vs non-REM, but it's good enough for duration tracking.
The sync functionality is abysmal though. Half the time it doesn't work or takes minutes which would be solved if they bothered to make a dedicated 'sync' function on the hardware. Instead you have to hope that the software and tracker coincidentally communicate (which also means that the tracker has to continually poll Bluetooth, wasting power).
The pedometer is very accurate, it gets each footfall most of the time.
But... it doesn't integrate with many apps which is annoying (e.g. Google Fit).
I mostly use it for the heart tracker, since that's pretty much the only useful metric for health that it can provide. The calorie count is very optimistic, for instance, but you can compare lazy vs active days.
It's probably not for you, given the speedmaster & the biking, but I like my Withings Activite. Looks like a normal analog watch with a activity level dial, and integrates with Apple Health via Withings' app, which is nicely designed. Regular watch battery.
Edit: I would also be interested if anyone knows of an automatic (mechanical) watch with a pedometer complication. Seems like it wouldn't be too far off from the power-reserve dials that some fancy automatics have.
SleepCycle is accelerometer based, actually. You put the phone next to you or under your pillow, and it tracks your motion based on vibrations in the bed. I believe the app tells you flat out that it won't work on memory foam beds.
I wonder if the hardware all stops working if they go belly-up. That would be pretty hilarious. It sure seemed like -- ca. 2 years ago -- my Up band/their Up app didn't do a whole lot without their server; I couldn't even set the alarm that one time I really needed it, because there was no cell reception in that particular alpine hut.
Also, if they're selling of business units, I wonder if they're considering selling off the user data along with it, and what the next "owner" of my data intends to do with it.
Too bad. My UP3 is pretty new, so I can't comment on longevity, but I like the idea of something that doesn't try to be a watch, and, in the case of the UP3, knows its limits and doesn't try to measure active heartrate when it can't do it right.
Hopefully this is just clearing out the warehouse before releasing something better.
It seems like the reason to buy an up3 would be for the purpose of sleep tracking. It doesn't seem like any other tracker is on par with it. The up3 will track your heart rate through the night, and even has a flexible alarm setting to try to wake you in the lightest sleep phase.
Does anyone know if there is a comparable sleep tracking device?
Hmm, I like my UP2. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's not bad as a better quality pedometer, considering what I paid for it ( < $100 ). I mostly use it for hiking or when I'm on vacation, hoofing it around European cities.
I had such a negative experience with their jambox, when I was shopping for fitness trackers I wrote them off immediately. Personal devices are a market where quality really matters, and people have long memories for a bad purchase.
I'm not in the market for these, but I also haven't had a great experience with Jambox. Mostly I find it unbelievable hat something as simple as a speaker could be so hard to use.
