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So after umming and erring over it I’m finally into the world of wearables. I would like to say that it was a decision made on my own merit but my lovely wife acquired me a Jawbone UP for my birthday the other week. Now I was going to write a first impressions review but I thought I’d give it a couple of weeks of use to really see what I can do and thus far I’m really impressed.

So if you’re not familiar with Jawbone it’s basically a wearable fitnesses tracker (much like the Fitbit) which as it suggests tracks your activity, this can then be synced to your phone or your computer to keep track of how well you’re doing. There are lots of features which you can utilise (too many to mention) but I am going to go through the ones that I have found most useful.

Design

The UP is a pretty decent looking device and quite unassuming. It doesn’t clasp together like other fitness trackers it kind of just overlaps but it seems to work and fits rather snugly. It comes in a range of colours and most importantly sizes. Actually the box comes with a handy little loop you can put your hand through so can make sure that you get the right one for you.

Activity Tracker

The one thing I need the most is to be motivated to get active so they best way for me to achieve this is to make it a competition against myself and being able to track how far I move each day is a great start. You set yourself goal, so for me I want to make sure that I have walked no less than 15,000 steps a day. When you sync your Jawbone with say your iPhone it will tell you how close you are to achieving that goal so you know how much more you have to do. It also details the longest periods for which you were active and idle as well as calories burned. There is also a raft of other stats that you can delve into if you’re really serious. I have found this most useful as if I am not achieving my goal I will take time out to make sure that I hit my numbers and that’s a really good motivation.

Sleep Tracker

Now before I go into this bit don’t ask me how it works but I put it down to voodoo. So when you go to bed you set the band to sleep mode and it monitors how well or not you snooze once your head hits the pillow. It tells you how long you’ve slept, how much of that was deep sleep and how much was light sleep as well as how many times you woke up during the night. It’s good to see how well you’re doing but I guess that its primary aim is to see how diet and exercise affect your sleeping patterns so you can try different things if you’re into that.

Food Tracker

I guess if you’re looking to track how fit you are or are becoming you should track your food intake. Now obviously the band can’t do this but you can via the smartphone app and it actually makes it quite easy to do. Firstly you can do the obvious thing which is to trawl through its concise library or restaurant chains and food outlets. Next you can scan the barcodes from products and it will match it to its database and it’s actually pretty accurate. But the feature I like the most is to simply take a photograph of what you are going to eat and it does its best to detect what it is. Now I’ve had mixed results but it’s fun to try it out. When you have entered all of your data it will calculate your calorie intake and deduct it from your daily limits. You can also add water intake.

Syncing

Now the UP is not a device that syncs constantly with your phone. Funnily enough you pull off the tab on the band and it reveals a headphone jack and it’s this that the device uses to send the data. More voodoo methinks. If this seems a little too much effort for you then there is the UP 24 which syncs all day.

Apps

The UP app is simple and easy to navigate and use. It becomes even more powerful as it can link to other fitness apps that you may be using such as ‘My Fitness Pal’, ‘IFTTT’, ‘RunKeeper’ as well as a host of others so if you’re really serious about your fitness then you can customise the experience based on your needs.

Conclusion

I’ve actually found the UP a really useful device and a joy to use. There are loads of other features that I have yet to utilise such as smart alarms and other tracking modes but for the casual fitness buff it covers all of the bases. Well worth a look.

Author

Paul Wright

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