Review: Jawbone Up

Like love, sensors are all around us. The astronomic growth in smartphone uptake means that most of the people you know now carry around a device that is constantly monitoring movement, light, sound and location. To date, the data captured by these sensors has found limited application, but this will soon change.

At its core, the Jawbone Up is a pedometer, but with pretensions of being much more. Within its "medical grade" rubber casing, the Up houses a number of motion sensors and shares the information it collects with a smartphone app for iPhone and Android.

• Buy Jawbone UP Wristband - at Amazon for £64.99

Beyond counting your steps, Jawbone believes the Up is capable of monitoring your sleep as well. Using proprietary algorythms, the wristband and its software tell you how well you slept based on how you moved, sensing a difference between light and deep sleep and acknowledging when you wake up.

The accuracy of these readings is hard to guage though, and acting on the information it feeds back is entirely up to the user to figure out.

Smartly designed

There is one thing for certain: the Jawbone UP is fantastically designed. Both the wristband and the app are sleek, easy to grasp and a pleasure to use.

The band itself is completely devoid of clasps or clips. It is a flexible loop that you slip around your wrist, and it sits comfortably below your hand. There are three sizes to choose from, with a size guide on the Jawbone site.

Best of all, the wristband looks good to wear. Our review unit is black, and it goes with every outfit in our wardrobe, from unwashed weekend wear to cocktail party dress.

At one end of the band is a small, square tip, that looks like mere decoration. In fact, this is the single button on the Up that users interact with. A long press on the button changes between day and night modes (you switch it before bed), and a double-press and hold command starts special modes, like a power nap, or the recording of an exercise session.

The app

 Monitoring the data collected by the Up is quite good fun, thanks to Jawbone's colourful and well-designed smartphone app. Large arrows point towards your daily goals and animate when you reach them; congratualting you on your small achievements.


You begin the Up journey by telling it a little about yourself: gender, weight, daily walking goal, etc. It keeps track of everything thereafter, showing you how you are doing each day, as well as collecting data over time into larger, more complex graphs.


Once or twice a day you plug the Up wristband into your phone via the headphone socket. Doing this syncs your data with the app.


You can enter food into the mix, but this isn't really designed as a calorie counter. The pre-set food options are extremely limited, and manually entering these details is a pain.


If you gain motivation from groups, you can select friends to add to your "team" and watch each others daily progress.

What does it all mean? 

Not to delve too deeply into the existential, but what does it all mean? Data collection and graphing is one thing, but what are you to do with the information the Up feeds back?


Some of it is pretty simple. For example, after using the Up for a month it is clear that this reviewer needs to get up and walk more. If the average adult should walk 10,000 steps a day, I'm a few kilometres short. The solution here is pretty straight forward.


But what about sleep? Each night the wristband reports on the quality of sleep with coloured-strips that show how much deep sleep you had, how much light sleep you had and often you were awake.





My sleep looks bad -- I think. There seems to be far too much light sleep, only thin strips of deep sleep and several instances of waking up each night. It is interesting to gaze at the graphs each day, but without suggestions on how to act, the Up creates more questions than it answers.


On top of this, you have to take this information at face value, if you do at all. There are several times during the review period where the band has reported periods of being awake that we don't rememberm for example. Is it wrong? We have no evidence to the contrary.


On a similar note, the Jawbone could have a limited use for some people with sleeping disorders. This reviewer has sleep apnea and uses a CPAP machine to sleep comfortably. During the review period, data from the Up suggested poor sleep and prompted a check-up.


It is certainly a long way from being an effective monitoring tool for these sorts of disorders -- heart-rate monitoring would be necessary for starters -- but it is handy for (very) general guidance.

Vs FitBit

Comparing the Jawbone Up to its most obvious competitor, the FitBit One, it's easy to see just how much growth this category has in front of it.

When it comes to step counting, the Up feels significantly looser than the FitBit model. While we couldn't do a side-by-side comparison for absolute accuracy, we found that we hit our goal of 10,000 steps a lot more frequently with the Up, despite not changing our habits.

The One's screen is a welcome addition as well, giving immediate feedback of performance. To get a quick idea of how you are performing during the day, you need to manually sync the Up band, while the FitBit's OLED screen can give that information at the press of a button, as well as offering information about calories burnt.

The sleep function, on the other hand, is a much nicer implementation via the Up band. Because the Up is already on the wrist, it's as simple as pressing the button to switch to sleep mode.

The FitBit, on the other hand, requires the device to be slipped into a special pouch that wraps around your wrist and attaches with velcro. Because the tracker is in a pouch, it's much easier to forget to switch the device in or out of sleep mode.

The information you get from the Up, when displayed through the accompanying app, is also a lot more useful than the FitBit version, especially for sleep. The Up app's food counter is also more usable - although not necessarily more accurate.

Ultimately, the Up is a lifestyle product. It's designed to look good, while providing your information on your lifestyle so you can hopefully improve it.

The FitBit, on the other hand, is more of a tool, something that works to enable you to improve your lifestyle. They may do similar things, but if you're serious about accountability for your physical actions, the FitBit is a much more accurate tool.

Verdict

It looks good and it certainly seems to work as intended, but if you were hoping that the Up was something more than a pedometer in fancy dress, then you'll be disappointed. Especially considering that At £65 it is twice the price of most step-counters. It certainly looks much better, and its smartphone app is well designed, but at the end of the day the functionality it collects the same data as a pedometer and leaves the same questions unanswered. 

Review: Fitbit Flex

Even though the Flex was briefly superseded earlier this year with the arrival of the Fitbit Force, it is once again the company's flagship tracker following the Force's recall earlier this year.

Fitbit has said it's fixed the issues that plagued the Force and is all set to release the new, updated version, but until that happens, the Flex is still the wrist-mounted tracker flagship from the company.

• Buy Flex Activity and Sleep Wristband - Amazon for £65.37

Announced at CES back in 2013, the Fitbit Flex combines the step-counting technology that made its One and Zip products so useful, and places it on the wrist for convenience.

This big design change has some pretty big advantages. For a start, the fear of having the small sensor pop out from a pocket while walking is gone. With the wrist mounted option, you always know where the device is.

The second major benefit is for sleep-tracking. While the Fitbit One offered the ability to track sleep by slipping the sensor into a soft, velcro arm band, the Flex leaves the sensor permanently attached, allowing you to switch modes without removing the device at all.

Unlike the Jawbone Up, the Flex consists of two separate parts - the sensor and the strap. The sensor itself is smaller than the One, thanks to the fact that it doesn't include an LED display.

Instead, five LED lights indicate the number of steps taken during a day, and are only activated by double tapping the device.

The rubber wristband is lightweight, but a little simplistic in its design. Unlike a watch strap or even a bracelet, the Flex uses a plastic grey latch to poke to plastic prongs into a series of holes on the band.

Getting the Flex closed the first time can be challenging, but it does quickly become second nature. It's not as comfortable or effortless as the Jawbone Up, but it is functional.

The other noteworthy aspect of the Flex band is the clear bar that sits above the LED lights in the actual tracker unit. This band allows you to view your progress while wearing the band.

But after a few weeks, that clear band was already showing signs of wear and tear, with scuffs and scratches, despite a blatant lack of gruelling conditions.

Of course, Fitbit offers a range of bands in a variety of colours, which might be a nice way (although expensive) to work around this problem.

Power to the people

One of the most immediate joys of using the Fitbit Flex over the Jawbone Up is the inclusion of Bluetooth 4.0 wireless syncing. Instead of having to manually remove the device and plug it into your phone to sync, the FitBit will periodically wake up and connect to your phone, keeping your stats up to date.

The catch is that at the moment, wireless syncing to mobile still only works with a very limited number of devices. If you don't own an iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 or Galaxy Note 2, then you're out of luck on the phone front.

That said, it also syncs with a 5th Gen iPod Touch, 3rd and 4th Gen iPad and iPad mini and the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

While this is currently a major frustration for Android users, there is good news on that front with Google announcing Bluetooth Smart support as part of the OS, which should theoretically give Bluetooth 4.0 syncing support to a much wider range of devices.

In the meantime, the Flex does come with a small USB dongle for syncing to Mac or PC. It works well, but is nowhere near as elegant a solution as the mobile syncing.

One thing that does work in the Flex's favour is battery life. Despite the inclusion of Bluetooth for wireless syncing, the Flex still managed to almost match the Jawbone Up for longevity when worn side by side.

While the Up can be pushed to 9 days of use - depending on how active you are - the Flex tended to last seven or eight days.

Sure, that's a step down, but the convenience of wireless syncing makes it all worthwhile. Especially given it also offers some kind of real time indication of your daily progress in the form of five LED lights, while the Up has nothing.

The question of accuracy

Like a high-tech hipster, we tested the Flex by wearing it on our weaker arm, with the Jawbone Up right alongside it. Despite the proximity of the two devices, the results were quite varied.

On the sleep front, the Jawbone was easily the stronger device. Nights spent getting up and down to unsettled children were accurately broken up by the Up as times awake, while the Fitbit app claimed that sleep was just a little unsettled.

But when it came to step counting, the devices offered such varied results that you had to wonder how they could both claim to count the same thing.

Without fail, the Flex reported a significantly higher number of steps taken than the Up. On a day where we conquered our 10,000 step goal on the Flex, the Up would bring us back to earth by reporting only 8,000 steps taken.

To test which of the two was more accurate, we physically walked 200 steps, counting as we went. Neither device tracked the steps 100 per cent accurately, although the Flex did come up slightly closer to the mark.

How that extrapolates to larger numbers is unclear, but there's a real question mark over the accuracy of the wrist-mounted device, which is something we didn't encounter with the pocket-mounted One or Flex.

Steps to 'appiness

Fitbit's app is easy enough to come to grips with for even the most novice of users, but does let you drill down into more and more layers of information.

That said, it still struggles with food tracking thanks to a lack of internationally localised cuisines, although that is something that can be worked around thanks to the third party app ecosystem and services like MyFitnessPal.

Compared to the Jawbone, the social aspect with the FitBit app seems undercooked, which seems like a missed opportunity.

On the upside, Fitbit has just launched IFTTT compatibility, which will automate many functions and help improve the overall function of the device with very little effort.

Which goes back to the verdict we came to in our Jawbone Up review, that the Fitbit is a much more useful fitness tool, while the Up is a lifestyle tech accessory.

The Flex does start to veer to the accessory side of the fence with its design, but it's app keeps it firmly in the fitness tool category.

Verdict

The Fitbit ecosystem is a great way to start using technology to keep on top of your personal health. But the Flex is the weakest link in the product lineup, a device that tries to take the same technology as the One and place it in a much more convenient position on the body.

The catch is that it sacrifices too much. Gone is the satisfying feeling of accuracy, with high step counts seemingly too-easy to obtain thanks to inaccurate algorithms.

The wristband itself could also use a little more work. It's lightweight and comfortable, but looks more like the watchband on a kid's watch than a truly stylish piece of tech.

All that said though, Fitbit has shown the strengths of its platform. Wireless syncing is essential in this product lineup, and having a strong app ecosystem is a huge benefit to fitness trackers out there.

There's no doubt the second generation Flex will improve on all of the issues, but at this stage the One is still a much better alternative for your money.

Buy Flex Activity and Sleep Wristband - Amazon for £65.37

How to Reach Freak Level Fitness

If you ever feel like you’re not progressing as fast as you’d like, then there’s a fair chance the fastest way there is to do more. Eat more good meals per week. Train more times. Do more reps within sessions. Volume vs. Intensity Up to a point doing more will work fairly well for everyone. On the continuum of training, the fastest way to get a beginner to respond is to gradually add volume. Next you start to add intensity. There’s no hard-and-fast line of when this switch from adding volume stops and adding intensity begins, but it’s probably around the time sessions start to edge beyond ninety minutes or two hours. Because at some point “just adding more” isn’t actually going to make you anything other than too exhausted to recover before the next session. Intensity Requires Time and Patience So we start to add intensity. Intensity can come in a variety of forms, but is most likely to mean lifting more weight, as intensity in lifting is a measure against what you are capable of lifting once and once only. Intensity can also come in the form of doing something faster, though, such as running at higher speeds (because running intensity is either a measure of pace or heart rate). While increased intensity is ultimately what people add as they become more advanced, the problem is that everyone thinks they’re advanced. So we end up with relative beginners coming in the gym trying to lift more, lift more, lift more, and wondering why they can’t handle it. The reason is that just like it takes a long time to get faster at running, it takes a long time for the body to get used to lifting heavy more often. Most people’s nervous systems are not ready for that. More Easy Is More Better But what if you are advanced and already train both hard and long? How do you advance then? If you’re already training six or seven days per week for about two hours at a time, what’s the next step? Believe it or not the next step is not to add more hard work, but to add more easy work. The reason is simple - if you’re already maxed out for hard work, the only way to add more work in your week is to add easy work that has either no recovery cost or is actually a recovery benefit. That means the training needs to have no associated muscle soreness and no metabolic cost in terms of recovery (such as muscle soreness) that needs repairing. The Value of Easy Aerobic Work The answer to your training woes is easy aerobic work. The aerobic system is what’s responsible for recovery in your body. It is responsible for your recovery between sets and body repair between sessions. Most people, however, have a severely impaired aerobic system so their recovery is never optimal, even at one session most days. The modern fitness industry tries to tell us that shorter and harder is better, but those results aren’t matched by the training done by elite sports people. From elite rugby to Navy SEALs to Games winning athletes you will always find large amounts of steady cardiovascular work being done to keep fitness high without breaking the body, as well as enhance recovery. The standard prescription is a sixty-minute easy run. The problem with that is most people aren’t physically ready to run an hour a day and that alone will break them, which will hardly help their recovery. So how do we begin adding aerobic work into our training? Establish Your Maximum Aerobic Heart Rate Step one is a MAF test. MAF stands for maximum aerobic function. The basic idea is that you determine your maximum aerobic heart rate using the 180-formula, warm up, then do three miles staying at that heart rate. For many this will be heart breaking as they realize they can’t even walk and stay within their aerobic abilities. This is a problem because sessions that are “easy” and solely aerobic in nature will be quick to recover from. Anything that starts to become anaerobic, even by just a few beats per minute, is like adding in extra strength training and will need extra recovery to deal with. So the start for most people, after discovering how inefficient they are, is to add daily walking and build that up to an hour every day. Yes, I said an hour every day as a separate session to your normal hard session. If, at this point, you tell me that you’re not able to find the time to walk for an hour each day but you want to go to the CrossFit Games, then I suggest that you’re not really being honest with yourself about your own commitment. If you’re seriously already training every day and want to go to the next level you’ll find the time. Incidentally, this concept of adding in walks to get used to extra work done in the week is also useful for anyone wanting to do more work. The same concept can be applied to adding walks in on any day you don’t currently train and gradually making them harder or longer until you’ve got seven full training sessions each week, at which point you start the process again as outlined here. Transition to Running The second step, once you’re habitually doing an hour of easy extra walking each day, is to start turning this into a running session. Do not rush this step. It may well take six months to get through the transition period from walking to running if you intend to do it injury free. If you feel like getting torn calves, a sore Achilles, plantar fasciitis, or any of the other common running ailments, then by all means feel free to ignore me. Given we’re doing this to add work and boost recovery, that seems like a silly path to follow, though. Begin with a total of twenty minutes of running from a sixty-minute walk. That means your first walk/run will have forty minutes of walking and twenty of running. I’d break it up like this: • Walk 10 minutes • Run 2 minutes/walk 3 minutes x 10 If you have any pain the next day, then only do walking until all muscle soreness in the feet and lower legs has subsided. Keep following this plan until you can follow this step seven days per week pain free. Slowly Increase Your Running Time Gradually add time to the running component until you get to four minutes running followed by one minute of walking. Make sure to only add one step each week, i.e. don’t jump from run 2/walk 3 to run 4/walk 1 in a single week. That progress should be based on at least two full weeks of pain-free work. Once you get to run 4/walk 1, then I suggest going to run 7/walk 3 x 5. The previous step of run 4/walk 1 gives you a total of forty minutes of running time in an hour. This next step gives you 35 minutes, but it is harder on the body as you’re running non-stop for nearly double that time. Follow the same step-by-step process until you get to run 9/walk 1 x 5, which gives you 45 minutes of running in an hour. At this stage, provided you’ve been pain free on all seven days, you’re ready to run sixty minutes. Conclusion While this process may seem unnecessarily slow, it will be a pain-free way to achieve your goal of training advancement. And if you’re already doing seven other hard sessions in a week, you’ll be amazed at how much difference this approach can make once you get through all the steps. You’ll be strong, fit, and recover from most hard sessions almost instantly. There is no secret shortcut or hack to get to that point, though - just lots of hard work and discipline. However, if you truly want a freaky level of strength and fitness, this is how you get there.