Although it is only just being released this morning, I was able to pick up one of Jawbone’s new UP wrist bands yesterday (Jawbone UP). It truly is the height of “geek chic”, and whether or not it will be a passing fad waits to be seen. I wanted to share a few initial impressions of it but first let’s look at what it does and does not do.
The UP is like a super-duper pedometer. It tracks your steps and can “challenge” you to do more. Or, if you set it at “X steps planned today”, it will tell you when you are achieved your goal or when you have lamely missed it.
It can track your sleep patterns. You simply “tell it” you are turning in and it goes into sleep monitoring mode. Based on your movements, it can sense when you are in deep sleep and when you are not. It can also track how close you are to achieving the number of hours of sleep you desire. This is a great thing since, as a society, we are all pretty much sleep-deprived.
It has another cool trick up its sleeve. More on that soon.
It can track your meals and help you figure out which foods work well for your body and which do not. Unfortunately, this aspect of the system is fairly limited. You can take a picture of your meal and record, it but it doesn’t appear to do much more than that.
And that leads to my main initial negative of the device. It requires a lot from you. The band needs to be charged every ten days. Worse yet, the only way it tracks ANYTHING is if you sync it to your iPhone. And how do you sync it? You plug it into the 3.5mm headphone jack. That’s right, there is no wireless connectivity here. That, plus the limited food aspect of it are concerns for me, at least in my initial impressions.
On the plus side, the UP band has a cool alarm setting that will wake you up within 30 minutes of your target time, and based upon your body movements, go off at the optimal time for you to wake up refreshed. I assume this means it goes off when you are moving and are therefore in a lighter sleep. I tried it today, and while it did get mixed up by an hour thanks to the time change, it worked well. On the downside, to set the alarm you need to physically connect the band to your phone and fire up the free UP app.
The UP band is meant to be a social experience. Couch25K certainly was more “doable” because Judie, Carly and Larry were all doing it with me at the same time. My hope is that as more friends get them, the peer pressure to do more will increase. I know that Judie, Matt Miller, Scott Jordan, Larry and others either have them on the way or are getting them today.
We will keep you posted.