[rwp-review id=”0″]
I have to admit that a few years ago, I really never understood the appeal of fitness trackers. Why would anyone benefit from keeping records of exercises or sleep patterns? As time went on and I became more health-conscious, my record-keeping OCD kicked in. I’ve been always intrigued by Jawbone and Fitbit but never really gathered enough will to try any of them. Now with a Jawbone UP2 on my wrist for a bit over two weeks, I admit that I am hooked.
Having bought an Apple Watch a few months ago, I was pretty excited as it became my first fitness tracker. Unfortunately, Apple Watch’s fitness tracking is not only basic, but requires a lot of manual input. For example, I walk to work every day and back (half an hour each way) but the Apple Watch does not consider this walking an exercise. If I go through the menus and tell the watch that I am heading out for an outdoor walk, only then will it register it as an exercise.
Some Design Oddities
Jawbone’s UP2 eliminates much of the manual hassle, although there is some manual work required should you really need to. The UP2 measures your step count, activities, and sleep. You can also log your food in for more thorough tracking.
But before I get into those, let’s talk about the design. I have the “Black Diamond Classic Flat Strap” model, and from the onset it looks elegant yet at the same time quite “rubbery”; it has the sports-band feel yet the texture on the display – if I can call it a display – feels nice. After a few boot camps and workouts though, the rubber band is showing signs of wear, but nothing that I should worry about for now.
The UP2 has a display hidden underneath the texture with three different LED to show you what exactly it is doing. From personal experience, though, Jawbone might as well have done without the display completely. It doesn’t show you time, goals, calories, or any of the tracked fitness metrics; it only lights up when you’re charging it or when it randomly wants to show you it’s tracking an activity.
Fitness Automation
To me, the display is completely useless, and for good reason – the UP2 is brilliant at tracking things without input. It does a remarkably excellent job in recording when exactly did you go to bed and when you woke up in the morning – and it includes all those little pee breaks in between as well. On three separate occasions, it was off by a couple of hours – those where when I was in my bed, immobile, doing some reading, which the UP2 considered part of my sleep (perhaps rightly so; it was a boring book). This was quickly remedied within the iPhone app when I edited the entry to the correct timings. Other than that, the UP2 runs in the background. You could, if you want to, go into the app and manually tell the UP2 that you’re about to go to sleep or you’re about to do some exercise. Personally, I open the app in the morning to sync it and make sure the sleep timings were logged in correctly, or after a workout, where I tell the UP2 what kins of exercise I was doing in the past hour. The good news is that it has a LOT more workout varieties than those found on the Apple Watch.
Speaking of which, since I do wear both the Apple Watch on one wrist and the UP2 on the other, the two give a more complete picture of my daily actives. My morning and evening walks to/from work are picked up automatically by the UP2 as a walking exercise, which in turn fils in the exercise ring on the Apple Watch. I can tell the UP2 I was doing cross-fit for an hour, and my heart rate is picked up my the Apple Watch. Since the Apple Watch doesn’t track sleep (I used to use a sleep-tracking app on the iPhone), the UP2 fills on those blanks – and it’s comfortable enough to wear at night, too.
Your Own ‘Companion Cube’
Complimenting the UP2 in many important ways is the app, available for iPhone and Android. In the app you can manually log in or edit sleeps and exercises, and you can even tell the app whether the exercise was easy or tough. The app also provides you with a food-log, so you can enter in your meals. It’s a bit tricky, though; the database is full of different meals from various food outlets, and a search for a “turkey and cheese sandwich” will return tens of results, each with a different mix of ingredients and calories. You can also manually enter the nutritional information yourself. It’s a laborious task, but for those wanting to know exactly how much protein they had in a day, then that’s the way to do it.
What’s more important though is that all this data feeds into the UP2’s “Smart Coach”, which regularly fills you in with good information based on your behaviour, and would give you some recommendations and ask you to stick to it. For example, for a few nights in a row I haven’t been sleeping well, and the Smart Coach was telling me how this is affecting my cognitive abilities and requests that I go to bed at a certain hour – even going the extra mile to ask me for a pledge. It checks my exercise routine and pushes me further, giving me the necessary compliments and ass-whipping whenever it is necessary. You can also set wake-up times and the band will vibrate to wake you up whenever you’re in the light-sleep phase (and yes, it works better than a frightening alarm). The Smart Coach is brilliant, and sends in push-notifications to your phone and Apple Watch with the feedback every now and then.
Not all is good and dandy with the UP2, though. The proprietary USB charger that comes along uses tiny, magnetic pins that need to be aligned perfectly to snap onto the UP2 (sort of defeats the purpose of the magnets). Wearing the band proved to be a difficult task the first few times, until I figured out the optimal and quickest way for the clasps to lock. Once the initial setup is out of the way though, you’ll be happy to know you’ll only need to take it off once a week for recharge and whenever you shower (it is water-resistant but I personally don’t take the risk). Battery lasts around 7-8 days, which is good enough for me.
It’s Really Good to Have
So when all is said and done, is it worth it? For me, absolutely – it’s priced fairly at $99 and does its job as a basic fitness tracker. I would have loved for it to be waterproof or to at least have its own heart-rate monitor, but for me it goes way above and beyond what Apple Watch’s fitness tracking offers (not that the Apple Watch is designed as a fitness tracker in mind), and the fact that I don’t have to do much or any manual work with the UP2 is its biggest selling point.
