The Jawbone Up
I have been using the Jawbone Up for a week now, and here are some thoughts.
I bought my Jawbone Up from the Apple store in Bath. Moments after tweeting I’d grabbed one, I was inundated with links to articles about them bricking & most people returning them - which put me on edge just a little. At £79.99 the Jawbone Up isn’t cheap, but as I was reminded whist entering my PIN number on the brilliant new POS system at the Apple store, I have 14 days to return it, even if it isn’t faulty, and a lot longer if it is. Apple stores are great for returning faulty products that they don’t manufacture, if you didn’t know. I recently got my 4th pair of Beats by Dre from them (no questions asked & absolutely free) when they started falling apart again. Next time I’m going to get different headphones I think, but fingers crossed there won’t be a next time.
Back to the Up. After taking the product from its beautiful packaging, creating an account on the slightly less beautiful app and wrapping it around my wrist for the first time, I left it for the day. There are a lot of things I love about the Up, and a few things I don’t.
First off the good stuff. I got my Up on a Saturday. I got home, charged it in the evening, put it to sleep mode, wore it to bed and made sure to test how effective the vibrating alarm was, as I wanted this to become my one and only alarm. Safe to say - it does the job. The vibrate isn’t too strong (which I like) & after a few seconds you are well-and-truly awake.
Continuing on the theme of the vibrate motor, you can set the Jawbone to vibrate every hour (or whatever interval of time you wish) and have it remind you to get up and be active. This comes in very useful sitting at a desk all day. Sometimes I’ll forget to move for one or two hours and even a simple trip the the basement kitchen for a class of water every time it reminds me keeps my muscles moving, and myself hydrated. It’s simple to do but so simple to forget.
One of my favourite things about the Jawbone Up is the sleep monitoring. If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know I often tweet screenshots of the Up and how much sleep I got. Sleep information is very important to me as I find it hard to get a good night most of the time, so anything that will improve that, I’ll give a shot. The Jawbone Up does a very good job of tracking how deep in sleep you are and when you’re awake. I just wish there was more you could do with the data, but more on that later.
As I said before I got a Medium (there are Large & Small versions too) - don’t worry about the Up feeling a little tight if you get one. Mine just about fit when I first got it. Over the past week it has become looser and I now notice it even less than when I first bought it.
There is a mode on the Jawbone that I will use maybe a few times a week - and that is the activity mode. This is activated by tapping then holding down the switcher button on the end. Whilst in this mode the Up pays more attention to what you’re doing. It estimates how far you’ve run, how many calories you’ve burned, and if you pair it with the app, you can even track when you’ve gone with the iPhone’s built-in GPS.
Speaking of the calorie count - it’s not something I really pay attention to. For the most part it seems pretty accurate - which I can’t say for the pedometer! Something else I don’t really pay attention to is the addition of the food monitor. You’re supposed to take a picture of what you eat and then a few hours after the Jawbone Up will remind you to jot down how you feel. (whether the food made you feel great or not-so-much!) - This seems a little tacked-on in my mind and something I won’t really be using all that much.
The battery life on the Up is great. I’ve had a solid week of using the Up and as of writing this review I’m on 36% battery. Charging is also quick - when I first got the device, it was on 24% and I charged it to 100% in under 30 minutes.
Now, however onto a few things I don’t like:
Most of the time the pedometer is not accurate on the Up. I’ve found that counting how many steps I make in my head is a little shocking though - you take a lot more than you realise! The Up does like to round-up and tack a few on for good measure, however.
No wireless syncing. You’d think Jawbone the company behind the best Bluetooth headsets in the world could work out Bluetooth syncing right? Wrong. You have to pop a cap off the end and sync it a la Square. They say this is for battery life, though.
The cap in which the headphone sync jack is held can pop off a little easy from time to time. I was carrying my little brother round the Christmas market last Sunday and it popped off as I set him down. Luckily that was the only time such a thing happened but I think Jawbone know it’s likely as they sell replacement caps in their store.
Exporting data in a better way would be nice. Currently you can only view the data on the device and it’s not clear what the bar graph is a measurement of. For example in Sleep mode there is a “Sleep Quality” rating at the bottom, but the bar graph has Time on the X-Axis & nothing on the Y-Axis so it’s a little confusing as to what you’re actually measuring.
Overall I’d give the up a 7/10, with room to improve that score based on an update to the App instead of the hardware. The hardware is beautiful, strong, light and clever. The App has a LOT of potential, but just misses the mark right now. The fact that you can have teams (not even mentioned in this review) is cool - but you can’t search Facebook/Twitter for friend you have to know who has an Up already and add them - for example. If you’re even considering getting one I really would. Buy one from the Apple store (they have a great replacement policy, and right now Jawbone will take weeks to get you a new one should it brick). Will you be getting one? Let me know!
