Jawbone UP
So I went to the Apple store the other day and picked up this little dohickey, the Jawbone UP, Jawbone’s nutrition, sleep, step, life tracking wristband.
The band is light, water resistant (I wore it in the shower and it was okay), and generally attractive. Anyone who is familiar with the companies other product designs will feel right at home with UP. After about an hour, I barely noticed that I had the device on. But the star of this show is the iOS (only) app, which allows you to track and analyze everything that you do on a daily basis.
One of the apps most useful features is the sleep tracker. What the wristband does is
using its included accelerometer tracks your movement throughout the night in order to classify when you are either awake, in light sleep, or in deep sleep (or what science people call REM or something like that). As you can see, when you wake up you can analyze how well you slept that night, exactly when you were in light sleep, deep sleep, etc. What’s really cool about this is that you can set an alarm to go off anytime in a 30 minute window which you specify. What the UP will do is during that window, it will find out exactly when is the best time for you to wake up and in turn feel the most energized in the morning. The system really does work. It’s like having your own sleep specialist with you every single night. That alone is worth the Jawbone UP’s $100 price tag.
The app can also track things like how many steps you’ve taken in a day, when you have taken those steps, and how strenuous/effective it was compared to different times of the day.
One of the most useless features of the app is the food tracker. All you do is take photos of your food and tell the app a couple hours later how you felt after eating it. The theory here is that the foods that make you feel better are the ones that you should eat more of. However, UP does not provide any recommendations/suggestions about how to eat better using your past data. Again, useless.
The app is clearly v.1.0 software. It’s quite slow, ugly, and buggy at times. Given the amount of data provided, I would have hoped Jawbone jumped on that opportunity to provide a beautifully designed view of your life. Seems like a missed opportunity to me. But again, it’s their first iteration. Hopefully upcoming versions make more use of the data provided.
Is the Jawbone UP worth it’s $100 price tag? I’d say so. If you are into learning more about yourself and are up to change, than it’s defiantly worth buying. If you like sitting on your fat ass watching Maury re-runs and eating lard and aren’t looking to change that, this probably isn’t the device for you. You need an actual doctor.
Ramblings by Colin
