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Comment by goshx | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Fitbit Flex about a month ago. I am totally disappointed. It has lots of bugs. The sleep tracking (which was the main reason I bought it for) is just a very subjective/guess-like tracking mechanism. I wake up many times during the night but if my arm doesn't move much, according to the device I was sleeping. Not sure how they can improve that part. Now it simply stopped reporting my sleeps. I tell it I'm going to sleep, then in the morning I tell it I am awake and when I sync the data it has nothing in the sleeping log. The steps also seem very inaccurate. Sometimes I wake up with hundreds or thousands of steps (maybe I am a sleepwalker?)

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>>>Sometimes I wake up with hundreds or thousands of steps (maybe I am a sleepwalker?)

It actually sounds like either it's not going into "sleep mode" correctly or it's coming out of it for some reason. I have a flex and eventually got into the habit of checking as I approach sleep that it's still on sleep mode.

If it does come in and out of sleep mode without action on your part, that sounds like a defective device.

My favorite thing was that I supposedly walk 200+ steps while brushing my teeth. Nope. Again, we are all beta testers. It's like as if we'd be driving cars that routinely fall apart every 50 miles -- and claim we drove 500 miles.

Just so we're clear here, your band was not on the wrist holding the toothbrush, correct? hehe.

I know. And it was. But the app knew it was my "active hand" which should've had some implication, no? Or am I supposed to take it off when I do everyday things now too? Cooking = 100 steps. Washing my hair = 30 steps. Wasn't the point to put it on and forget about it? It's just so flawed.

There's definitely flaws, but keep in mind, it's merely an accelerometer, not a 9-degree IMU. I just left it on my non-dominant wrist and the FitBit and JawBone have both been pretty close, though my BodyMedia (which goes just below the delt/tricep connection) seems to be a bit closer to "experimental results" in terms of calories / activities / sleep / etc.

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