Jawbone UP3 Activity Tracker
jawbone.com
jawbone.com
That itself isn't a problem. It's probably part of the recipe for awesome, week-plus battery lives. But the band itself, while fitting fine on my wrist when brand new, started to degrade quickly.
To be clear: the electronics are fine. The rubber enclosure seems to have expanded up to the point where the button was completely covered by it. Upon "folding" the end so one could access the button, the rubber continued to extend, etc.
Finally, maybe eight months in, the button snapped out. I can't use a lot of the functions of the band now, such as exercise/run tracking; I can't even tell it _when_ I'm going to bed, although the app still auto-discovers when I was sleeping.
When the band starts to vibrate (unless it's my half-hour inactivity buzz), you can either stick with it for two solid minutes or plug it into the app.
The main reason I still wear it is that the motion-aware/light sleep estimate-cognizant wake-up alarm is the only way to live. It's the snooze button rebooted: rather than waking up to hit a button and then enjoying some more light sleep, the band will just wake you up when you're already semi-awake.
TL;DR: this band broke down very soon after purchase but even as it does a fraction of its original functions it's really really cool.
I had the exact same experience with the 24 and the rubber enclosure warping. It's very disappointing that Jawbone has such hardware quality issues, as I vastly prefer its software to that of my FuelBand and Fitbit.
Wait a sec, are you saying it uses a software modem to communicate over the audio jack, or am I misunderstanding? That seems oddly cool, if true.
Snore
Does anyone think people will care enough to 'check' when they can get one?
just announce a date, and if you can't announce a date, don't announce it...
Not announcing a date also works to their benefit since news outlets will put out another PSA when they announce the date.
The next iteration of these devices (Basis Peak, Jawbone up3, whatever fitbit comes up with) will no longer be just about quantifying your physical life. With more data comes an increased ability to make inferences about your behavioral patterns, and that's going to be the killer feature of the future.
The first company that actively tries to answer how to instigate real behavioral change in its users through notifications, insights, and other motivational tools will be the first to make fitness wearables ubiquitous devices.
Of course, the band has to be actually _wearable_, too.
Jawbone is doing both of these things, faster than the competition.
Basis is _just_ starting to try and do insight work, after years of perfecting their sensor infrastructure. Fitbit is a toy in comparison, and afaik they haven't even touched doing inference work on small individual user data.
The insights I get from Jawbone now suck, but they're doing those with _just my steps and sleep_. Who knows what will become apparent with my heart rate and automatic activity identification.
No GPS makes it an inferior device than Microsoft Band.
Also it looks like just a bracelet, so you can wear it on right hand, and still wear a watch.
> The world's most advanced tracker.
> The most advanced activity tracker known to man
When it obviously has less features than some of the competition. Eg no GPS for one.
Also, the puffery: The most advanced activity tracker known to man, UP3™ is packed with state-of-the-art sensors that give you the full picture of your health.
Someone in the marketing department should go back to the basics, we are now much more educated consumers and we don't fall for these cute bold statements anymore.
Plus let's face it, we'll soon be inbetween an Apple Watch or Moto 360, especially when these reach the $200-$250 price range in a couple of years. Thinking out loud here.
- Because they can. People are willing to pay this much for this product.
- It takes a lot of research and development costs, which have to be included
- You also buy a (lifetime?) service that tracks and stores your data
There does appear to be some reversing of undocumented API calls that provide some better resolution, although I don't know how up to date that is: http://eric-blue.com/projects/up-api/
- Microsoft Band / $200 (available)
- Basis Peak / $200 (November)
- Jawbone UP3 / $180 (soon.. probably before Christmas)
- Apple Watch / $350 (2015..)
Frankly the technology is just not there right now for a true smartwatch/fitness tracker hybrid.
Many Android Wear devices have optical HR (although accuracy is usually low).
There's also the Adidas Smart Run, TomTom Cardio, and Mio Fuse/Alpha 2 on the sports world size. (they all use a Mio sensor AFAIK)
These are just the standalone optical HR sensor devices off the top of my head, there are tons of ANT+/BT Smart accessory devices.
That's like at least an order of magnitude less convenient than having pulse monitoring integrated in the watch (or wristband) itself, in my opinion.
The whole bunch seem good for general fitness, but not for athletic performance. For that a chest band still can't be beat.
http://www.mioglobal.com/Default.aspx http://4iiii.com/product/viva-mini/ (this is just a wrist strap, but they're about to release an all-in-one)
(I'm not related to this apart from being a backer on indiegogo)
Are there off-the-shelf IC's/sensors that these devices are using?
Is their software really this bad and if so are they ever going to fix it?
I don't foresee them improving their software in this sense since they've mostly bought companies thus far to fix their software. The food tracker software is a lot better than when it first started. People have been asking Jawbone to make a web interface for years now, and to date it's still not available.
Basically they are focused on product, design and big data. That's where the money is at anyways.
Details are buried in the FAQs, mentions it supports AMEX only. There are some duplicate FAQs as well, wonder if that was not ready for prime time (though NFC is listed under the available sensors).