Jawbone UP: First Impressions

After 2 weeks of using Jawbone UP this is my attempt to put first impressions about it together: generally it is interesting gadget however it seems still have a long way to go to be worth the price they sell it for.

Negatives

There are some inconveniences in operating it using just one button, two feedback icons and two colors. Figuring out when it is fully charged was a bit of challenge for me as well, but I must say it did hold for almost 10 days (as specification promised) before I needed to charge it up.

I should have done a better job when decided on the size, even thou after measurements it looked like "medium" now I see that "large" would be much better fit: sometimes I feel like I need to move it up the hand because it doesn't feel comfortable on the wrist (especially when I work on my laptop).

Another inconvenience I've noticed is related to working out when my arms are stationary: walking on treadmill with hands on rails, working out abs, etc. If hand with Jawbone UP doesn't move - it will not track a step. And there is no way add such workout to the stats. At the moment I just put UP on my ankle (remember - medium?) while walking/running on treadmill, however this seems more like a hack than a proper solution.

At the moment Iphone app seems like is very limited version, it doesn't let me do much, but if they work on it some more it can be very useful. Amount of stats is very limited and doesn't allow any kind of customization; tracking of eating exists more for me to remember what I ate and when, I wasn't able to figure out any other use of it.

Positives

It does track main activities, even thou amount of steps it track for me per day seems a bit too high than I would expect; but I don't have any other numbers to compare it to.

Finding good challenge from the list of available Jawbone UP Challenges seems keep me motivated (at least for now); the key here is to find suitable challenge (or create it yourself).

Tracking of my sleep behavior is entertaining activity by itself, I am still playing with it; on a side note: I wasn't able to enjoy the wake up call feature, I seems always wake up by myself before it fires.

Resume

I will continue using Jawbone UP for now (at least until I am not borred by it just yet); after all it helps me to track some things I do during my day and may help me to stay motivated and be more active.

And I really hope that Jawbone UP team will do some magic soon to make the UP app more functional or come up with a way to synchronize my data to more user-oriented website interface, which isn't possible at the moment.

UPDATE: amazingly my UP started malfunction right after I answered Jawbone survey about it; happily for me they announced refund possibility, will see how it works.