Review: Jawbone UP 1st generation
A little history
I have spent a lot time on reading, researching tech gadgets articles and products, sometimes I’ll really buy some of them that I think are useful and interesting. I was mesmerized by Jawbone UP as soon as it came out — not only for the idea, but also for its features were all I wanted at that time.
Without any doubt, I purchased one from the Internet even it never had been released in China. I picked the larger size with a black appearance. 2 years later, it is totally out of work. I think I have enough experience for reviewing it.
My personal feelings
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| long battery life | forget to recharge sometimes |
| light weight | even the largest size is small a lot of people |
| meet-demand features | switch mode by mistake sometimes |
| the plug will have connection problem after plugging in and out a lot | |
| alarm is not powerful enough | |
| the cap is easy to lose |
Overall: Good product
Replacements
Since it has three main features — monitoring steps in day time, watching sleep quality at night and logging your records into the app for future review. I will talk about them in three parts and the replacements for each.
Steps
As I have mentioned above, Jawbone UP is designed to let you forget its existence. But you may forget for recharging or plug it in your phone to log since its design concept. Especially for forgetting for recharging, you could wear it for days without noticing it is totally shutdown. Another problem is though it uses medical rubber to prevent allergic reaction, people like me who sweat a lot and live in a hot area will still get rashes on wrist probably.
I discovered an app called Move on iPhone, which can work in background to track the steps you’ve walked, how many minutes for walking or jogging, and also the GPS infos for places you have been. As cell phone become one of my must-have carry-on these years, I almost immediately use it for step tracking after trying the features.
Sleep Quality
One of the Jawbone UP 1st generation’s main feature is the sleep mode. You can use it to track your sleep quality by tracking your body movement during sleep indirectly. The theory behind this is that, you have less movements when you are in deeper sleep period. Also it provides a smart alarm to wake you up by vibrating itself when you are not in deep sleep around you set time.
I know there are a lot of sleeping softwares on iPhone, but all of them have to be paid for using until I find Sleep Time. Although this free version can only keep your last 5 nights’ records and you have to put your wire on all the night, it still good enough for using and provides details about sleep.
Records
The official App for Jawbone has an awesome design, and the functionality is great. But it can be only used with its own products. Since my wrist band went down, I found TactioHealth which is a universal record system not only for step numbers, but also for body wight, activities, blood pressure and so on.
The only problem here for me is that I have to manually input steps from Move into Tactio. But since I have to plug Jawbone into my phone and adjust it for a lot for sync, I think this word is worthy.
Ken’s View
Jawbone UP is my first gadget for health tracking. Its quality is very good though there are some foibles. But I prefer to bring less with me and use my phone to do a lot of work, so I may not buy another similar product in the future.
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