Review: Jawbone Up

You must first understand I am a sedentary man.

My typical day at Wired involves two minutes of quasi-ambulatory floor puttering for every 58 minutes spent sitting at my desk. I work out at home, yes, but my fitness regimen could be best described as low-impact snack digestion.

Were it not for my dog Whiskey (she of the twice-daily poop walk), and my girlfriend Julie (she of the twice-daily "Whiskey needs a walk!" reminder), I probably wouldn't receive much exercise at all.

And so it was with jazz and anticipation that I began to test the Jawbone Up, an innovative new lifestyle monitoring system that consists of an electronics-packed wristband and accompanying iPhone app. The two elements work together to hector, needle, and ultimately inspire the user to live a more active, healthy life.

The Up system can tell you how many foot steps you take in a given day, and includes a bunch of "challenge" features to prod you to take even more. It can also monitor your sleep habits, and gently wake you up within a predetermined window during REM sleep. REM is not only your lightest sleep cycle, but also the best cycle in which to wake if you want to avoid that groggy morning lethargy that feels like all the blood in your brain has been replaced with frozen Barenjager.

So, yes, the Up has great potential as a health and wellness gadget. And, yes, the Up worked fabulously – until it stopped working entirely. It turns out one of the cleverest gadgets of 2011 currently has such grave hardware reliability problems, I can't recommend it. In fact, until Jawbone can prove that it has remedied what's causing the wristbands to fail at an alarming rate, no one should consider buying the Up.

I'll be attacking this review in two parts, first describing the system's considerable features and talents, and then listing the litany of hardware problems the Up has suffered since it was released a little more than a month ago.

How the Up Works

The Up wristband costs $100, and currently comes in three sizes, and just a single color (black). The band's internals are quite simple. Inside there's little more than a motion sensor, vibration motor, and rechargeable battery (supposedly good for ten days of continuous use).

The outside of the band is even more unremarkable. It's just a nondescript, hypoallergenic rubber ring, with a single steel button on one end, and a 3.5mm plug for device syncing on the other end. You get a single cap to cover the sync plug, and the exterior also features two LEDS. Jawbone says the band is water- and sweat-resistant, and while you can wear it in the shower, it should be removed for swimming.

To get started with the Up, you place the band on your wrist, hit the button to enter Active mode (confirmed by a flower-shaped green LED), and then go about your day. Every step you take will be recorded by the band's internal motion sensor – as will all the minutes you spend off your feet.

When it's time for bed, you hit the button again to enter Sleep mode (confirmed by a crescent moon-shaped blue LED). You wear the Up band throughout your slumber, and the internal motion sensor records all your night-time movement. The system is clever enough to know when you're awake, when you're in light, REM sleep, and when you're in a deep, Rip Van Winkle-worthy trance.

After waking, you sync the band with Jawbone's iOS app by plugging the Up into your iPhone's headphone jack and hitting a simple menu button in the app. And here's where the fun – or pangs of guilt, or flashes of inspiration – really begin.

Tossing and Turning

The app reveals fascinating infographics that chart every minute slept and step taken. It's almost like having a personal coach who records all your activity, and then plots every single minute of your day across a visually rich timeline.

The graph of a single night's sleep will show you exactly when you fell asleep and awoke, and reveal all your periods of deep sleep, light sleep, and complete wakefulness in between. The infographic even reports a "sleep quality" rating that accounts for the ratio of deep to light sleep.

All this information is divined from how you trip the Up's internal motion sensor during the night: During deep sleep we're essentially motionless, while during lighter, REM sleep, our wrists move to a measurable degree.

Sound familiar? There's actually a term for the use of motion sensors in sleep and activity monitoring – it's called actigraphy, and it's employed in other commercial bio-feedback products like the Fitbit, Sleeptracker watch, and a wide variety of pedometers. The technology itself is nothing particularly special, but Jawbone delivers a unique, compelling experience by marrying actigraphy to all the visual richness of an iOS app.

Within just two days of use, I found myself running my own one-man sleep clinic, addicted to analyzing my own sleep data. I wanted confirmation of exactly what happened in the middle of the night. And I didn't just want to know how well I slept. I also wanted to set new personal bests for sleep quality scores.

To this end, the Up offers promise as a behavior-modification tool for anyone with sleep problems. Does exercise before bed help or hinder deep sleep? And what about the effects of alcohol? For that matter, what about the effects of frozen Barenjager – would switching to, say, a playful prosecco better serve the nightcap-inclined insomniac? You can use the Up to help answer these questions, assembling a telling case history of how wakeful activity affects your sleep.

The Up's band can also serve as the most gentle of alarm clocks. Let's say you want to wake up at 6:30am. You open the iOS app, and set a "Smart Alarm" for a 30-minute window starting at 6am. You then sync your band with the app – in effect, loading the alarm into the hardware – and place the Up back on your wrist.

When 6am rolls around the next morning, the band's motion sensor waits for you to enter the twitchy throes of REM sleep. As soon as it senses you're dancing in the dreamscape disco, the Up will wake you with a gentle vibration via its internal motor drive.

This scheme really does result in easier morning wake-ups, though, yes, you always run the risk of being nudged awake during the beginning of your alarm window (which is locked in at 30 minutes). Within days I found I'd rather have 20-odd minutes of extra sleep each morning, and stopped using the the Smart Alarm completely.

The Pitter-Patter of Active Feet

Once you're ready to start your day, you tap the Up's button to enter Active mode (the band will also enter that mode automatically after a period if extended wrist motion). While the band records your footsteps, you can begin pre-catastrophizing the moment of reckoning you'll face upon viewing your next activity report.

The Up's activity reports use a color-coded bar graph to illustrate just how many steps you've taken across a span of time. You get a daily snapshot, complete with notation of how many calories you've burned, how many miles you've covered, how many hours and minutes you were active, and, of course, your total number of steps.

Dissatisfied with your day's activity? The Up interface is merciless in illustrating your extended stretches of deep-cushion entrenchment. You have nowhere to run from the visual evidence of your laziness, so your best option is to, well, just get up and run.

Indeed, the system really did inspire me to take more steps throughout the day. On each day's activity graph, I wanted to see more bars, higher bars, and bars of darker colors – all indicators of a more active life. I found myself parking blocks away from the office, if only to squeeze in a few more steps. And on the weekends, I found myself taking Whiskey for longer, farther walks.

My band syncing also increased in frequency. The Up turned me into a data junkie, and instead of syncing only upon waking, I began syncing multiple times a day, if only to see my activity graphs improve.

If you're inured to bar-chart-inspired guilt, the system includes a host of other tools to prod you out of your comfy chair. When you set an "Activity Reminder," the band's vibration motor will nudge you to stop everything you're doing, and take a few steps at pre-set intervals. It's a useful tool for, say, a desk-bound journalist, but probably not the best option for surgeons who specialize in conjoined twin separations.

You can also join a team of Up users, and issue each other challenges. For example, a team called DailyFeats has initiated a group challenge called "Great Wall of China" where members are asked to walk a combined 5,500 miles – the length of the famous wall.

The Up system is rife with social media features too numerous to mention, and in the end, I found myself more interested in using the package as a monitoring device. To this end, you can time-stamp a single workout by pressing your band's button as soon as you begin and end your run, walk or hike.

You can also use the app to initiate a GPS-based work-out. The iPhone in your pocket will monitor the terrain you cover, and when you sync your band, all your footstep data will be mapped to your path on a map.

Besides recording sleep and activity data, you can also use the Up to track everything you eat. In fact, food tracking consumes a full one-third of the app's main interface, and the nascent Up "community," as it were, is even interested in issuing food-based challenges (for example, "Eat a breakfast of fruits and veggies").

In practice, the food tracking component involves little more than taking photos of your meals, location-stamping where you ate them, and filing them into any group challenges you've accepted. Do I really want the whole world to know I consider fried oysters a defensible source of protein? No. This is not an opinion one shares with others.

Bottom line: The Up band doesn't offer any actigraphy features addressing food consumption, and I find the whole "police your own food intake" component of the system rather silly. I'm not interested in simple scrapbook images of the meals I've eaten. I want empirical data points on exactly what I've consumed: detailed caloric intake numbers, and exactly how many hours that bowl of spumoni shaved off my life.

Other gripes: The Up comes with just a single cap that has "You will lose me some day!" written all over it (replacement caps come in packs of three for $10, plus extra for shipping).

I also found the band's hardware interface to be simple and nondescript to a fault. With just a single spongy button and two dimly lit LEDs, it was often difficult to tell if I had successfully changed monitoring modes, or set up a user-defined workout. The button doesn't offer any discernible click to indicate one has triggered a new action, and when my first test unit began failing, I couldn't tell if user error or faulty hardware was to blame.

All of which leads us to device reliability. During testing, I had not one one, but three review units fail on me. I dismissed the first failure as an anomaly – no hardware production line is immune to a few random device failures.

But when the second Up wristband bricked on me, I sensed a worrisome trend, especially because by this time, users on Jawbone's own forum were complaining about wristbands dying after just a few days of use.

And they weren't the only ones. As of press time, 41 different Amazon.com user reviews complained of 23 different broken Up bands – good for a cumulative user review score of two out of five stars (Note: Only Amazon is selling it for $195).

Before my three Up bands gave up their ghosts, I observed number of strange behaviors. One band issued random Activity Alert vibrations, and its activity graps indicated dropped data collection throughout the day. Two of the bands had difficulty keeping a battery charge, and all three units exhibited syncing failures before dying on me entirely.

As I reported Thursday, Jawbone says the reliability problems are tied to two faulty capacitors, and has stopped manufacturing the Up until it's positive the hardware problems are fixed. What's more, the company is offering an unprecedented make-good for Up customers: Beginning today and running through Dec 31, 2012, people who bought their bands from authorized retailers will be granted full refunds, and – get this – be allowed to keep their existing bands, even if they continue to work, no questions asked.

If you have an Up on you wrist this very moment, you can collect a full-price rebate, and continue using the band 24/7 – assuming it does, in fact, work.

I'm impressed with Jawbone's commitment to customer satisfaction, but I'm not completely surprised by its generous refund policy. The Up launched to significant critical acclaim before units started bricking, and people who've used the system – like myself – quickly found it becoming an essential part of their daily routine.

In short: It's a winning product with a single fatal reliability flaw. But it's a flaw that should be easily fixed.

Jawbone would be foolish to write off the Up as a horrible nightmare never to be spoken of again. It's a product with serious potential. It makes sense for the company to take a financial hit today to manage its reputation, then resuscitate the Up a number of months down the road.

But, sadly for Jawbone, this review must publish today. The Up system, even despite its silly social media and food photography components, is a winning package. But because this package currently doesn't work, we must give it one our most scathing review verdicts.

WIRED Effective tool for monitoring your footsteps, health habits, sleep patterns. Attractive on the wrist. Charts and graphs are fun and addictive.

TIRED Currently doesn't work, a complete hardware fail. Social interaction features are dull. Hardware interface is too simple to be useful.

See Also:- Jawbone Explains UP Wristband Failures and Offers Full Refunds

• G-Lab: Dead Jawbone Wristbands, New HTC Phones, Virtual Boy
• Jawbone Unveils "Up," A Health Monitoring Wristband for Data Fiends
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Jawbone UP Wristband, Robotic Vacuums, Smart Thermostat
• Jawbone's App-Powered Wristband Encourages Health, Wellness