I've been using my UP by Jawbone for just over a month now, and have been hesitant to write any sort of review until I had so much time to really use it.

In simplest terms, the UP is a super-accurate pedometer with a few other key features. Much like the fitbit, the UP is a device you keep with you all the time, and it tracks your activity. What is special about the UP, though, are the new features it adds: a gentle alarm that wakes you only when you're in light sleep, a gentle reminder to get up and move around when you've been inactive for too long, and the ability to switch to your iPhone's GPS when you're doing something that can't be measured by motion, such as a bike ride.

The UP's data tracking functions fall into three categories:

1. Move, which tracks your physical movement
2. Sleep
3. Eat, which attempts to track your diet and how you feel after eating certain things

And the peripheral functions include:

1. Team, with which you can compete with other UP users to encourage each other to be healthier
2. Challenges, which encourage you to reach certain goals, such as "Walk 10,000 steps every day" or "Sleep an extra hour every night"
3. An alarm that waits until you're in light sleep to wake you up
4. An activity alarm that reminds you not to sit still for too long
5. An iPhone app to analyze your activity

Move

After using it for over a month, and comparing the UP's data with that taken from my iPhone's GPS, I am truly amazed how accurate the pedometer function is. I've never really believed in pedometers because small changes in your stride can make such a drastic difference, but somehow, this can easily distinguish between steps I take and other motions, such as driving on a bumpy road.

(It seems to use vertical motion to sense steps, which means some activities, such as brushing your teeth, can look like "vigorous" activity. Though, unlike other users who expect this to be omniscient, I simply wear it on my left wrist, which keeps things pretty consistent.)

The ability to switch to your iPhone's GPS is, in my opinion, a brilliant solution to an obvious problem. I've been tracking activities, such as runs or bike rides or hikes, using my iPhone's GPS or my Garmin, for a few years now, but it only works well when outside — the UP combines the quality of both by using something I already have. To switch into GPS mode on the UP, you (somewhat unintuitively) tap a plus button on the main screen (to "add"?) a GPS workout. Like so many other apps, it brings up a screen with a timer, an odometer, and the ability to control whatever music you're listening to. The app, however, leaves much to be desired in terms of customization, so I still end up using Kinetic when I'm working out, and just have the UP app tracking GPS in the background. Until the app can notify me of my progress, send my track to Runkeeper, and have a more functional UI, I won't be able to use only the UP app for activities like this.

I always figured any iOS app that used your GPS would have the same amount of accuracy, falsely assuming GPS was hardware only. But it turns out that using only the UP app to track my GPS activity yields some horribly innacurate tracks (note: for all images, I'm on the sidewalk, so my track should follow the road closely):

GPS tracks when using only the UP iOS app:



GPS tracks when using the UP and Kinetic simultaneously (UP on left, Kinetic on right):



(Note that the "start" point for each is a bit different, because I have to hit start on different apps.)

Accuracy

I've seen many scathing reviews about the accuracy of the UP's activity tracking, and I'm not entirely sure I understand. As I noted above, even the best pedometer in the world can still only accurately measure your steps. The best GPS device can only accurately measure your geolocation. So I'd never expect something like an UP to be able to measure all of my activity with absolute accuracy. The benefit of the UP, in my opinion, is to measure your general activity levels, and give you an overview of how active you were on a daily basis. Matt Alexander at one37 explains this perfectly:

The UP is a lightweight bracelet that reminds you to move around, it wakes you up in the morning, and it tracks your general activity levels. Sure it can't tell if I'm doing weights at the gym or if I'm running, but it knows how long I'm working out, how intense it is, and the context of that workout with regard to my day. I spent 45 minutes at the gym yesterday, but was far less mobile during the day than usual, and I had less sleep. That's enough actionable information for me, and has provided enough fuel for me to proactively consider my daily activity levels.

Sleep

The sleep mode is one of the main reasons I got this. I've always been fascinated with sleep, and at last I have a reasonable way to track the quality of my sleep. For the last month (minus a week when the sleep data disappeared), I've been quite pleased with the sleep tracking. The UP considers seven hours to be enough sleep, which I don't, so I mentally change the scale a bit. (If you're listening, Jawbone, I'd love to be able to change the amount I call 100%. This goes for Move too!)

Based on your motion while sleeping (or perhaps even your pulse?), the UP can determine if you're in deep sleep or light sleep. And when you wake up (either by switching out of sleep mode or by taking 200 steps, in case you forget), it sums the amount of time in each. It somehow calculates your "sleep quality", which is perfect most of the time, but horribly wrong other times (but how can it really know I drank too much?). Last night, for example, I had 2:07 deep sleep, 5:23 light sleep, and I was awake for 24 minutes after the alarm went off and I didn't get out of bed. This amounted to sleep quality of 79.

As of now, the tools available to analyze this data are very weak: you need to find the time you slept and look at a graphic to see any data about it. It shows your deep sleep vs light sleep vs awake time in a very intuitive manner, but I'd like a function for comparing sleep on a given day with activity levels of the previous or following day. Wouldn't it be useful to see that you were far more active when you slept eight hours the night before? Or that you slept like a baby the night after a day of heavy exercise?

I'm confident these tools will be developed eventually, especially if Jawbone publishes an API for accessing the data. But until then, I'm using this data on a day-to-day basis.

Eat

The eating function, which attempts to track the food you eat and how you feel afterwards, is extremely lacking. So lacking, in fact, that I stopped using it after about a week. There is really no easy way to track this, but the UP found no solutions either: to track your food, you take a photo of your food before you eat it, possibly with a description, and then an hour later you receive a notification to rate how you feel — using smiley faces, frowny faces, etc. This is problematic for a number of reasons:

1. What about snacks?
2. What about meals with several dishes?
3. My wife is Chinese, so we frequently eat many communal dishes, where I eat 90% of this dish and only 5% of that dish, but how can a photo demonstrate that?
4. There's no way to post photos for meals you already ate
5. It's very easy to forget to track this until later in the day, and there's no way to change the time stamp on the meal/photo
6. There's far more involved in a meal that a photo simply can't capture

Many of the reviews I've read say they're hopeful for when this feature is improved, but I'm still not really sure how it could be. I'd like to track how many calories I've eaten, but that requires somehow putting that data in — which would make any meal a chore.

So until someone figures out a good way to track only relevant data, I'm considering this feature a lemon.

The Recall

Last week, I guess Jawbone got enough complaints that they decided to recall the product. They offered a no questions asked guarantee, providing a full refund for anyone, and even letting the refunders keep the UP. Much like Matt Alexander said in his aforementioned post, I think this was a poor business decision, and has made people see problems that they may not even have. I've had no problem with my UP that Jawbone hasn't been able to solve (though I have had some issues). As a result, the UP is not available for sale at this time, and their website has only an option to notify you when it is back on the market.

General

My biggest complaint about the UP right now is that there's no way to access or share the data. And I don't mean sending today's activities to Twitter, though that wouldn't be a bad option. I mean sending or retrieving activities from already well-established services like runkeeper.com — this would avoid the need to run two iOS apps on each run and try to keep them more or less in sync. I'm also already heavily invested in other services like this, so having yet another is a bit of a burden.

The iPhone app needs some work, but I'm confident it can only improve from here. As of now it's very unpolished and offers limited functionality. Again, I'm okay with this because the raw data is stored in the cloud, so all they need to do is improve the analytical tools to make the data more useful.

All told, I am very happy with my UP. It has already been successful in encouraging me to be more active, and has made me far more aware of how much of a turd I am when I just go to work and come home to watch TV. The sleep tracking is lots of fun, and quite useful. And the accuracy is just right for my use, despite several complaints by other users I've heard from.

I highly recommend UP by Jawbone. (Even if you can't buy one right now.)

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