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.

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.)

• Filesharing. This is the big one. On Snow Leopard Server, I used AFP, SMB, and FTP. AFP was without a doubt the most necessary, but several of my Windows friends used SMB, and FTP is a good universal-even-if-a-pain protocol for sharing files.
• VPN. This is very important as well, not only for me to access the network from anywhere, but also for several of my friends in China who use this to get around the internet censorship — the "Great Firewall" — in China.
• Various means of access for me, such as Screen Sharing (VNC) or SSH. These are easy to configure, and only I use them, so it would be no issue to set up from scratch if need be.
• Time Machine. My wife and I use this machine for Time Machine backups of our other computers. This sort of fits in the filesharing, but is related also to user accounts and permissions.
• iCal hosting. For events that require extra coordination, such as our wedding in China last year, I set up calendars for people to subscribe to. Sure, I could do this on MobileMe or Google Calendar or any other number of things, but I like doing it here.

And the things I previously had but realized I no longer need:

• Wiki. Seriously?
• Mail. Again, seriously? I've got so many freaking email addresses the last thing I need is to maintain another that is solely my responsibility.
• iChat. I can see how this is a great service for some, but I have enough ways to communicate with other users.

For everything in the first list, I exported all of the settings from Server Admin.app. The app makes it remarkably easy to export configuration files, which can later be imported. Using the upgrade guide Apple released, I also made several com.apple. ... .plist backups from the System Library.

And then I pressed go.

I had mostly the same errors as I did back in July, which surprised me, seeing as how they've already had a number of "bugfix" updates. And when the installation was complete, sure enough, the user accounts were gone, and half of the services were disabled. But rather than trying to correct all the problems at one time — say, by restoring files in System Library from my backup — I addressed each service as needed:

I reimported the user accounts from the exported list, as well as the groups, I removed any previous NAT port-mapping settings I had made with Snow Leopard on my Time Capsule router, verified the sharepoints, etc.

The only thing that gave me a bit of trouble was enabling the L2TP VPN, as Apple had disabled-by-default the less secure but more convenient and universal PPTP. After too long searching the web for reasons why canyouseeme.org couldn't see port 1701, L2TP's port, I found this little nugget on Apple's Forums from J15BIG suggesting it wasn't the port, but the devices connecting to it refusing the connection because I don't have an SSL certificate:

The issues I was having acutally had nothing to do with my ports, it was my SSL certificate. I didn't pay anyone for a certificate so I didn't have one setup. However, once I setup my server with a self signed certificate, and I added a profile to my phone that told the phone to trust the self signed certificate, the VPN worked flawless.

• I need a phone that can work when I travel for reasonable rates (ie not $4/min)
• I want a way to send/receive text messages from multiple devices, including the web, while still being able to search all messages in one place (search is very important to me)
• If possible, I'd like to avoid getting into a contract, even if that means paying the subsidized price for a phone.
• And finally, of course, I want an iPhone.

For the last several years I've been able to satisfy these requirements using a complex system of unlocked iPhones, Google Voice, Skype, and a vast array of apps, depending on which one sucks the least. You can see more details in my previous post, International Roaming with Skype & Google Voice, but essentially I used an unlocked iPhone with a local SIM card, and had Google Voice forward my calls to Skype, which then forwarded my calls to my iPhone wherever I was. This allowed me to manage my call forwarding, text messages, and phones through the web, and also made calls extremely cheap regardless of where I was.

As I mentioned in that post, the method works. I need to take an extra step when making calls, and sending a new contact a text message required a bit more time. But it worked.

Enter iMessage on iOS 5, a way to send messages for free to anyone with an iOS device.

Because my Google voice number is not my actual phone number, I'd have to register my iMessage with my email address. Everyone who knows me knows I'm an avid iPhone fan, so they'd expect to be able to send me free messages at my phone number, but this would cost them per-message rates. Furthermore, I'd have to remember whom to contact via iMessage, and whom to contact via Infinite SMS, my Google Voice SMS app of choice.

Well, this confuses things, but it would still work to use my email address and tell people to iMessage me through that. And for Google Voice, everything else remains status quo. Meh. What a drag.

But Sprint, I recently learned, is now fully integrated with Google Voice. This means that my Sprint phone number will be my Google Voice number. I can manage my messages online, and when I send messages through iMessage (or receive), it will be completely transparent. No more deciding which app to use. (Though my messages will be in two places, admittedly.) So this solves my Google Voice problem beautifully. I can integrate my Sprint account with Google Voice so I get the benefits without any of the headache.

And it gets better.

The Sprint iPhone 4Ss are GSM unlocked*. To be clear: the iPhones are still locked to Sprint, but when the Sprint network cannot be found, eg in China, I can use a local SIM card, thus avoiding the outrageous $4/min calls expensive text messages. And, because I can use Google Voice on the web, or iMessage through my iPhone, I can still use Google Voice to contact people back in the states without them even knowing the difference. Everyone wins!

So my wife and I switched to Sprint this morning, are saving a bundle of money, and can use Google Voice and iMessage for everything international, almost completely transparent. The only downside is that Sprint's 3G network is roughly a quarter of AT&T's on iPhone 4S (theoretical speed), but I'm on WiFi most of the time so that hardly matters.

*I had to contact Sprint three times to confirm this. All the articles I read about it referred only to Jason Snell at MacWorld, who provided no evidence. The Sprint customer service rep was very helpful and called Apple to confirm. My disclaimer: call Sprint yourself.