Back in October, Microsoft announced and promptly released the Microsoft Band. Aimed squarely at the growing “fitness wearable” market, the Band is a fitness bracelet and more. The question is, does it try to do too much?
When is a smartwatch not a smartwatch?
Before I start in earnest, I think it’s important to define a few terms. The market for wearable tech, apart from Google Glass, is generally dominated by watch-like devices that you wear on your wrist. These fall into two main categories:
Fitness Trackers that track your pulse, steps taken, calories burnt, and, maybe, your GPS position;
Smart watches that link to your smartphone (or not) and allow you to read and send text messages and e-mails and install custom apps.
The Microsoft Band falls broadly into the first category, but with some of the characteristics of the second. It connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth and while it will work without the connection, you’ll want to get back in range to get the data from it in a readable format. The Band itself will show your text messages, a summary of any e-mails you receive and will notify you of incoming calls. Unlike a more conventional smart watch, however, you can’t compose texts or mails from the Band (Cortana notwithstanding, but more on that later) and it doesn’t really run apps in the conventional sense.
The Hardware
The Band I’m reviewing is my own. Prior to buying it, my research suggested that comfort was an issue. For something you’re expected to wear constantly, that seemed a significant problem, and I have to admit that trying one on in the New York store where I got mine didn’t completely allay my fears. The Band is made from pretty stiff rubberised plastic. The battery is an innovative split unit, with each of the 2 ‘pieces’ situated inside the strap, one on either side of the screen. This means that this area is almost completely rigid – something that gave me serious pause. I didn’t want to feel constricted when wearing the Band, and feared that this might mean it was downright uncomfortable. I figured I’d go ahead in the name of science anyway, and I’m glad I did. The band is available in 3 sizes, and as long as you get the right one, you’ll probably find, as I did, that the rigidity is easy to get used to and you fairly quickly forget you’re wearing the Band. I have been wearing it 24/7 for the past few weeks now, and am well past noticing it. I’ve had watches that took longer to ‘break-in’ (and don’t get me started on shoes). The clasp is easy to fasten and adjust – just pinch and slide – and although the Band is a little on the chunky side, I haven’t found it getting too much in the way, even while typing.
The screen is a 1.4″ OLED display and is flat, not curved like some other wearables (like the Galaxy Gear). Microsoft, perhaps acknowledging the fact that the screen is a little exposed to the elements, are throwing in a free screen protector with all purchases. The protector on mine already has a few nicks, so I’m glad of it and will probably invest in a few more before long. You can wear the Band with the screen on the back of your wrist like a watch, but given the shape and orientation of the screen, it probably makes more sense to wear it facing in. It may look a little odd, but it’s surprisingly easy to get used to.
Charging is done using a magnetically attached proprietary cable that will plug into your PC’s USB port or compatible wall adapter. Charging to 80% takes about an hour and you’ll get more than a day of normal use from that (although using GPS during a run will reduce that time significantly). I find that if I give it 20 minutes after I wake in the morning, it gets up to between 80 and 100% and that keeps me going until I charge it while showering again the following morning.
The Band is billed as water-resistant, but not waterproof, so it will be ok in the rain, and will deal comfortably with your sweaty wrist, but don’t take it for a swim. There are videos online of people immersing it in a sink for 10 minutes from which it emerges in perfect order, but I’m not going to advocate taking that risk.
Sensor Overload
One thing you can’t accuse Microsoft of with the Band is skimping on the specs. The Band packs in a total of 10 separate sensors to monitor everything from your heartbeat to your global position and most things in between. The full list ( here ) is as follows:
Optical heart rate sensor
3-axis accelerometer/gyro
Gyrometer
GPS
Ambient light sensor
Skin temperature sensor
UV sensor
Capacitive sensor
Galvanic skin response
Microphone
In practical terms, this means that the Band can provide the user with an array of information on their physical condition while exercising. Microsoft calls these “actionable insights for healthier living”. Whatever you call them, these data are the bread and butter of a fitness wearable – steps taken, distance covered, calories burned, heart rate during the workout, pace over a run (which you can also track with GPS and show on a map later, complete with colour coding for your pace), split times and even how much you’re sweating.
All of these data are presented to you in the accompanying Microsoft Health app, so you’re currently limited to what that measures and displays. However, I think it’s fair to say that with the number of sensors on the Band, the potential for how these data are extracted and presented, and the situations where they could be useful, is huge.
Buttons and Display
The Band has two physical buttons – lock/unlock and action – and they are located under the screen. The lock button is pretty self-explanatory, while the action button has different purposes depending on the function you’re using.
When you lock the screen it goes dark by default, but you can set the clock to appear all the time meaning you can use the Band as an everyday digital watch if you wish (I do).
The 1.4″ touchscreen display is bright and colourful with the home-screen showing the time and one other value (date, heart-rate, calories burned today, steps taken today or distance walked today). You can cycle through these secondary values using the action button and you can ‘peek’ to the left on the home-screen to see some status information (battery, Bluetooth and heart-rate). Using the app on your phone, you can choose an accent colour and background pattern for the home-screen as well as which tiles to display and in what order.
The Band can display up to 10 tiles to the right of the home-screen, with 3 filling the screen at a time. There are 18 tiles to choose from (Settings is always shown) including Messaging, Calls, E-Mail, Weather, Sleep, Facebook, Twitter and Facebook Messenger. As you can imagine, the screen real-estate is at a premium, so most show summary data, although text messages are shown in their entirety. As I said before, you don’t get the option to compose messages on the device – I can’t imagine you’d want to anyway.
The clock app on the Band has a timer and stopwatch as well as the ability to set an alarm. Setting the alarm on the Band means that you’re awoken with a vibration on your wrist rather than a buzzing in your ear. I have found it just as effective, and it doesn’t disturb anyone else in the room. Strangely, the time of the alarm resets to the current time when you open it, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to schedule recurring alarms like you can on the phone. Hopefully this will be improved in the future, because it’s a nice little function.
If you’re using a Windows Phone, you can use Cortana through the Band by long-pressing on the action button. It’s not a massive benefit as your phone will probably be in reach, but some may find it useful (I mainly use it to send quick text messages). If you don’t know what Cortana is, think Siri for Windows Phone – a voice activated digital assistant. It is due to be rolled out in Ireland in the coming months.
App-tastic
The Band requires that you install the Microsoft Health app on your phone before you start to use it. I won’t go into the setup process – there’s some Bluetooth pairing, syncing, all very straightforward. The app is available for iOS and Android as well as Windows Phone, so you’re not restricted by your choice of mobile OS. To be honest, as a Windows Phone user, I find the app a bit of a mess. It may be that it’s designed to look familiar to all users and none, but to my eyes the layout of the app is not exactly intuitive. I’m used to swiping through screens, but here we have a ‘burger’ menu button on the top left that opens a catch-all menu on the left, and a Band button on the top right that syncs with the Band and shows another menu on the right.
Once you get used to the navigation around the app, there is a fair amount of useful stuff in there. You can view detailed information on the steps you’ve taken and when, the calories you’ve burned, and, if you’re using the sleep app on the Band, how you’ve been sleeping. If you tracked your run via GPS, it’s in this app that you can view it with colour coding showing your changing pace over the route.
If you’re looking to get fit, you can download guided workouts to the Band. These are available from various providers and for people with varying levels of fitness. I downloaded a ‘couch to 5K’ workout with 14 different routines to complete, culminating in a 5K run (jog!). The first set is comprised of a 10 minute walk and 5 sets of a 2 minute jog, then a 60 second walk. To do the routine with the Band, you choose the Guided Workouts app and hit the action button to start. The Band buzzes after 10 minutes and tells you to start jogging. It then buzzes after 2 minutes and tells you to walk, then buzzes again a minute later to tell you to jog again. This goes on until the workout is over. Although the one I chose is for running, there are others for weight-loss, building upper-body strength and more. When working out, you can choose which metrics (heart-rate, calories etc.) to display by default on the screen – one main and two secondary. This is a nice way to see what’s important to you during the workout.
Future-tech
There are ways in which the Band feels like a prototype or slightly beta product. I’ve had a couple of issues with notifications (one of the mail accounts on my phone keeps sending notifications even though I’ve turned them off), and the connection to the phone (it very occasionally tells me it can’t reach the phone, despite all indications that the connection is in place) but nothing major. The Band itself is a little bit thick and rigid, and not exactly pretty, the screen could be less exposed to bumps and bruises and the Microsoft Health app needs polishing.
Having said that, the array of functions currently available is a good start, and the plethora of sensors gives great scope for more. I’m particularly looking forward to a simple Golf GPS app, music player controls and Skype and Viber notifications, but I’m sure more inventive and ambitious people than I are working on more exciting projects. I hope that Microsoft will support the platform with development tools and APIs that make it attractive to developers. I should also mention that there is a Starbucks app included that lets you use the band to pay for coffee after you register your Starbucks card.
With any piece of tech like the Band, you do find yourself wondering if you really need it. Put simply, no, of course you don’t need a GPS tracking, heart-rate monitoring, sweat measuring, calorie counting, workout guiding wristband. The thing is, there are plenty of us who do want that, who want to measure and analyse and maybe incidentally get fit in the process. Outside of the fitness functions, I have found that the e-mail and text notifications mean that I go to my phone less frequently for this information. A glance at your wrist can tell you whether or not the mail you just received needs your immediate attention, and that can save time over the day.
The Band is currently only available in the United States, and is in short supply, so you may have some work to do to get your hands on one. If you do manage to do so, please let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
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