UP3 by Jawbone Activity Tracker, Black
In-depth review and comparison to FitBit,
I took a while to review this because I wanted to make sure I understood the features and any flaws.
I’ve had three FitBits now, but as my latest one’s battery life was getting unacceptably short, I was offered this Jawbone 3 to review. I figured it was worth a shot.
At first, I was very frustrated. FitBit is all about data: steps, distance, stairs, hours of sleep, and so on. It’s pretty slick in that regard.
The Jawbone doesn’t immediately give you a lot of data. It records the data, and then it gives you summaries of how you’re doing, and advice (including challenges). It’s a different paradigm, and it’s hard to get used to at first, but in the end I found it more useful to me than what FitBit offers.
There are three main categories–
Motion:
This is very basic, just like Fitbit, just like any pedometer. How many steps you took, and how far you went. It’s a useful basic motivator. For some trackers, also stairs/ascent. The Jawbone 3 does not (directly) track altitude. I was sad at first to see that the stairs/altitude tracking was unavailable. I walk on a lot of hills, and that was an important bragging right to me! Not that anyone was interested… And ultimately Jawbone’s activity tracking is better. More on that below.
Sleep:
Both my old Fitbit One and Jawbone 3 track sleep, using both user input and motion data. They both do a good job, but I think Jawbone’s tracking and analysis is a bit better. This is also when the Jawbone’s heart rate monitoring is most noticeably active. You can see a graph of your slowly dropping heart rate as you slept, and your lowest rate is noted. Jawbone (correctly) mentions that having a low resting heart rate is a good indicator of health, but since this is something that will only change slowly with lifestyle adjustment, it’s not really a great “daily check” kind of data. Still, it’s neat to know. They also breakdown hours light/deep/REM sleep, and time awake, and your sleep total is actual sleep, not time-in-bed. Takes me 10 hours to get 8 hours of sleep apparently. Ouch.
Metabolic Activity:
This is where the Jawbone shines. They’re kind of cagy about their sensors and what the tracker actually collects. But if you put have the tracker on, and go out and get active, this will be noted in your calorie burn. (The app may also ask, “Were you exercising at [this time]?” which you can answer and fill in the type, if you want.)
And here’s the magic — if you link the UP app with a diet/calorie tracking app — it will automatically update the diet app with how much energy you’ve expended, and adjust how much you can eat!
Now, I’ve done this in the past manually. I weigh X, I do this activity for this long, do the math, add it as “exercise” to the diet app… but it’s a chore, and I have no idea how accurate it is.
It will be a couple months before I can confirm the accuracy of the Jawbone’s numbers, and Amazon doesn’t give me that long to review, but in the few weeks I’ve been trying this, it looks pretty good. I really, really like this feature.
(For reference, I am using the LoseIt! app, with a premium account to link in the Jawbone UP data. There are many available apps though, and you could even use the one built into UP, though it’s not as full-featured.)
Other features—
Alarm:
You can set a ton of reminders with the Jawbone 3, from “you’ve been sitting still too long” to “drink more water” to “it’s time to get ready for bed.” Also, I really like the smart wake alarm. You let it know when you want to be up by, and also give it a range of up to 30 minutes before. If your sleep cycle ends within that 30 minute (or whatever) range, the vibration motor in the wristband will wake you up, allowing for easier, more alert mornings.
Obviously, all these alarms are silent, so you don’t need to worry about disturbing anyone else. Some of the reminder alarms also activate on your phone.
Band:
It’s comfortable and adjustable. Getting the clip to work took a little practice, but now I can do it left handed in the dark. It’s a solid rubbery material, so it doesn’t breathe at all. I find myself sliding it up or down to give my skin a bit of air. I switch it to the other wrist for sleeping, for the same reason.
I have had the tracker clip unfasten when pulling a backpack off or on quickly, but there’s a little metal loop that caught the other side of the band before I completely lost it. However, if you’re really active, you might want to invest in one of those silicon security rings. I’m considering it.
Readout:
There are three, colored LEDS behind cut outs. An orange runner, a white circle, and a blue crescent moon. On my tracker, the cutout behind the runner isn’t aligned right so it’s just kind of an orange squiggle. The other icons look fine. Reminders and alerts are a vibration accompanied by some combination of these lights to distinguish them, but it’s pretty easy to know what you’re being told, regardless.
The tracker essentially has two modes: active and sleeping. To switch between modes, you tap on it until it wakes up, and then it’ll show you what mode it’s in. Runner for active, moon for sleeping. Touch and hold to change modes. This can be a little tricky at first, especially if you’re moving around a lot, you might accidentally change modes. Any change is accompanied by a vibration and an indicator light, so if you keep an eye on it you’ll see what is happening
I would’ve liked a clock or another useful readout, but this makes for a very slim band. You’ll have to look at the app on your phone to get most data.
Charging:
There are magnets and a charging connector on the inside of the Jawbone 3. To charge you “connect” it to a short, bendable USB cable. It might take a couple tries to get the connector going the right way—the magnets will stick, but be unaligned if it’s backwards. The cable is not very convenient for the location of my USB ports, but it works. You can bend the cable around so you can see that it’s charging okay. It goes for a week or so between charges. I generally just recharge it while showering.
App:
The app looks pretty polished, and has a lot of neat features, but it still needs some work. I use the iPhone app on a 5s, where it is occasionally very slow with jerky animations. It’s a little hard to navigate, but just keep poking at and sliding things and you’ll find all the features. Mostly, there’s a timeline of your activity—eating, moving, sleeping, that you can scroll through. Your day so far is summarized on the main screen, with how much you slept (as a % of ideal), how many steps you’ve taken (as a % of your goal), and, if you’re including nutrition data, a numerical 1-10 “food score” plus your calories. The food score is based on USDA recommendations, which you can tweak a little.
The app will suggest things to you, like, you’ve been doing X steps on average—do you want to try to beat that today? Or, considering when you get up, it would be good to get to bed by [time]? Would you like to take that challenge? (I’ve been stuck on the bedtime challenge for weeks now! ) Or, consider adding more fruits and vegetables to your meals. Stuff like that. It’s a little odd at first, but it’s very non-threatening and easy to use or ignore.
You can also track things like glasses of water and mood, which I haven’t got into yet.
There are still some bugs, though. In order to track sleep, you have to switch into “sleep” mode. One night for some reason it didn’t quite take, so I had to manually add a few hours in the app. I assumed it would be best to just add the whole span, and suddenly it was showing 12 hours of sleep. Huh, maybe I got am/pm wrong. Tried again. Wait, now I’ve been sleeping 20 hours?? Maybe I got a whole day wrong. Try one more time… Eventually I figured it out was just bulk-adding those hours to my sleep total. I wound up with 50 hours of sleep in one night, and no way to delete it. Neat trick, that. Then, because it had messed up my average for the week, I tried to delete all my data and start over, and I could never get that to work either.
Sometimes the phone and the band lose their pairing constantly, and the other times it’ll go for days just fine. I know bluetooth is a little troublesome, so I’m not going to blame the tracker too badly for this, though I think it should be a bit more robust about re-pairing itself. Still, the procedure is easy, and it stores enough data on its own that I’m not losing anything.
Set up and Documentation:
There is almost no documentation included. I needed to go to the website (which isn’t all that great either) to figure out how do to anything. Go to Support -> Fitness Trackers -> Up 3. The “Getting Started” links have everything you need. The app is easy to get.
Wishlist:
When I got this, I really hoped for more in the way of heart rate monitoring. I go for long, hilly hikes and it’s hard for me to balance overexerting myself on the uphill parts with slacking off on the down slopes. I’ve used Polar HRMs for that, but I thought that with this I’d be able to get that feedback, but no. However, Jawbone claims that they’re adding new features all the time. If they could give me some kind of heart range gating for exercise, that would be great.
I would like to be able to see/manipulate my data on the either a website or a desktop app as well. The phone app is not always the easiest way to get an overview.
Overall:
I really like the Jawbone 3, and I’m super happy that I got a chance to try it. It’s got the best metabolic tracking, the best diet tracking, and the best sleep tracking around. However, if all you want is the raw data, this is not the tracker for you. Also, if you’re not comfortable with some bugs and growing pains, you might want to wait a couple months. I will update this review as needed.
