Last weekend when I was in Vancouver (yet again), I visited my good buddy Nicole at the Apple Store, and she introduced me to the Jawbone UP! Remember last year at Comic-Con when I got that Nike+ FuelBand and was all excited about it? Well this is kinda like that, but BETTER!
Much like the FuelBand, it's a band you wear on your wrist that measures your movements and tells you how many steps you've taken and works that out into calories burned and makes a pretty little graph in the app that goes with it. So far it sounds pretty familiar. Nothing too terribly exciting right? Might as well just have a step counter. But WAIT! There's MORE!
You also wear this thing to bed and switch it into sleep mode, and it somehow records your sleep! When you wake up in the morning and sync the band to your iPhone app, it pops up with a cool little graph showing you how long you slept, how much of your sleep was light versus deep, and it shows you how many times you woke up. I'm not sure how it works, but it's really cool.
The app also lets you input your other activities, like biking, cross training, weights, and a bunch of other things, and then tells you approximately how many calories you burned. You can also put in all of the food you've eaten throughout the day. This one is a really big thing for me. You put in the nutritional information of what you ate and it compares it to what you should be eating, and then I feel guilty for having way too much sodium and not enough fibre, or whatever. Did you know that EVERYTHING you eat has sodium? Even water.
One of the really interesting features of the band is the "smart alarm." I mentioned before that it somehow can tell when you are in a light sleep versus a deep sleep. Well, you can set an alarm on the band with a window to wake you up. You can set it to wake you at 7:30am, with a window of half an hour. The band will then find a point between 7am and 7:30am when you are in a light sleep stage and wake you up then so you'll be less groggy. The band vibrates on your wrist, which worried me at first, but it's not a bad way to be woken up. It's pretty interesting. It seems pretty effective, but me being me, I still set an alarm on my phone. And my alarm clock. But maybe I'll change that after I test it a little longer.
There are a lot of fun features in the UP app. You can add your friends to your "team" and see their activities and comment on them, cheer each other on. I've got a few friends on it, and I love that. It's nice to have friendly encouragement. You can also look at a timeline of everything you've done since you started using the UP band, and you can compare your sleep and activity on different graphs. And the app pops up with helpful tips and information based on your activities.
All in all, I'm really enjoying the Jawbone UP so far. It's pushing me to get more active again, and that's something I need. Plus it's fun AND pretty. And I think you should get one.
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