The Nike Fuelband.....from Gadgetreview.com

Pedometers have long existed. But let’s be honest, they’re for middle aged, over weight women. There is nothing cool, rad or hip about them. Those of the younger, more stylish generation are attracted to sleeker looking products that complement their lifestyle, not ones that contradict it. Nike’s Plus service emerged a few years ago, and while it provides much need information for runners, it was, and is, hardly an everyday accessory to help you keep track of your daily activities. Leveraging the popularity of rubber wrist bands, such as Livestrong Lance Armstrong bands, is Nike’s Fuelband bracelet.

123►

Embedded into the bracelect’s face, in addition to a single rubber coated button, are 20 LED lights which indicate how close you are to achieving your daily Fuel goal. There are also 100 white LEDs that spell out your total steps taken, calories burned and your Fuel number for the day. By design, and logically I might add, the information resets everyday at 12am since the goals are designed around a single day.
To get the Fuelband up and running I simply had to plug it into my computer. Unlike many of today’s smartphone and similar products, the Fuelband doesn’t use a micro or mini USB port. Instead the clasp doubles a USB plug, though Nike includes a cord for those using a desktop or aren’t comfortable plugging the band directly into their computer’s USB port. Once plugged in, you’ll need to head to Nikeplus.com/setup where you’ll be prompted to download the accompanying software. Once installed you’ll be walked through a quick setup process where upon you’ll enter your age, height, weight as well as your desired daily Fuel goal. Don’t worry, you can later customize the Fuel number to whatever you’d like, but Nike offers three presets: 2000 (normal), 3000 (active day) and 5000 (high-energy day). If you’ve got a Nike account you can login immediately or sign up. After that, you’ll just need to just charge your Fuelband to full, which takes about 3-4 hours, and you’ll be off and exercising.

So what is Nike Fuel? Nike Fuel is whole integer number that represents your daily activity by calculating your calories burned along with your steps taken, while simultaneously factoring in your age, gender, weight and height. In short order, Nike Fuel is a calculation that allows everyone and anyone to compete regardless of their sex, age and any physical predispositions. All this data can be uploaded to Nike+ Connect or the accompanying smartphone app once you pair the Fuelband using the built-in Bluetooth.
The Fuelband by all accounts is a revolutionary device. At first blush it looks like another black rubber wrist bands. Don’t get me wrong, it is. But once those LED lights illuminate, it felts like all my childhood gadget aspirations had come together simultaneously. Phrased another way, the Fuelband’ design is so innocuous, so unassuming and so simple that when it shows off its LEDs they’re awe inspiring.

Using the Fuelband is dead simple. A small rubber button that is seamlessly embedded into the facade, illuminates the LED lights. Press it and it will show the last menu viewed: Fuel, Cals, Steps or Time. Each subsequent press cycles through the different menus by scrolling them from right to left in a fashion that could be best described as an electronic billboard – it’s quite slick. The color LEDs, which shows you how close you are to your daily goal – green is the goal as indicated by one LED, while red is your progress – only illuminates during the initial press of the button, not during the cycles. Hold down the button for a few seconds and it will activate the sync feature (as displayed), provided of course you’ve paired it with your smartphone’s Bluetooth connection and downloaded the accompanying app.
With the app installed (on your computer or smartphone) you’ll be able to modify your daily Fuel goal to whatever integer you like, see your progress, calories burned, step taken and distance walked. It also allows you to view your past days, rate your day using a variety of emoticon faces, view your friends activity and review past achievements. If need be you can also modify a few other options, such as the Fuelband’s display orientation for left or right hand wearing, but you’ll need to connect it your computer to change your height, weight or age – hardly a concern though, since those won’t change much.

Unfortunately, there is no way to view the Fuelband’s remaining battery life, unless of course you plug it into your computer’s USB port or you’re almost out of juice. That said, the small version comes with a 50mAh battery, while the medium ships with a 70mAh battery. I tested the medium Fuelband and have gone 7 days without recharging it despite Nike saying that it should last for up to 4 days. Suffice to say, my battery expectations have been managed.
During my testing, I used the Nike Fuelband in a variety of scenarios over the course of 7 days. I ran with it, lifted weights, practiced some Kung Fu and all but slept with the Fuelband on my wrist. Thanks to the accompanying iPhone app I am able to see roughly what time of the day I was active, how many calories I burned, steps taken and total distance traveled (miles or kilometers). You can also review your past days, weeks and years if need be. Achieve a goal and the wrist band will display the word GOAL and upon syncing it run a small video snippet of the Nike Fuel character in celebration. By all means this is great motivition to drive you forward in your daily routine. Unfortunately, this is where the buck stops and the proverbial dime drops.

The Nike Fuelband over counted my steps, no question about it. I first noticed this while driving. Some how I manage to accumulate 50 steps while sitting. Okay, I’m moving forward, so it stands to reason that the Fuelband’s accelerometers mistook this for walking. Fair enough. So I set about with some rudimentary testing. I walked 10 paces in a normal fashion and the Fuelband came close enough, though it rarely captured this to a T. So suffice to say the Fuelband has a tendency to miscount steps and in turn inaccurately calculate miles walked and calories burned. After syncing the Fuelband’s data to my iPhone this gross over counting was further reflected in the miles walked. On March 9th the Fuelband calculated that I walked 5.5 miles or 11k steps. Not possible, since that day I didn’t travel more than a few miles and that was by way of car; I’m a writer, so my days are often spent in front of a computer.
Okay, so the pedometer is hardly accurate, so what about the calorie counter? Would you be surprised if I told you that it over counted my calories burned by a two fold while exercising? During a few trips to the gym, where I ran and lifted weights, I wore a heart rate monitor and accompanying watch. After burning just 200 calories according to the heart rate monitor the Fuelband said I had burned more than 400 calories. Also, following my workout, which mind you is inside a relatively large gym, the Fuelband said I had taken over 6000 steps – just not possible.

It would seem that Nike, in their attempt to capture all things workout related, created too much of a gray area for the Fuelband to capture data. A quick swing or flick of the arm results in steps counted, which is great from a caloric standpoint if you’re lifting weights or punching the air, but hardly satisfactory if your shaking hands with someone. While I applaud Nike for attempting to make a dead simple device, the sacrifice in complexity has resulted is gross overstatements rendering the Fuelband, in my humble opinion, a great start, but most certainly would have benefited from much more Q&A.
But, despite the Fuelband’s inaccuracies, it still remains a great indicator of how often I am active. Run, lift weights and perform any type of exercise and Fuelband records it. Sure, I won’t know exactly how many steps you’ve taken – I most certainly proved that – or what sport you’ve engaged in, or how fast your heart is pumping, but at least I can effortlessly tally the days that I am.
That said, it’s the times when I’m NOT engaging in rigorous exercise that I want to know more about my couch potato, TV watching ways. Tell me how many steps I took to go to the bathroom or what I didn’t do on the days I was just too hungover and tired to remove my eyes from the TV. Needless to say, it’s frustrating that Nike would let a product that clearly has so much R&D invested, out the door and what appears to be all accounts untested. I asked if there was perhaps a way of calibrating the Fuelband, but I was assured that if entered my age, weight and height correctly that it would accurately capture my steps and thus my calories burned and Fuel consumed.
Bottom Line: Unable to accurately count steps and thus deduce calories burned. However, the design and coolness factor scores big points.

Editor’s Rating:

Good

Pros:

• Array of LED lights and design is awe inspiring
• Long battery life – 7+ days on a single charge
• Accompanying smartphone app is easy and simple to use

Cons:

• Over counted my steps and thus calories and Fuel
• Band’s black finish will get marred quickly
• No exercise setting – this might help with accuracy

NOW MY REVIEW........

Please review this in conjunction with my review of the Jawbone UP

The Nike Fuelband is overall a great product.  The design itself is attractive as seen above in the photos.  But there are some aspects where the Jawbone Up is much better.  The Jawbone Up has all of the functions that the Fuelband has except for the clock feature.  What the Fuelband is missing that the Jawbone Up has is the vibrating alarm, 30 minute vibrating reminder to remind you to be more active, food diary, excercise function and sleep function to monitor how much deep sleep and light sleep that you are getting.  All of these features are used by me except for the food diary and I have become dependant on these features.

But the Fuelband is much sturdier than the Jawbone UP and has a better design with lights on the band to tell you the time, calories burned, steps taken, and how much "fuel" you have burned.

Also, there is a closing clasp that the Up does not have.  When sleeping...sometimes the UP band slips off my wrist and I have to look for it in the bed when I wake up which can be a pain. 

The Fuelband seems to hold a longer battery charge than the UP band as well.

I agree with the above reviewer that the Fuelband seems to over count steps taken during the day whereas the UP band seems to be more accurate.

What makes the Fuelband better than the UP band is the bluetooth feature where you can sync your results to your iphone by a press of the button whereas with the UP band you have to manually plug it into your phone which is a pain.

However, you are able to see the battery power remaining on the UP band when you sync to your phone.  With the Fuelband, you are guessing when you will need to recharge the band unless you plug it into your computer.

Unfortunately, the UP band has alot of defects mechanically.

All in all if a developer were to combine the Fuelband features with the UP band features they would have a bestseller on their hands.

Currently I am wearing both on my right wrist so I have the best of both worlds :)

The Jawbone UP fitness wristband....

This is what Engadget says...The company, best known for its Bluetooth headsets, announced it was cooking up a wristband called "Up" -- a wearable device that would track the wearer's sleeping, eating and exercise habits. At the time, we didn't know much more than that, but given the company's expertise in wearable tech, we assumed it would at least have a Bluetooth radio, tying it together with all the other products Jawbone sells.

As it turns out, the wristband doesn't sync your vitals wirelessly and for better or worse, it doesn't work quite the way we thought it would. To use the wristband, you'll need an iOS device -- no other platform is supported, and there isn't even a mobile website to which you can upload all your data. Then again, it does things other fitness trackers don't: it monitors when you're in deep or light sleep, so that it can wake you when you're just dozing. And because it's waterproof up to one meter and promises up to 10 days of battery life, it's low-maintenance enough that you can wear it every day, which could be key to making some healthy lifestyle changes. So how did Jawbone do, stepping so far outside its comfort zone? And should you consider this over identically priced fitness trackers such as the new Fitbit Ultra? Let's see.
There's not much to Up, which is a good thing considering you're supposed to wear it day in and day out. The band, available in three sizes, is made of springsteel wrapped in thermoplastic, hypoallogenic rubber. Most importantly, it's waterproof up to one meter (3.3 feet), and dries quickly, which is what allows you to wear it continuously for days at a time. In contrast, you'd need to remove your Fitbit every time you take a shower.

Unlike most wrist candy, the band doesn't fasten but instead has open ends that curl around your wrist -- not unlike a snap bracelet. One end is topped off with a metal piece that you'll press every time you want to let the band know you're going to sleep, getting out of bed or beginning / ending a workout. (There's a vibration motor inside and also an LED light that flashes different colors, so you'll get plenty of feedback confirming you're in the right mode.) On the other end, there's a metal cap covering a 3.5mm headphone connector, which you'll need to sync the band with your iDevice and also re-charge via your computer's USB port (the band comes with a small USB adapter specifically for this purpose).

The wristband is thinnest at the edges, though for the most part it's about as wide as those ubiquitous Livestrong bands. Still, it's discreet enough that it can pass for a proper bracelet (a rugged, slightly masculine bracelet, but a bracelet nonetheless). It's also available in seven colors, though if you'll indulge us for a moment as we dole out some fashion advice, the black goes with more outfits and calls less attention to itself on days that call for dressier digs. As for fit, Jawbone has a printable ruler that you can use to measure the circumference of your wrist. Based on that single measurement, we ended up with a bracelet that fit snugly, but didn't come close to cutting off our circulation. And that's just fine with us: the last thing you want is a bangle sliding down your wrist and hitting the palm rest every time you peck away at your laptop.
To set up and use the wristband, you'll need to download the free, corresponding app from the App Store if you haven't already. Then, just plug the band into your iDevice's headphone jack, open the app and follow some onscreen instructions -- in particular, entering your name, email address, height, weight and sex. Within a minute or so, then, you should be up and running.

And that, friends, about describes how you'll be using the wristband on a daily basis (minus the part where you enter your weight, of course). You'll need to plug the band into the headphone jack every time you want to sync it. The truth is that Up has a rated battery life of ten days, which means you could spend the better part of a week wearing this thing 24/7 and not syncing it. Still, we quickly fell into a pattern of syncing our vitals at least once a day, if only because we were curious to see how well we slept this time.

Similarly, we chose to charge most days, even though we didn't have to. After 18 hours of use, we were still at 87 percent capacity; after about two days, we were down to 35 percent. So perhaps Jawbone's claim of ten days was exaggerated, but you can at least use this for a few days uninterrupted. Ultimately, though, we're at our least active when we're sitting in front our PC, so we don't mind going under the radar for a little while and letting a few burned calories go unrecorded -- even if we're not running low on power.

Also, we should tell you that although we didn't lose either the proprietary USB charger or the cap covering the end of the bracelet, we had to go out of our way not to. We got into the habit of placing both the cap and dongle in a clean corner of our desk whenever we weren't using them, but we can see where a less meticulous person could lose them within the first week. Which is bad, because that bracelet becomes a lot less comfortable (and more conspicuous) when you remove the metal cap to expose the male 3.5mm headphone jack connector. Jawbone is quick to point out that although a wireless radio would have eliminated the need for wired syncing, it would have made for a thicker bracelet, and shorter battery life. So at the end of the day we can live with the tethered setup, though it is pretty clumsy.

iOS app

The app organizes your data by day, and then according to three overarching categories: sleep, activity and food intake. When you launch the app the first thing you'll see will be a bar graph for the current day called the "Me screen," which features three vertical, color-coded bars arranged side by side, representing the hours you've slept, the number of steps you've taken and how many energizing meals you've consumed. At the bottom of the chart, you'll also see some basic stats, including how long you slept and how many steps you walked. Even without those numbers, though, you can tell at a glance roughly how well you've been doing. For instance, the blue sleep bar will be taller if you've gotten seven hours of shut-eye instead of five. Want to put that all in context? Swipe that chart to the right and you'll see yesterday's graph. You can't pick a day from a calendar; you just keep swiping until you reach the day you want.

Jawbone Up review (screenshots)

With us so far? Good. By default, Up has certain daily goals in mind -- say, seven hours of sleep per night. You can change these to whatever you want; the point is, each day's bar chart will show percentages above each category. So, if you slept five hours and 44 minutes instead of seven, you'll see a grade of 82 percent for the day. Exceed that goal and you'll see a halo effect around the bar, a subtle but clear reward for a job well done.

You can dig deeper into those charts, but not much. If you tap the bar chart, it'll turn into a longer-form graph called the Live Feed, which you can only view in landscape mode. Here, the bars are smaller and the information is more granular, but the idea is the same. You'll see color-coded bars on a horizontal axis, representing the hours in the day. Swipe through it and you'll see up-to-the minute stats on what you ate, how that food made you feel, how many steps you took and whether you were awake or in deep or light sleep. Up tosses in a few extra pieces of information at the bottom of the screen, including your mileage, calories burned and time spent doing something active. When it comes to sleep, that means seeing a breakdown of how much time you spent in deep versus light sleep. You can't filter the Live Feed according to date or the type of data. And the information itself isn't much more detailed that what you'll see at a glance on the home screen. It's certainly not materially different than the stats Fitbit collects.

Social feed, challenges and other features

In addition to hosting all this info in pretty charts, the app is home to a handful of other features. It's from here that you can take a photo of your meal or set an alarm to wake you up when you're in light sleep (more on both of these in just a bit). You can also set the wristband to buzz as a way of reminding you to get up and move if you've been sitting "too long," whatever that means for you -- it could be every fifteen minutes or every hour, depending on how sedentary you are.

And what would a fitness tool be without a little social networking? The service allows you to befriend other Up owners, at which point all of their activity -- everything from their sleep quality to how what they ate -- will appear in a list, aptly called the Feed. You can also create so-called teams with groups of people, and also pose challenges to them. In fact, if you're more private you can pose challenges to just yourself if you're the modest type -- e.g., "How much sleep can I get this week?"

Activity tracking

Like Fitbit and other fitness products, Up packs a pedometer, allowing it to gauge your activity levels by tracking the number of steps you take. (The second-gen Fitbit Ultra does it one better, though, with an altimeter that monitors how many flights you've climbed.) All told, our mileage counts seemed a bit generous, but then again, we had the same complaint about Fitbit. For example, on a day when we did not work out, it said we walked 4.26 miles. That seems like a stretch given that on that particular day, all we did was walk to the subway (about half a mile), from the subway in Manhattan to our office and back (another three-quarters of a mile in total), and from an apartment in Brooklyn to a nearby park (one mile, roundtrip). Then again, we do appreciate that when we worked out on the elliptical machine, which requires you to make some pretty sloppy, ill-defined steps, the band did a good-enough job approximating our mileage.

When you're beginning a workout, you can press the end of the band once to let it know you're about to exercise. (Likewise, you'll want to press it again when you're finished.) The idea is to distinguish between normal moving about and a concerted workout, but given how limited the data selection is, we don't really see the point. Whether we call it a workout or not, the band knows how many steps we're taking, and in either scenario, it doesn't account for metrics such as pace or heart rate. The only time we felt compelled to set the band to workout mode was when we set a personal challenge in which we wanted to see how much time we could spend exercising in a given week. Otherwise, you won't lose any credit if you forget to send the band into workout mode, which is actually all too easy to do.

Food diary

Up claims to track what you eat, but it would be more accurate to say that you track what you eat -- when you remember to. Whereas the wristband has sensors that can monitor your sleep and activity patterns, the food tracking bit is based completely on input from you -- specifically, photos you take of your meals using your iDevice. A couple hours after you eat said meal, you'll see an alert on your device asking you to rate the meal using one of five emoticons -- a selection that includes options like stuffed, sleepy and OK. The idea isn't to track your calories or to shame you into eating healthier, but to track how you feel after you eat certain foods, and then, over time, give you credit for eating meals it's learned are energizing. (By this metric, then, you can game the system so that it thinks Big Macs are nutritious.)

We see a few problems here. One, even after wearing the band for several weeks, we often forgot to photograph our food until we had two bites of food left. Secondly, even when we did remember, we were hesitant to be That Guy in the restaurant, snapping pics of our meal with a cell phone. It's one piece of the Up regimen that just doesn't feel natural, which is ironic, since the bracelet itself is designed to blend in and not call attention to itself as you carry on with your daily routine.

Most importantly, though, this cutesy food diary ultimately couldn't persuade us to lay off the pizza, cookies and bagels, even though they invariably leave us feeling sleepy, unsatisfied and a tad sheepish for eating like a five year-old. Having used both Up and Fitbit, we found it more useful to see a list of our daily caloric intake against the calories we were estimated to have burned that day. Now it's true, Fitbit's food tracking system is sorely in need of a makeover: right now, it requires you to choose your meal from a list, which is mostly populated with items from specific cookbooks and restaurant chains. Still, as annoying as it is to pretend your bagel and cream cheese came from Friendly's, it still gives you some approximation of how much you're consuming. That's all we want, really. We don't need photographic evidence of that cheeseburger that's only going to pad our behinds.

Sleep analysis

Like Fitbit, Up uses sensors to track your sleeping patterns, though Jawbone goes a step further, recording how much time you've spent in deep versus light sleep. Which brings us to one of the band's marquee features: it doubles as an alarm, sending vibrations through your wrist when it's time to start the day. Setting this up through the app is simple enough: just select the time as well as the days of the week you want it to go off (e.g., Monday through Friday). Once you're ready to retire, send the band into sleep mode by hold down the edge of the band until it vibrates and a blue LED light flashes. When you get out of bed in the morning, hold the end of the band again until it vibrates and flashes green.

But here's the twist: Up wakes you within half an hour of your alarm, depending on when you happen to be sleeping lightly (and therefore easier to rouse). Indeed, there was one morning when we were already sleeping fitfully, and the band began vibrating 30 minutes before we needed to get out of bed. And though we were none too cheerful about this 6am interruption, we have to admit we weren't terribly groggy either.

The problem is, when you don't urgently need to get up, it's all too tempting to grab your cell phone, set a new alarm and doze for an extra 30 minutes. What's more, those vibrations are fairly easy to ignore, as the wristband falls silent after a minute or so. It would be helpful if the band could use its step counter to detect when you're out of bed, and then turn off the vibrating motor -- kind of like how your bedside alarm won't shut up until you hit dismiss (or at least snooze). Ultimately that day, we did what many of you would have done: we nodded off for another half hour. As it happens, though, we went on to have the kind of spazzy morning where we mistook body wash for shampoo, so perhaps Jawbone was on to something by waking us when it did.

In addition to tracking your sleep states, the wristband collects data on how long you took to nod off and how many hours you slept in total -- data that it uses to spit out an overall sleep quality rating. Fitbit does this too, although it actually tells you how long it took you to fall asleep; Up's iOS app shows a slim bar at the beginning of your sleep graph, illustrating how long you were awake, but that length of time isn't actually visible. Maybe Jawbone will throw that into version 2.0. Not a deal-breaker by any means, though we're naturally curious about such things.

Then again, when it comes to sleep tracking, Up's data is more accurate and also, thorough. Fitbit, for instance, will tell you how many times you awoke during the night, but that tally appears to be based on activity detected by the accelerometer, which means you could, in theory, fool Fitbit into thinking you're asleep when really you're staring at the ceiling, worrying about the day ahead.

Reports of breakage

Soon after we began our testing, we started hearing grumbling from early adopters, who reported their wristbands had suddenly and mysteriously stopped working properly (hit the links at the bottom of this post for examples). Sure enough, after less than two weeks with ours, the vibration motor became unresponsive, making it impossible to take advantage of that smart alarm feature. (Fortunately, the device continued to collect data, so even though the band didn't vibrate when we put it into sleep tracking mode, it still came back the next morning with stats on how much shut-eye we'd gotten.)

Jawbone sent us a new band, and has been issuing free replacements to everyone who's reported issues with their devices. Once we received it, all we had to do was plug it into our iPhone and agree to sync our existing account with this new band. At least that part's painless. Still, within 24 hours we noticed the vibration motor had once again appeared to stop working. This time, it didn't register any data.

This apparent pattern is troubling for a couple reasons. For one, Jawbone owners have been reporting a disturbing range of issues, including difficulty syncing with iOS and sharply depleted battery capacity. Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy, said he suspects these myriad problems might all stem from the battery not being charged enough. Then again, he admits the company's engineers haven't yet diagnosed the underlying problem. Which brings us to our second concern: until Jawbone is able to explain why its devices are malfunctioning, it won't be able to deliver any kind of long-term fix. Offering replacement devices makes for smart customer service, but it sadly won't do much good if these secondary (or even tertiary) devices eventually brick too.

Wrap-up

It's a shame the Up wristband is breaking all over the place, because it's otherwise a promising idea for a gadget. Jawbone's on the right track with the hardware: the band is comfortable, waterproof and doesn't call much attention to itself. It can tell when you're sleeping deeply, as opposed to lightly dozing -- something competing fitness trackers can't do. Sure, we wish the Up band charged wirelessly, but we appreciate that by nixing a Bluetooth radio, the company was able to make the battery life as impressive as it is. All told, it's the kind of device we can easily see ourselves wearing day in and day out (and we should know: we tested this for weeks).

Where Up really needs work is in its app: as slick as it is, it feels more shallow than Fitbit's website, and it isn't quite as fun to use either. It would also be nice to see Up expand beyond iOS to Android and other platforms. The good news, though, is that this is precisely the sort of thing Jawbone can keep working on, even now that the Up has begun shipping. The company says it will release an app for Android. And it can most certainly beef up the current app so that early and later adopters alike can benefit from additional features.

But all that means little when the device routinely malfunctions. Though the company says a minority of users have reported breakage, it's telling that both of the units we tested over the past month have bricked -- one of them within 24 hours. Worse, Jawbone hasn't yet diagnosed the root cause of these problems, a collection of maladies that run the gamut from a rapidly draining battery to a silent vibration motor. We still feel that the Up has promise, but until its engineers iron out the kinks, we can't in good faith recommend it.


NOW THIS IS MY REVIEW

The UP only works on the iphone through the UP app...overall the unit sucks because it has had so many faulty defects. If you do a search on the internet you will see a plethora of bad reviews and complaints due to the various defects.....some of the defects consist of the wristband not holding a charge, the wristband not syncing with the iphone app, and the alarm not waking you up in the morning.

My issues were all three....the way I got around the defect is to straighten the wristband when charging and syncing...I expect that the wristband will break in the next couple weeks since the bracelet was not made to be straightened.

Once it works, it is pretty cool. It keeps track of the number of steps you walk each day and how much you exercise and sleep. What's even better is that there is no monthly fee of $7.95 like units like body bugg and others.

The other cool thing is that it keeps track of your deep sleep and light sleep so you have an idea of how much quality sleep you are getting each night. You can also customize your own goals of how many steps you will try to walk each day and how many hours of sleep you will try to get.

You also keep track of your meals and your UP band will vibrate to remind you to get up and walk after a period of time of inactivity.

Overall I would give the UP unit a 3 out of 5 stars...only if it is working.

The GOOD thing is that due to the number of complaints, Jawbone is offering a NO QUESTIONS ASKED refund....you have two options to either return your unit unlimited as it breaks until they are able to fix the various defects....or you can request a refund and keep you unit.

This is definately good PR on the part of Jawbone. I have already requested my refund and still use the UP band as long as I straighten the band to charge and to sync. It is relatively easy to straighten when syncing but when charging you have to be a little more creative.

I use a book next to the computer to keep it straightened.

After I receive my refund I will be purchasing the NIKE Fuel Band which is $50 more than the UP band. Although Jawbone has a great reputation in re: to bluetooth, Nike is the household name when it comes to fitness. The NIke Fuel Band will be coming out on 2/22/12 and is already on backorder..

UPDATE

I just got the Nike Fuelband...please see my review in conjunction with this one....