Wearable vs App (Jawbone Up vs Moves)

Why wear a fitness band when an app will do?

The wristband lasts a week on one charge, but I am charging the iPhone daily anyway.

The wristband captures steps when you are sans phone, but my one day head-to-head showed the opposite. The phone had 10% more steps.

Jawbones app shows lots of stats — idle time and calories. Moves seems to prefer the simpler timeline.

But they actually have more data — they have location. The wristband doesn’t.

The fatal flaw on Up is that it doesn’t sync unless you plug it in. Geez. So you can’t see how the day is going. You need the phone to use your data. The app is always the latest. In often forget the app is recording at all, just as I forget to sync, until the app just tells me what happened yesterday.

The wristband though is a pretty visible club thing — lots of fitnessy geeks wear them.

Amol Sarva, Ph.D. // @amol // a.sarva.co // 530-727-8277

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *