Jawbone Up review (2012)

Jawbone VP Travis Bogard called the Up "functional jewelry," and that's actually a pretty good description. Unlike the boring, gadget-y Nike FuelBand or the Fitbit clips, the Up looks like something you might wear anyway — oh, and it just happens to collect data too. The look hasn't changed since last year's model, wth the same Jambox-like ridged rubber coating and silver ends. There's no clasp on the bracelet — the two ends overlap slightly on the underside of your wrist, and the rigid build is what keeps it in place — so it's really easy to get on and off, but it's never once fallen off or even felt loose on my wrist.

Unlike my much lauded colleague Thomas Ricker, I do wear a watch — I feel odd not wearing one. I'm used to having things on my wrist, which meant that the Up's penchant for catching in my jacket sleeve or for occasionally tugging at the hair on my arm didn't feel out of the ordinary. The Up's rubbery texture sticking to my arm was a little uncomfortable, though, especially when I was sweaty from exercising.

I wear my watch almost everywhere, but I take it off when I sit at my laptop. It's just uncomfortable having the band scratching and scraping around the palmrest, and it forces me to perch my arms awkwardly above the keyboard. That's not a problem for my watch, which doesn't need to be worn all the time, but I had to take off the Up as well because it caused the same problems. I'd always put it back on when I got up to go outside or go home, but the Up didn't measure my quick walks to the kitchen or around the office. A thinner bracelet might do the trick, but I found it really hard to wear the Up all the time — and to some extent that defeats the purpose. That's one thing I like about Fitbit: whenever you're wearing pants, you can be wearing the Fitbit, and I'm pretty much always wearing pants except when I'm sleeping.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure a thinner bracelet is in the Up's future, or the FuelBand's. There's a lot of tech inside the thing: a rechargeable battery that lasts about 10 days on a charge, a vibration motor, and a motion sensing accelerometer. There's a single button on one end of the bracelet, which you use to change its settings, and a 3.5mm plug on the other side for connecting the Up to your phone. The plug has a cap that matches the color of your band, and somehow I haven't lost it yet – though I'm confident that's going to happen.

The parts are the same as always, but they've been completely reconfigured — the parts are better shielded and more flexible now. Bogard told me that the Up's previous problems were primarily from liquid seeping into the bracelet as it was flexed and moved in ways Jawbone hadn't predicted, and he said the company's now tested every conceivable way to move the Up and made it possible. I've tried moving it every way I could think of while running it under water, and it's still ticking. It survived showers, sweat, and all the times I "accidentally" dropped it to see if it would break.

The Up tracks three things: activity, sleeping, and eating. The first is simple, requiring only that you wear the bracelet. Its engine turns the motion of your wrist into calories burned, steps walked, and active versus inactive time (you can set the Up to warn you when you've been sitting at your computer for too long, for instance). It's remarkably consistent: my 10-minute walk to the subway every morning measured almost exactly the same number of steps and calories each time.

It's great for finding out how much you move around under normal everyday conditions, but it falls apart when you actually work out. It's competent enough as a running companion, but it doesn't understand if you're playing basketball, biking, or lifting weights. You have to add those activities manually, which is easy enough — just pick what you were doing, how intense it was, and how long you did it — but it doesn't offer nearly the accuracy or simplicity of data it should.