Jawbone UP Move Fitness Tracker Review
In this video, I'll walk you guys through my current fitness tracker of choice, the Jawbone UP Move.
I'll walk you guys through the hardware features, and discuss some of the software features and available app integrations.
If you want to join me on my fitness journey, subscribe to the channel and find me on UP (scott@project-reboot.com).
Transcript: What’s up guys, it’s Scott from Project Reboot and today I’m going to be walking you guys through a full review of my current fitness tracker of choice, the Jawbone UP Move.
The UP Move is the most affordable tracker in the Jawbone line up. In fact, the UP24 which is the next model up, is more than double the price of the UP Move. And considering that the Move can do almost everything the UP24 can, I’d say that this budget tracker is easily the best value in Jawbone’s fitness tracker line up.
What's in the Box?
Now out of the box, the UP move comes with the tracker itself, a standard watch cell battery, a tool to remove the battery door, and a clip that allows you to wear the device on your belt, in your pocket, or clip it onto just about any other article of clothing.
A wrist band is optional, but I’d highly recommend it. They cost around $15, but that’s money well spent since you’re far less likely to inadvertently throw your tracker into the wash while still attached to the jeans you wore yesterday. The wrist band also allows you to more easily check your progress throughout the day.
Operating the Device
Press down once and you’ll get a glimpse of your step progress. There’s no digital readout telling you your exact step count, but the LEDs help you approximate your progress by expressing your step count as a percentage of your total goal. For example, if you had a goal of 10,000 steps and you had completed around 5,000 steps already, the tracker would illuminate in the 6 o’clock position.
Give the UP Move two quick taps and it will pull up a clock so you can check on the time. The solid light indicates the hour, while the blinking light shows the minutes.
Three presses will reveal your sleep progress from the previous night. You can see here, last night was one of those rare occasions where I exceeded my sleep goal, so those lights twirl around in celebration before showing me how much I exceeded my goal. Unfortunately, it never seems to be as happy with my step progress.
If you press and hold on the button, it will set your tracker to sleep mode, which will help you gauge your light sleep and sound sleep. For me, this is one of the tracker’s most useful features. I would sometimes wonder why I would sometimes wake up so tired after a night where I went to bed at a decent hour. Turns out, I wasn’t getting enough sound sleep. So I tried different bed time routines and sleeping positions until I found something that consistently improved my sound sleep. This is so critical because I find that if I get 3 hours of sound sleep I’m super pumped for the day ahead. It doesn’t matter if that’s over 5 hours total sleep or 8 hours of total sleep, all that matters is the sound sleep I’m able to achieve. So this is an invaluable tool in helping me take actionable steps to improve my sleep quality.
If you press twice, then hold, the tracker goes into timed activity mode, and will remain in that mode until you press and hold one more time to put it in back in regular awake mode. This feature is useful if for example, you want to take a hike and check out how far you walked or how many calories you burned just for that specific activity.
The UP App
Now with more and more fitness trackers on the market, you might be tempted to think that they’re all basically the same because of the hardware capabilities are basically identical. But one thing a lot of people fail to consider is the quality of the software and ecosystem that accompanies the fitness tracker, and in that category, Jawbone is truly best in class.
I’ve tried quite a few fitness trackers over the years, and most of them do a decent enough job of collecting your data and regurgitating it back to you through a web interface or mobile app. But Jawbone’s app does more than just surface your information back to you. It actually helps to make your fitness data meaningful and actionable.
So here on your home screen you can see your step progress for the day, your sleep progress from the previous night and how you’re tracking on both your calorie consumption goals and your overall food quality.
You can tap into any of these to drill down for more detailed information.
Right below your summary data are your insight cards. This is a large part of how UP helps to make your data more actionable. There are a number of different notifications that will pop up in this section. Standard insight cards give you access to interesting wellness related information. Smart Coach takes that a step further and actually suggests things that you can do to up your game based on your specific performance data. And finally Today I Will challenges allow you to opt in to activities to take your performance to the next level like modify your bed time, take more steps, or eat more fiber. Today I Wills surface somewhat randomly based on your specific performance, so I don’t have one to show you for this review, but trust me, they’re cool - and you get a nifty achievement in your feed when you successfully complete a challenge.
On the bottom of the screen is a plus button that allows you manually add steps, mood, food, weight, and sleep.
Mood tracking is one of the more interesting features on UP. It’s one that I rarely use, but it’s super cute. You can use your mood tracking to celebrate a great workout or fitness milestone, or to lament a long day at the office so your friends and console you.
Which brings me to my next point. UP is really designed with the social aspect of wellness in mind. In UP speak, friends are called “teammates” which really helps to drive home the collaborative, helpful community that Jawbone is trying to build. You can encourage your friends by leaving an encouraging comment or emoji on their feed updates, and you can use the leaderboard to spark a little bit of competition.
Now, going over into the options menu, you can see that UP allows you to set step, sleep, and weight goals. It also allows you to choose whether to make these goals public to your friends or to lock them down if you’d rather keep your information to yourself.
Next up is trends. The trends feature allows you to easily glance through your past data in daily, weekly, and monthly aggregates. but the best thing about this feature is that it lets you graph any 2 data attributes against each other so you can start to see correlations. For example, you might want to see if the amount of physical activity you’ve done affects the quality of your sleep. This truly helps you to analyze your data and make meaningful changes.
Third Party Apps
The last thing I want to touch on is Apps. UP has an open API which means that any developer can develop for the UP platform. As a result, UP has integrations with tons of different apps with more being added all the time. Two of the ones I use are My Fitness Pal, which is the industry leader in food tracking, and Withings, which connects wirelessly to my Withings Body Analyzer scale. The beautiful thing about both of these integrations is that they both connect seamlessly with existing UP app functions. So the food data I enter into My Fitness Pal shows up in my UP food summary and gets a food score assigned and my weight tracked via my Withings scale automatically updates my information in UP.
The Bottom Line
I could go on in more detail about the things you can do with UP, but suffice it to say that for $50 bucks you’re getting access to a nifty piece of hardware that is accompanied by one of the best software experiences in the market. Bottom line - at the end of the day, a fitness tracker’s primary job is to promote fitness, not just to passively track things, and the UP app is one of the only ones I’ve tried so far that actually makes your data actionable enough to enable you to make better fitness related decisions.
There’s even a free version of the UP app on the app store that allows you track steps using your phone’s motion co-processor if you have a compatible device. So if $50 bucks is too steep, you can get most of the benefits of the UP platform for free. Or, if you’re totally sold on the UP app and you’ve got friends who want to support you but don’t want to invest in the hardware, that’s a great way for them to do it.
Now, I’ll be checking out the MisFit Flash here pretty soon as well as the FitBit Zip and will be doing a head to head comparison across the three. If you know of any trackers you want me to check out, leave me a comment below.
If you’re new to the channel, be sure to subscribe so that you’re updated when I post new review videos like this one.
And if you want to join me on UP, you can add me to your team by searching for scott@project-reboot.com.
If you're interested in picking up an UP Move after watching this review, you can do so and support this blog a the same time by using the link below! It costs you nothing extra, but definitely helps me explain to my wife why I'm spending all my free time blogging.
