Over the past couple of years I’ve tried a number of different fitness trackers. I’ve had multiple fitbit trackers, some got lost, others had issues with their battery.
Last year I switched to the Jawbone UP. Apart from anything else the battery issues with the Fitbit were driving me nuts – they’d lose their charge very quickly or refuse to take a charge.
The UP worked really well up until a few weeks ago when it too started having issues with holding a charge. And then it broke completely, so I had to get a replacement.
I was considering going back to a Fitbit, but they don’t ship to Ireland!
Jawbone, on the other hand, does ship to Ireland, so I was able to order directly from their site and get my new “toy” within a couple of days.
I chose the UP3 as it has a couple of features that I was interested in:
- automatic sleep tracking
- heart health
Both the Fitbit and the Jawbone models I’d tried in the past had sleep tracking, but they all needed you to tell the device manually when you were going to sleep and you also had to remember to “wake up”. With the Jawbone UP3 the device automatically detects when you’re asleep and from using it over the last few days it’s pretty accurate.
The “heart health” feature is something that intrigues me.
The UP3 comes with a bunch of sensors in the band that need to be in contact with your skin in order for it to work.
With earlier models of the UP you had to “plug in” the device to charge it. With the UP3 the charging is done using a magnetic strip in the band which couples with the USB charger. One potential downside to this is that the contacts might get a little dirty from use, but at least you won’t end up breaking the device through wear!
The mobile app for iPhone got an upgrade as well and while previously firmware upgrades were a bit messy,with the UP3 the firmware upgrades can be handled directly via the mobile app.
Hopefully I won’t have issues with the battery in this device!