Jawbone Up review

It's the second time around for Jawbone's fitness tracking wristband. Have they got it right this time?

The Jawbone Up comes in eight colours.
The Jawbone Up comes in eight colours.

Jawbone Up
Jawbone
£99

Jawbone's Up, the fitness-tracking wristband, first went on sale more than a year ago but ended up being withdrawn because of reliability problems. Jawbone redesigned Up from scratch, making it sturdier and fixing problems with water resistance. The new version is available today but it faces more competition than when it first launched.

Available in eight colours and three sizes, the Up is comfortable and stylish. The black version (or "onyx", as Jawbone calls it) is fairly subtle but you can go for red or orange if you prefer to make more of a statement. The rubberized band clings to your wrist but doesn't have a clasp to close it. One end of the band is a button and the other is a cap that covers the connector used for charging and syncing.

Up acts as a pedometer when worn through the day, tracking how many steps you take. Around 10,000 steps per day has become the standard target for daily exercise. It's the walking equivalent of the five portions of fruit and veg rule of thumb. The theory behind gadgets like Up is that simply monitoring your activity is in itself a motivation to improve.

Jawbone quotes a Stanford study that found that people who track how many steps they take end up moving around 26 per cent more than those who don't. The company also says that Up users with more friends on the system move more and work out for longer than their more solitary counterparts.

The Jawbone Up comes in eight colours.

At night, Up will monitor your sleep. You need to tell it that you are going to sleep by holding the button and then it will determine, based on your movements, how long it takes you to fall asleep, how much of your sleep is light sleep and how long you spend in deep sleep.

The band doesn't have a display - everything is controlled by the app, which is available for iOS and - from today - Android. You can use the app to set an alarm and the wristband will wake you by vibrating, which is surprisingly effective and far less intrusive than having an alarm clock beep you into the day. You can also set Up to vibrate during the day to remind you to stretch your legs if you've been sitting still for too long.

It's also possible to set a 'smart' alarm that will wake you when you are in a light sleep, which means you should feel more refreshed than if you are awoken during a deep sleep. Up monitors your sleep and wakes you up within 45 minutes of your specified time, based on how you are sleeping.

If you are willing to put a little more information into the app then Up can be much more useful. You can track your mood, track workouts and add what you are eating. The comprehensive foods database includes barcodes so you can input a lot of things simply buy scanning the wrapper. Up then calculates the calories you're taking in, as well as those you're burning.

The app is beautifully designed and a pleasure to use. Perhaps the highlight is the ability to compare two metrics. You can see, for example, whether you sleep better on days when you exercise.

Overall, Up is a fantastic tool but there are downsides. As mentioned above, there is no screen so it's not possible to see at a glance how many steps you've taken or even what time it is. Jawbone says they don't think a simple number is that informative and that you can get more meaningful feedback just by taking your phone out of your pocket.

That's true but it brings up the second downside: to sync your data to the phone you have to take Up off your wrist and plug it in to the headphone socket. There's no Bluetooth and so it isn't possible to sync just by pressing a button.

Charging is worse because you have to connect Up to an adaptor and then plug the adaptor into a USB port. Not only is it inconvenient, it means having to make sure you remember where you put the adaptor.

Thankfully, you won't need it often because the band has a fantastic 10-day battery life. In part, that's because it doesn't have battery draining features such as a display or Bluetooth, so there are some payoffs.

A major competitor for Up is Nike's Fuelband. I like the Fuelband, which does have a display and Bluetooth connectivity. However, Up beats it on price (the Fuelband is £129) and simply by being more useful. It tracks sleep, which the Fuelband doesn't, and it offers a more detailed app.

The Fitbit One, another Up rival, beats Jawbone's gadget on price (£79) and features - it can be connected to wireless scales to track your weight, for example - but it loses out, for me in not being a wristband. The Fitbit One clips to your clothes or your pocket and then has to be slipped onto a velcro wristband at night to track sleep. The Jawbone Up just stays on my wrist, which means I'm unlikely to set off in the morning without it.

Having spoken to a few people about these devices over the last few months, I know that the biggest question is not which one to choose but why you would need one at all. All I can say, after trying several, is that they really do encourage small changes in behaviour that could end up making you healthier.

I wouldn't go back to not wearing one and, if I were buying one today, I'd choose Up.