Hands-on: UP by Jawbone Wristband

There’s been a deluge of smart wristbands lately and Jawbone made one that seems to be getting quite an attention. We’ve been using the UP by Jawbone for a couple of days to learn a few more things about it.

Jawbone actually has two models of their wristbands, one with the Bluetooth (UP24) and the older one which plugs into the earphone jack of the smartphone to sync. We got the latter during our recent visit to Singapore last week.

The UP by Jawbone is one of those typical activity-monitor-in-a-wristband that collect bio-related information such as pace, movement, sleep patterns and also computes the amount of calories burned on a 24-hour period.

The band is fairly thin and flexible, comes in 3 sizes (S, M, L) and three colors (blue, black and white). Once activated thru a smartphone (Android and iOS), it will start monitoring and logging every activity from the amount of steps you’ve walked to the number of minutes of deep sleep you had overnight.

The other tip of the band has a removable cap that exposes a 3.5mm jack which you plug into the smartphone and manually sync with the Jawbone app. Data is then uploaded into their servers and information is presented to you in graphs.

The data is divided into two parts — the Move (or waking time) and the Sleep. For Move, it shows the total number of steps, active time, idle time and total amount of calories consumed.

For sleep, it monitors how long it took you before you fell asleep, amount of time with light sleep, deep sleep and total time in bed. It can even track how many times you woke up and went to the toilet.

This is actually the part of the data that we were most interested in — too see if we are getting enough sleep the night before. Interesting to see those information presented in a graph as well.

Perhaps, our only complaint is that we have to trigger the Sleep mode and the Wake mode each time we go to sleep and right after we wake up (it’s possible you’d forget to switch them sometimes). The band isn’t also waterproof so you’ll have to remove them when necessary. It’s sweat-proof though so you can still wear them in the gym while working out or when running or playing.

The UP by Jawbone sells for $129PHP 7,570INR 10,933EUR 123CNY 939 in the US (between SGD$149-$199 in Singapore, depending on the store) while the Bluetooth-compatible UP24 is priced at $149PHP 8,744INR 12,628EUR 142CNY 1,084.