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As Apple moves into fitness, rival wearables vanish from stores
Apple is pitching its first smartwatch as the ultimate health and fitness coach, so of course, it doesn't want to remind customers about the competition. According to Re/code, the company is no longer selling the Nike+ FuelBand and Jawbone Up, among other popular activity trackers, in its flagship retail stores across San Francisco, Palo Alto, Los Angeles and New York. As early as last October, Apple was planning to pull Fitbit hardware from its shelves ahead of the Apple Watch's launch. A cursory glance at the company's US online store shows that almost all of the wearable's competition has now been removed, save for Jawbone's Up Move clip-on pendant and Wahoo's TICKR fitness trackers.
Jawbone wants to help companies keep employees healthy
There's never a bad time for a little friendly competition between co-workers, especially if it means working together to accomplish certain health-related goals. With its new Up for Groups initiative, Jawbone is looking to start just that in the workplace. The company's new ecosystem, revealed earlier today, aims to give employers a set of tools that can help keep their team motivated and reach different fitness achievements -- all while using trackers such as the Up24 and Up Move. There are a bunch of features within Up for Groups, like leaderboards, activity logs and detailed performance ratings from group members. Jawbone says the goal is to take corporate wellness beyond the typical 9-5 hours, but that the end results of the teams will, ultimately, depend on each individual's willingness to stay active.
Gadget Rewind: Fitness and activity trackers
Tools for tracking and fine-tuning our fitness regimens are more abundant today than ever. And they're getting smarter, too. From the simplicity of mechanical step counters to ultra-smart digital devices that pack accelerometers and GPS radios to follow our every move, it's clear the wearable category has grown. These devices now collect data, provide a soundtrack, prod us when we're lazy and reward us when we've achieved our goals. They've also considerably scaled down in size, so we no longer resemble gadget-laden test subjects when tracking our workouts. In fact, wearables have become rather stylish. Join us in the gallery below then as we take a brief look at the evolution of the activity tracker.
Jawbone takes on Weight Watchers with its latest app update
There are things fitness trackers are generally pretty good at. You know, like counting your steps, measuring how many calories you burned. And then there are things fitness trackers are generally bad at. Logging your food intake is a particularly sore point. After all, it's not like the onboard sensors can tell when or what you've eaten, so you have to go through the tedious business of manually entering all your meals. What's more, companies like Jawbone and Fitbit aren't exactly weight-loss specialists, which means their food databases tend to have gaping holes compared to services like Weight Watchers. So, even if you're disciplined enough to keep a food diary, the thing you ate might not even be in the system. That goes double if you eat out -- how are tech companies supposed to know how many calories are in the brownies at that cafe around the corner?
Using Jawbone UP with MyFitnessPal to track your calories and workouts
MyFitnessPal is a fitness platform that is part calorie counter, part fitness goal tracker and part exercise journal. It compiles a wealth of information about your fitness program and makes it accessible on the web and your iOS device. With Jawbone's recent update, you can now share some of that fitness data with the Jawbone UP system. Jawbone UP and MyFitnessPal have a two-way relationship that shares meal data from MyFitnessPal and calorie counts from the UP. MyFitnessPal is meant to be the cornerstone of your daily exercise regime. You log each meal and workout and then track the amount of calories you need to consume to either lose weight, gain weight or remain steady. Meal and workout entry is made easy by the platform's large database of foods and activities. When using MyFitnessPal with the UP, meal data that you enter in MyFitnessPal will show up in your Jawbone UP software. It syncs a few times a day and pulls over your aggregate meal data. The meal data is not broken down during the transfer, so your lunch of an apple and yogurt will show up as one unnamed item with 325 calories and combined nutritional information. Meal data also is sent over with the same time code, at least in my experience. According to my UP feed, my breakfast, lunch and dinner were all consumed at 3PM. You can edit this time stamp within the Jawbone UP app, but this is an unnecessary extra step that hopefully will be improved in a future update. On the other side of the coin, the Jawbone UP shares some of its fitness data with the MyFitnessPal software. When you are logging a workout in your MyFitnessPal app, you will notice a line with calorie information from the Jawbone UP. This value is an adjustment based on the activity level recorded by the UP. It is the difference between what is estimated by the MyFitnessPal app and what is recorded by the UP. In my experience, this number was not a large amount (200 calories or so each day), but every little bit helps. Overall, I like the combination of the Jawbone UP and MyFitnessPal. There is some overlap as you have to enter your workout data in both the Jawbone software and the MyFitnessPal app as the two don't exchange detailed workout information. This duplication is just a minor inconvenience. I like the exchange of meal information which is useful, even without a detailed breakdown of items. In the end, I find that I use MyFitnessPal for its calorie counting and the Jawbone UP for its sleep tracking and overall activity counts (number of steps taken). Both work together to provide me with a wealth of fitness information that'll help keep me healthy. MyFitnessPal is available on the web at myfitnesspal.com or as a free iOS app. The Jawbone UP fitness band is available for $129 and its companion iOS app is free.
Using IFTTT with the Jawbone UP
The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes. IFTTT is an automation tool that allows you to setup tasks that happen at a certain time or in response to a certain event. It uses a trigger event ("If this happens") to initiate an action ("then do that"). Within the IFTTT framework, you create what are called recipes to select the trigger event and its resulting action. For example, you can create a recipe that uses a date/time trigger to send you an email at the same time each day. IFTTT is extremely useful because it ties into services, called channels, like Dropbox, Google Calendar and, of course, the topic of this post, the Jawbone UP. With IFTTT and an UP, you can do a myriad things like update your UP mood to exhausted when you get less than 6 hours of sleep, automatically add your morning coffee to your UP food list and log the daily weather. Configuring the UP within IFTTT is extremely easy. Just login to the IFTTT dashboard and click on the UP channel to activate your Jawbone account. You have to login to your Jawbone account and authorize Jawbone to share info with IFTTT. You can share your moods, moves, meals, events, sleep info, weight and more between IFTTT and UP. It's a bi-directional connection so you can pull down info from UP and send new information back to the fitness tracker. As you can imagine, there are a lot of ways to interact with the Jawbone fitness tracker using IFTTT. Below are some of my favorite IFTTT recipes for the UP. See the big picture of how you sleep. Track your Zzz's with a spreadsheet! If I get more than X hours of sleep, set my mood to 'energized' in my Jawbone UP feed Share Foursquare gym check-ins to your Jawbone UP feed Log my UP meals and their nutritional content into a Google spreadsheet Send your spouse a friendly email when you get below 7 hours of sleep Tweet when I walk more than 10,000 steps Remind me if I don't work out for 3 days If I get less than 5 hours of sleep, put on a pot o' coffee with WeMo #sunshine brings better #mood Tag an Instagram photo with #UP to share it with your team There are now 110 recipes on IFTTT for the UP and this number is climbing. If you have an UP, let us know in the comments if you use it with IFTTT.
How would you change the Jawbone Up?
Ordinarily, we'd be dismissive if you answered that question with "Doy, make it work!" but in the special case of the Jawbone Up, it's entirely apt. The wristband promised plenty of technological advances that would track your sleep, calories burned and diarize your food intake, all within the confines of a slender cord wrapped around your wrist. The downside? A significant proportion of the units conked out days after being opened, forcing the company to offer no-questions-asked refunds and halt production. So, what we want to know is: do you have a working Up? Does it still work? Do you like it? If Hosain Rahman was reading the comments below, how would you suggest he goes about fixing things?
Tech's biggest misfires of 2011
The past 12 months have been a boon of technological innovation, particularly in the world of mobile devices, where top companies have been waging an arms race for the top of the smartphone and tablet hills. Not everything has been smooth sailing, however -- 2011 has also been dotted by delays, false starts, security breeches and straight up technological turf outs. Check out some of the lowlights from the year that was after the break.
Jawbone Up refunds start rolling out, feel free to keep your bricked band (or not)
Not entirely satisfied with that Jawbone Up purchase? Well, plebes, if you also applied for the "no questions asked" refund, you ought to check your inbox. A reader of Wireless Goodness has received a confirmation (as seen above) that greenbacks from their purchase are inbound. For those of you who forgot to file that claim, peep the more coverage link below. Everyone else, might we humbly suggest our review?
Daily Update for December 8, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Jawbone offers 'no questions asked' refund for troubled Up band, even if you keep it
While Jawbone attempts to fix the handful of substantial issues plaguing its new Up fitness band, it's now announced that it will begin giving free refunds to dissatisfied customers -- and you can even keep hold of the band afterwards. Production of it has been put on pause, but the company is continuing to roll out software tweaks for existing lifestyle metric obsessives. The new guarantee starts on December 9th, and will only cover Up bands purchased this year. You can read up on all the refund specifics -- along with Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman's apology -- at the source links below.
Jawbone Up review
Back in July, Jawbone did something surprising. The company, best known for its Bluetooth headsets, announced it was cooking up a wristband called "Up" -- a wearable device that would track the wearer's sleeping, eating and exercise habits. At the time, we didn't know much more than that, but given the company's expertise in wearable tech, we assumed it would at least have a Bluetooth radio, tying it together with all the other products Jawbone sells. As it turns out, the wristband doesn't sync your vitals wirelessly and for better or worse, it doesn't work quite the way we thought it would. To use the wristband, you'll need an iOS device -- no other platform is supported, and there isn't even a mobile website to which you can upload all your data. Then again, it does things other fitness trackers don't: it monitors when you're in deep or light sleep, so that it can wake you when you're just dozing. And because it's waterproof up to one meter and promises up to 10 days of battery life, it's low-maintenance enough that you can wear it every day, which could be key to making some healthy lifestyle changes. So how did Jawbone do, stepping so far outside its comfort zone? And should you consider this over identically priced fitness trackers such as the new Fitbit Ultra? Let's see. %Gallery-141101%
Jawbone Up detailed: tracks activity, food intake and sleep cycles, available November 6 for $100 (video)
Back in July, Jawbone did something puzzling. The company, best known for its Bluetooth headsets, teased a photo of a colorful wristband called the Up -- a deceptively simple thing that could purportedly track your eating, sleeping and exercise habits. The outfit left out a few teensy details: the price, shipping date and, the biggest riddle of all, how it works. At last, the company's ready to talk specifics. We just got word the Up will be available in the US November 6th for $100, and will continue its world tour on the 17th. With that price, it's well-matched against the clip-on Fitbit Ultra tracker, and indeed, they have some key features in common -- namely, a step counter and a few requisite social networking features. But with a sensor that knows when you're in deep sleep and a mobile app that can identify photos of food, it has a few unexpected tricks that could give devices like Fitbit a run for their money. We'll be getting one to test very soon, but in the meantime, join us past the break to learn more. %Gallery-138250%
Jawbone's Up wristband warms up at AT&T store, wants you faster, stronger
Jawbone's fitness-obsessed wristband appears to be closing in on the retail finish line. The Up pairs with what appears to be an iOS app, (no news on whether an Android version is in the pipeline), and will pile on the guilt about your disgustingly sedentary lifestyle. You can have the luxury of feeling like a weight loss reality show contestant by scheduling "get up and move" reminders when you've succumbed to watching back-to-back mediocre sitcoms with a Doritos family bag chaser. There's also a sleep tracker and a challenge tab to plot your amazing weight loss journey (or descent to an early demise) against friends and family. It'll monitor what you eat, and even tell you which foods "help you feel your best." (We think it's cake.) No word on price or arrival date just yet, so you'll just have to put up with Autom until we hear more. [Thanks, Luke]
Jawbone Up wristband sensor: Design for your health
Jawbone is well-known for its stylish Bluetooth headsets, but the company's forthcoming Jawbone Up is designed for a completely different task -- tracking your activity, sleeping, and eating activities. Packaged in an attractive wristband that comes in a range of bright colors, the Up is loaded with sensors and communicates with a companion app on your iPhone or Android phone. For food intake, it's expected that the app will use a photo-based technology like that built into the PhotoCalorie app -- take a photo of your food and the calories are estimated. After it has monitored your movements for a while, the UP and accompanying app are expected to make suggestions to help you live a healthier life. Travis Bogard, Jawbone VP of product management gave Co.Design an example of this in a recent interview, stating "For example, if you haven't slept much, when you wake up the app might suggest a high-protein breakfast and an extra glass of water." Thinking of the UP as a Livestrong wristband with brains, it's easy to see how people would wear such a device constantly for health monitoring purposes. Up is expected to be out by the end of the year, and though the company hasn't set a price, they say it will be "affordable."
