Jawbone UP Move Review

The Jawbone UP Move portrays something more than just another fitness tracker in the realm of wearables, one reason being it embodies the wearable tech 2.0, the progression of industry trends. If you have been following the wearables market trends, you may know that a year ago, the fitness trackers would cost your wallet roughly $100; whereas today there’s no reason to spend even half that amount of cash on them.

Between, Misfit Flash, Fitbit Zip, and the Jawbone UP Move, activity tracking is now a throwaway commodity, and in fairness, the prices, we see these days, are more favorable over the last year’s price of the fitness trackers. Though, that’s not to say that the $100 plus activity trackers are dead, moreover, company have turned their costly fitness tracker into more of a fitness smartwatch, like Fitbit’s Charge, Fitbit Surge and the Garmin Vivofit 2, morphing them with advanced tech and smartwatch style features, which a year ago would be unimaginable. So, is the Jawbone UP Move the King affordable fitness bands? Read our full review to find out.

Design

The Jawbone UP Move looks right in par with company’s other fitness trackers. Similar to the Misfit Flash, the UP Move is circular in design, although, unlike it doesn’t sport a shiny design; instead it has a ribbed design on its face.

The hidden LEDs in the face shows you which mode you are in and how far along you are in your daily step goal. It feels like the flower pattern on the face and a satisfying click sound when you press it is all you need in a good design. With its attention to detail LEDs, you can easily read the time. Yes, it shows the time also, whenever you press two times on the face of UP Move, the hour and minute hands will glow.

The UP Move comes with a clip for you to fasten the device to your trouser pocket, shirtsleeve, or anywhere else you could think of. As well as you can also buy wristbands to wear the sensor instead of clipping it on your clothes. They come in different color variants like Red, Black, Yellow, Purple, etc. are few of the options, and would cost you extra $15.

The UP Move is meant to disappear onto your body after you securely clip it. You could easily forget whether you are wearing the device or not, as I did when it was in the clip attached to my jeans pocket. And if tend to forget things in your busy schedule, so, it is highly recommended that you must remember to strap off the device because it is only splash-proof tracker. That means you cannot wear the fitness tracker while showering.

Honestly, the Up Move looks ugly. People thought it looked like a cereal box prize or a cheesy ’70s kitchen gadget on my wrist. Also, it’s not easy to pop it in and out of its accessories either, but once it is in, it stay put.

Display

As the Jawbone UP Move disappears on your body (due to its light weight), the display also disappears into the body of the device. Once you press the textured face, the LED display comes to life. Both the Flash and UP Move use the same round “clock” LED readout design, lighting up LEDs around the rim to show how far you have made it towards your goal.

Click the UP Move once for fitness progress, twice for a blinking LED readout that counts hours and minutes. It’s not a clock, but it can be one in a pinch, and the small icons to show you which modes you are in.

Step mode is indicated by a little orange running man, which monitors your movement over the activities of a day. When you press the display twice and hold on during the second press activates Stopwatch mode, which keeps track of the duration of your workout, steps taken, as well as total calories burned.

These activities will show up in your timeline in the UP app once you sync the device. Moreover, you can add details like whether you were running, playing soccer or doing yoga, and your intensity level. The third and final mode is sleep; just before you hit the sack, press and hold the display to activate sleep mode, which is indicated by a small moon icon. When you wake, you follow the same steps to reactivate the step mode for the day.

Though, it is a disappointment that the UP Move doesn’t automatically go into sleep mode like its competitor Misfit Flash, which falls under the same price category. The automatic settings make it easy to put a tracker on and forget about it, whether it is a day or the night.

UP App

The Jawbone UP Mode sync all your data to the UP app (available for both iOS and Android), all this is done via the Bluetooth 4.0, which means the connectivity between smartphone and device is quite strong and stable. Upon opening the app, it takes only few seconds for the sensor to get paired and update the home page with your latest stats.

While we like the simplicity of the Mi Band’s companion app on Android, we couldn’t be far more pleased with featured rich app and beautiful design of the UP app. The app uses bold colors; clean typography and Google Now-esque cards to relay information to you about your goals and stats.

There are two thick arrows point out on the welcome screen, one for sleep progress and another for step progress. You can tap on either that of options to see a full breakdown of your day. Sleep shows you a graph of your quality sleep time during the night, differentiating between the sound sleep and light sleep numbers. Whereas the steps shows you how many times you have been active all day long, the most active time, along with total active time is shown here, as well as total calorie burn, resting calorie burn and more detailed data metrics.

When you scroll down the home page, it reveals the dedicated step, mood, activity, and sleep cards; it gives you a glance at your day’s data. Each card show also has a tidbit of information/facts that one would like to learn about the health. It is easily be taken as advice because UP Move learns about your health every time you carry it along for a day’s trip.

Smart Coach

One of the latest features on the UP Move app is the Smart Coach, it learns about your patterns and gives you advice to improve your health over time. It will take two-three days to kick in this feature as it analyze your previous patterns and based on that you will get advice from the Smart Coach. For instance, it will suggest you on how to eat better, sleep better, as well as exercise more efficiently. One would find smart coach’s advices quite simple and actionable, giving you easy ways to change the habits.

To keep you healthy and active, it will give you challenges in the middle of the day. For instance, drinking eight glass of water during a day, you can opt into these challenges. If you do that, the challenges will be more frequent and will bring you back to the UP App more frequently. As well as you will be held accountable for the little things you did to stay healthy throughout the day, and that will make you feel more happy and inspired.

Performance

We found the Jawbone UP Move to be consistently accurate about the entries of the steps taken. It would have been a much better if the sleep mode were automatic, but then it won’t be as accurate as the manual mode. It was also accurate when we tracked the workout session in stopwatch mode, which displayed nearly the same distance and calorie burn that the treadmill showed. But unlike the Misfit Flash and the Fitbug Orb, the UP Move doesn’t track the stairs climbed or even a heart rate.

Sleep Tracking

The Jawbone UP Move has the same sleep tracking abilities that can be found on its UP24, and you can be certain that they are quite up to the mark, meaning they are accurate. As we have mentioned that to activate the sleep tracking you would have to long press the display of the UP Move and the mode will be switched to Sleep, as the moon icon light up.

The app breaks down your entire night’s sleep into graph showing your amount of sound sleep, light sleep, as well as the times you woke up (accelerator sensor abilities). It will also show how long it took you to fall asleep when you switched the mode to sleep mode. And just in case if you forgot to put your UP Move on sleep mode, you can always add the sleep time manually, but then, of course, you won’t able to see the detailed sleep metrics.

Battery Life

The battery life is not a point to judge the performance of the device, since the Jawbone UP Move is powered by a coin cell battery that can last up to 6 months. Yes, you read that right! It is the same coin cell that can be found on the Misfit Flash and the Fitbug Orb. It is pretty inexpensive and easy to replace when the time comes. So, you needn’t worry about the battery life of this device if you are going to buy it.

Verdict

Jawbone UP Move is superb budget fitness tracker, which not only beats its competition in the pricing, but also has an edge over the in-depth analyzes of the data metrics of the users. It stands up well against its competitor in many pointers, while lacking some points too, including the manual sleep tracking option.

The company has perfectly integrated the UP Move with its strong family of fitness trackers in terms of hardware and software design. It is easy to make affordable fitness tracker as Xiaomi has proved with its ultra-cheap Mi Band (Checkout our Review of the same). Rather an important aspect is to provide a feature rich companion app, just as Jawbone did with its UP app by integrating intelligent features and a Smart Coach. It is the feature that changes the Up Move from an amped-up pedometer to a useful healthy-living partner