At NikeTown in NYC, the entire 1st floor of a 6 story building is dominated by gigantic screens displaying a wrist band that calculates how active you are. There are dozens of employees offering hands on demos making sure all customers walking through the front door stop by to try one on. I don’t try one on. I know I want it. Where the Jawbone failed, the Nike+ FuelBand would succeed. Nike is sort of ingrained into my lifestyle. I wear their shoes equipped with sensors and run the Nike+ app on all of my devices. I also love their socks for some reason, Nike socks are incredibly comfortable. Most of all, I love the style that Nike exudes in all of their products and how simple it is to get a Nike anywhere in the world for around the same price. I bought my last pair of Nike shoes in India from an actual store and yes, they were real and not rip-offs.
For the FuelBand, I was convinced it worked. I trust Nike and their products. They’ve never let me down. A week after buying the FuelBand, I bought my first pair of New Balance Shoes. Yes, it’s that bad. Nike is a company I trusted and they’ve let me down.
Three Hours is the charge time for the FuelBand. You have to charge it every 3 days. Forget to plug it in on that 2nd night when you go to sleep and the unit may be dead by lunch mid-day. Hopefully you have a desk job because it only charges via USB. The software is great and easy to use. Setup was fast and simple and, I already had the Nike+ account so it all connected up beautifully. You need a separate application to manage the FuelBand which just means I now have 3 Nike apps on my iPhone. Kind of pointless. You can wear it all day and even in the shower. You can’t swim in it but, given that you can’t submerge it but you can do everything else like shower and wash dishes makes me worry. What is the fine line? Is there a chance it’ll break in the shower? I honestly don’t know.
Here are a few samples of data from the past couple of days:
On all three of these days, things were pretty normal. I get up, have coffee and go to work. On the first day, I didn’t break for lunch and then went home and, that night fed my pigs which is the last gap. Then I showered before midnight and went to bed. On the 2nd day, I went for a walk on my lunch break. That last day was a normal day until I BBQed for my family at night and we ate dinner around 9 thus the 3 hour spare of preparing food and then cooking it.
So, it does accurately read what I do each day based on simple movements but there’s no way I walked 8 miles on Friday or took 16,000+ steps. This is just flat out wrong. I didn’t walk at all on Friday. If to my car in the garage counts, then yes.
I haven’t been to the gym yet with the band on but, if at the gym my workout doesn’t yield very high stats compared to this, I know it’s total BS. Cooking 4 racks of ribs isn’t a “GREAT DAY” in my fitness goals. It’s a day where I gorged on pig meat yet that’s my “best day ever”. Um, hardly. A great day is going to the gym.
So, the FuelBand technically works. It measures accurately that I’m doing something. However, it doesn’t tell the complete picture. I was doing something as in waxing my car and a jog is actually just as much motion as waxing a car. It’s a record of how you’re doing but not a complete picture.
For $150, I wouldn’t recommend it. I need a week on a single charge, an actual GPS chip, a heart rate monitor and body heat monitor to get a full picture. I also need the app to include snapping photos of food and auto-detect calorie amounts like other apps did. If the FuelBand app counted calories and the FuelBand itself took more measurements on my body’s data, we’d have a better picture. Right now, I’m not happy with this thing.
UPDATE: I’m adding another screen. It’s from today’s rather extreme gym session. It was:
1. 45 minutes on the elliptical (using the arm swinger things)
2. 30 Minutes walking at 3.5 miles per hour on the treadmill
3. 10 Minutes of running at 7 miles per hour.
4. Punching the boxing bag for for five 30 second intervals
Later (the next hump) is when I carried a bag of feed out to the pig pen to feed them and then collect chicken eggs.
For some reason, over an hour of very strenuous exercise doesn’t beat cooking BBQ for 5 hours. How this is possible, I have NO IDEA! I busted my butt at the gym and still didn’t beat that epic BBQ day. In fact, feeding my pigs was considered pretty strenuous compared to running at 7MPH.
Nike, I’d like to return the FuelBand please.