Fitbit Wireless Activity/Sleep Tracker, Black/Blue
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Greatly Exaggerated Reporting

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Greatly Exaggerated Reporting

Fitbit Wireless Activity/Sleep Tracker, Black/Blue

$99.95/$81.88
Preface

I purchased this device to track my sleep, activity, and lessen the time I'm in front of a computer. I wanted to employ the easiest way of data mining myself. For quite some time I had been using manual services like Daytum to track granular aspects of my life. The manual method proved tedious. Some years ago I came across Fitbit but was turned off by their constant product delays. For a while it seemed the product was vaporware but eventually was released and well received by users who found the device effortless to use once they got past the hundred-dollar price point.

I was aware of the technological limitations when I purchased the device but expected there to be some calibration phase during setup. The Nike+ is a perfect example. Without calibration the Nike+ shoe insert's data values vary wildly from person to person. When calibrated properly it had a discrepancy of +/- three-hundredths of a mile. Fitbit provides no innate device calibration but instead allows inputting your average walking and running stride length via the online dashboard. Editing this field, however, does not seem to alter forward-facing statistics.

When I first started writing this review I was very much in love with how easy Fitbit Ultra is to use. Then I started noticing the data was greatly exaggerated. I took a 7-minute, light, even-paced walk around my neighborhood (a distance of less than 0.25 miles) and the device recorded I had taken many thousand steps with a distance totalling 1.25 miles. Impossible, I don't walk that fast. Maybe I'm an outlier, but within 3 hours of sitting still it had me pegged at walking 87 steps totalling another 0.25 miles. This occurred all while the device sat atop my desk, motionless. Clearly something is seriously wrong with the Fitbit Ultra.

Accuracy

As stated in the preface the data is greatly exaggerated. There seems to be a disconnect between what is really considered `very active' activities (their metric for most rigorous movement) and what isn't. My first light walk of the evening peaked the `very active' scale. The exaggeration of steps and miscalculation of distance traveled totally destroys all other metrics except for `floors climbed' which is the only under-reported metric.

Tracking Your Sleep

Another disappointment. The instructions are simple; when you're going to try to sleep, press and hold the button till you see the stop watch. When you awaken, press and hold the button again till you see `stop' across the screen. The next time your device syncs you'll be able to see how restless your sleep was. I logged about 6 hours 40 minutes of sleep time on Fitbit Ultra but my dashboard didn't seem to reflect that data.

It's quite frustrating to be honest. Actual sleep time = 0 minutes. That's not right. Where did all that data go? Someone at Fitbit really dropped the ball here.

Syncing

The biggest positive. It's Effortless. Really it is. You simply wear the device and it syncs automatically when you're near the base station without interruption.

Build Quality

I was afraid to use the device's hinge on any of my clothing because it feels like it could snap with minimal effort. Instead, I used the included belt-clip. It worked perfectly on my pocket liner, neckline, and everywhere else except for my super-thick manly belts. The sleeping wristband was very soft but there's a certain rigidity to the backing of the primary velcro part that is malleable and therefore uncomfortable at times.

Greeting & Chatter

It doesn't quip as often as I'd like. In fact, it's never once said anything clever or motivational like the website claims. The greeting is a name you set to identify the device. It displays at random. There is no definitive way to summon the greeting by cycling through the different displays. Maybe you should be able to do this but my Fitbit Ultra did not. It's not a big deal if you only have one device; but it's rather confusing to see information show only sometimes and other times not at all for no apparent reason.

Privacy

Some profile data is available publicly by default. Fitbit will use your email address as your public-facing username--be careful because I found out the hard way when my full-name was publicly visible on my profile. You can change it by setting a real name in your profile or a nickname.

Conclusion

The selling point of Fitbit Ultra is motivation--and the device will greatly exaggerate your progress based on several arbitrary graphs. The premium membership doesn't seem useful until the device itself gathers information correctly. I'm so disappointed in Fitbit Ultra, I really truly wanted it to work. I think the company should pivot and offer white-label devices with an open source api and codebase; then I could hack together a more precise formula for oscillation and impact tracking. Or they could fix the Fitbit Ultra and I'll purchase another one.

                                       - by campeaux @ 10/28/2011

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