Introduction and design
The wearable phenomenon is in full force. From glasses to smartwatches to full phones on your wrist, they're everywhere - but the most popular is still the activity tracker, thanks to the proliferation of a new low-power Bluetooth standard (4.0) and a glut of cheap sensors.
There mountain of fitness wearables seems to be growing by the day. Almost all of them have one thing in common: smartphone apps. But there are lot of other aspects that vary between them, which can make choosing your perfect device a bit of a mission.
To help you out, we've chosen four of the best known and most easily available activity trackers: the Nike+ FuelBand SE (£129), the Fitbit Flex (£79.99), the Jawbone Up24 (£99) and the Misfit Shine (£79.95). Each might seem similar on the face, but all of them offer their own unique features,
All except the Misfit Shine are in their second-generation version, so ought to be pretty polished by now. Or at least that's what you might expect...
Design
In terms of subtlety, Shine takes the plaudits here – and by a country mile. Its brushed aluminium, coin-sized shape and weight, makes sure of that.
It also doesn't need to be worn on a wrist (or necklace) – there's a tiny magnetic clasp for hooking it to a belt loop. It's also completely waterproof, just like the Flex, though unfortunately it doesn't record swimming as a specific activity.
The Flex, meanwhile, is a tiny sensor that can be separated from its bulky wristband to give you the power to place it where you want, although this does make it susceptible to getting lost. But the band itself is one of the most comfortable and lightweight on the market, and our favourite from this bunch.
Both the Jawbone Up24 and the FuelBand SE are devoutly wrist-only, and unfortunately neither are as comfy as the Flex.
While available in three sizes to accommodate for wrist sizes, the FuelBand SE has a very rigid design that can be a bit obstructing - particularly when resting your arm down on a flat surface.
The Jawbone Up24 is a tad more malleable than the SE; it's just a shame that it only comes in either orange or black. However its lack of a clasp means it can be yanked off your arm when you're, say, putting on a jacket.
But otherwise it's lightweight, comfortable, and like the SE you also get a choice of small, medium or large.
Battery
Battery life can make or break a life tracker. In some cases, how much juice you get depends on intensity of use, but on average the Flex gives between 5 and 7 days of use, the Up24 around 7 days (three less than the original UP) and the FuelBand SE at about five days.
The FuelBand SE's cable-free built-in USB slot makes it the easiest to charge when the power runs flat, and beats the competition in that the Up24 and Flex both use proprietary USB cables that are easy to lose and expensive to replace.
That leaves the Misfit Shine taking the gold medal here too, as the round-faced device uses a watch battery that's good for over four months before needing a change.
Usability
Looks aren't everything, and it's the rather ugly, bulky Up24 that wins the usability category.
The discreet Shine might look the best, but its use of a touch-sensitive shell and LED lights is confusing − it tries to tell the time in its own special way that is nigh on impossible to understand at a glance.
Worse, touching the Shine twice for the time or three times to begin a preset activity (including swimming, soccer or basketball) is harder than it sounds. In our tests we sporadically recorded a few activities, but it wasn't at all reliable and you could never tell when the activity had begun.
Press FuelBand SE's only button once to check your day's progress, twice to see the amount of hours you've 'won'. Press it twice in quick succession and it tells the time as a clear digital readout.
But where the SE does fall down is in its insistence on using Nike's own Fuel system, as well as telling us how many hours we've earned - it's as baffling as the Shine's points-based system. Both light up when various goals are reached, though it's not a remotely exciting event, especially given that they lack a more tangible measurement.
The Flex uses a line of LEDs as a guage to show you how much of your day's goal you've achieved, while the Up24 doesn't actually display anything at all - you have to go to the app to check your progress.
One big advantage the Flex and Up24 have is the ability to monitor your sleep patterns too. The Up24 will display small crescent moon to indicate that it's recording sleep, while the Flex will acknowledge you with a gentle buzz, and both give pretty detailed feedback on how long you were in deep sleep for.
It doesn't help you sleep any better, but it's nice to know that you managed to stay sound asleep for longer on a Monday.
Beyond these features, we like the way the Flex and Up24 can be extended out into the wider world of activity apps and gadgets. The Fitbit app used by the Flex is the same used by the brand's Fitbit Aria scales (£99) so you can funnel your current weight into the equation, too.
For the Up24, it's even more impressive, with various links to third-party gadgets, including Withings Wi-Fi scales.
For now, the Shine and FuelBand SE remain in their own closed ecosystems.
Companion apps and syncing
Companion apps & syncing
Nike's app might be excellent (and upgraded for the FuelBand SE) but it's only available for the iPhone, so that rules it out for a hell of a lot of people.
It's a real shame because the Sessions feature is mightily impressive, with tweaked algorithms for activities ranging from yoga and weightlifting to boot camp and basketball. If only the band itself was waterproof.
The app also lets you add your own activities and add a self-rated intensity, thereby heavily skewing the results. We like the 'Go for it Jamie!' style messages on the wristband, though it might annoy some.
The Flex app's dashboard presents a simple list of stats for steps, miles, active minutes, calories burned, weight and sleep quality, wisely leaving its free-text entry add-ons – its food plan and glasses of water drunk – at the bottom.
A Goals section is where figures for those parameters can be set. It's a good at-a-glance app, though the graphs supplied for each are of little use.
The UP24 app is better. As well as great, chronological Facebook app-style presentation of your latest fitness stats, a Trends section can be tweaked to produce graphs on a plethora of parameters.
A Lifeline section attempts to meld everything together, but we had trouble understanding just what was going on here.
The best part of Up24 is the chance to involve some (frankly more capable) apps into the dataset, including the likes of MapMyFitness, Sleepio, Strava, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and even If This The That (IFTTT), which takes UP24 into the wider world of the Internet of Things.
Probably the most basic app here is Shine (available on both iOS and Android), which gives a simple "Today" read-out that includes a 'last synced' time above a dial that's exactly the same size as Shine.
Around the edge is a orange line that represents how far you've walked as a percentage of your daily goal, which – rather confusingly – is measured in points, though also a useful message saying that you've got 'about 1 hour of walking left'.
A day is thus divided up into small boxes containing information like 'Kinda active, 15.32 minutes', which is nice and precise, but perhaps overdoing it.
The Shine and Up24 app have a Facebook dimension, and Up24 can tweet, too, so you can post inane messages like, 'Tarquin just achieved his daily goal of 2,187 steps', but we all know how annoying that can be for everyone else.
However, we do like the FuelBand and Flex's ability to hook up with other users and swap activity metrics. It gives a competitive edge that will be really useful to some for motivation. If a little rivalry won't get you motivated, what will?
The new Up24 app swaps the 3.5mm jack connection to Bluetooth 4.0, bringing it in line with the other three, all of which exchange data with a smartphone reasonably quickly.
Sleep management
Assign an activity in-app and all four record (very) rudimentary data on sleep, though only very basic metrics on periods of deep sleep and light sleep.
What you can do with that kind of information is very limited. Alhough knowing your total amount of time slept is handy, it's probably not enough.
If it's sleep tracking you're particularly interested in, you can forget about the Fuelband SE. While you can set sleep as an activity to be monitored, the actual tracking is very basic. That's probably because Nike doesn't believe that sleep can be properly measured properly outside of lab conditions.
The Flex manages a daily average, but if you're intensely interested in other sleep metrics, such as snoring volume (and even recorded highlights), head for SnoreLab or the brilliant MotionX 24/7.
The Up24 takes the prize here for its cute Smart Alarm, which aims to wake you up while you're in a light sleep period although though only within a preset limit (say, between 07:00 and 07:30).
It's something you appreciate when it works, though like apps such as Sleep Cycle that do the same thing, there's no guarantee that it always will.
Value for money and verdict
Value for money
Does the FuelBand SE justify its high price? No it does not – the lack of an Android app makes sure of that, though even before that horrific discovery it didn't exactly have a big lead over the others.
The Flex performs just as well as the others, so has to be considered best value, though we're big fans of the Up24, which offers a glimpse into a wider world of third-party apps and integration with other connected gadgets.
In theory we could set it up so that some Philips Hue lights go crazy when we reach our daily goal. Banal, yes, but the possibilities of this kind of connectivity are vast.
The Shine, meanwhile, is easily the most discreet, and can be worn on a pair of trousers or shoes for months at a time and synced whenever you want. For the more casual users out there, the Shine is hugely appealing.
Verdict
Our winner is the Jawbone Up24 – by a squeak – simply because it's both easy to use and incredibly well thought out. A lot of its success is down to the 'news feed' style of its smartphone app, but there are other characteristics that make it the best tracker available.
Probably the most useful is the device's only button, which puts it to sleep and wakes it up each morning, complete with lit-up icons that let you know exactly what it's doing.
The FuelBand SE largely fails on its lack of an Android app and its uncomfortable fit, while Flex is uninspiring and Shine is unresponsive and has a very basic app.
The Up24 is not perfect. it looks very child-like and the need for a recharge via a proprietary cable is a bit of a letdown.
No, what sees the Up24 grace our wrist is its integration with other apps and gadgets. We managed to feed in data from some Withings Wi-Fi scales and link it to (a growing list of) apps like Sleepio, RunKeeper and even If This Then That (IFTTT) to get involved with the rest of the household gadgets.
It's a small start, but it points the way for the future of wearables.
It's this open-platform idea that we think is crucial to the success of these 'self quantifiers' going forward because as more and more movement and other data is collected, it needs to go into one single app. Having two fitness apps to check, in our experience, invariably means that you'll forget about one of them.
By importing data from other services and letting those services access the data from the Up24 bracelet, Jawbone is onto something – let's hope we see more of this from wearable devices in the months to come.
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