Fitbit – first impressions from the master of lazy
Sarah is the chief gadget buyer for yours truly. I think she does it because she gets tired of hearing me lust after them. The Fitbit was no exception, I just had to have it. I'm really pleased with it so far!
First, a little update for those who may not know what a fitbit is. (via)
The Fitbit accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. The Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii. The Fitbit tracks your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.
You can wear the Fitbit on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments. At night, you can wear the Fitbit clipped to the included wristband in order to track your sleep. Anytime you walk by the included wireless base station, data from your Fitbit is silently uploaded in the background to Fitbit.com
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As you can see it's a small device, about the size of a small USB flash drive. It easily clips onto the waistline or belt. It has a charging station and lasts about 10 days between charges. When you're within a few feet of the charger your stats are automatically uploaded. Pretty nifty! Here's a pic of me sporting said Fitbit, posted to the mophoblog the other day.
I wanted the Fitbit because in order to expose myself for the lazy person I am. I thought, surely once I saw how inactive I was – the actual data – I would want be more active. Not exactly, that part hasn't really happened yet. At least not completely. I have been opting to take the kids to the park a bit more, knowing that this would lead me to be more active. So I guess in a way it's working. The other reason I wanted the Fitbit is I was hoping it'd give some insight to my sleeping patterns.
How about a couple screen caps of the dashboard area on fitbit.com (Click to view full size):
On the left you'll see the dashboard home page which shows all of the current daily stats. On the right is the historical data which gives an overview for a few weeks back. Here's a closeup of the sleep stats:
And the most interesting part yet, which is really no surprise. How inactive I am during the week, and how active I am on the weekends. Last Saturday I took 13,000 steps, during the week I'm lucky to get 3,000.
I'm still getting into things, and I can see areas where I need to improve. I hope to update this in a couple months with better stats. All around it's a great product. Very simple to use, very easy to setup. A great value for the $100 I paid for it. Now it's time to get Sarah one!
*EDIT
One gripe I have is there is no API to access the data. Think of the cool mashups. Well I asked the @fitbit twitter account and this is what I got back today, good news!:
Oh, one last thing, Sarah had to buy this one from the microsoft store, they had them in stock. At the time there was a little bit of a wait if you bought them from fitbit.com.