Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsNot accurate
31 December 2018
After a couple of days of using this tracker I decided to return it as it wasn’t giving me the data that I wanted. The step counter wasn’t accurate, but I could have lived with that - my phone has a very accurate pedometer so it was easy to calibrate what the tracker was telling me against that and use my phone to get a sense of what I was really doing. However, other readings weren’t accurate either.
The calorie counter only counted the calories used when I was moving, but grossly overestimated the calories I was burning, possibly because it overestimated my steps. It told me, for example, that I had burned 950 calories one day, whereas my pedometer app on my phone estimated 350. That is a significant difference and if I were to base my eating habits on what the tracker as telling me I would be putting on weight, which I definitely don’t need!
I was disappointed by the sedentary alarm, too. I needed to be extremely sedentary for that to go off - pretty much motionless for a full hour (which is nigh on impossible). As the tracker set me a steps target for the day, I expected the alarm to notify me that I wasn’t keeping up with my target but it didn’t do that - the alarm only went off once in 2 days, despite my general lounging around for a good part of each day. A short trip to the loo seemed to satisfy it that I was being active.
I was particularly interested in tracking my sleep and it failed here too. I wake up quite a few times in the night, but as far as the app was concerned, if I was horizontal, I was asleep and it didn’t class me as awake unless I actually got out of bed. If I hadn’t seen more sophisticated sleep tracking on the Fitbit I might have been ok with this, but having seen the data a Fitbit produces, and being unconvinced by the reliability of this tracker’s data based on the dodgy calorie and step data, I decided it wasn’t worth persevering with this product.
Oh, and the manufacturers clearly haven’t employed a native English speaker on their instructions or the app - I got the gist, but the poor English made it a bit difficult to use.