fitness / smart watch bleakness

[indigo_rose99]

For the past year or so, I've had a Basis Peak watch.

I've LOVED it. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE.

• I wanted something to measure my steps. Many pedometers do this, but I liked the fact that this one straps onto my wrist.


• I wanted something that measures my heart rate. A lot of the new fitness watches do this. This one had a reputation for accuracy. My personal evaluation and comparison to other measurement instruments and how I feel says that it did well when I'm not exercising, but less accurately when I'm running. I can live with this.


• I wanted something that does not cost me extra money to download the real data. Basis is happy to email me a text file upon request. I have done a LOT of requesting. This is the element keeping me from any other product: Access to my own data. I refuse to buy ANYTHING that does not give me this.


• I've been dealing with data downloads from other products that mostly do daily summaries. Basis gives me the raw data on a PER MINUTE BASIS. This is huge! It allows me to truly analyze the data in any way I want.


• I wanted something with a decent battery life. I don't care about color screens. I don't care about the ability to send messages from my watch. I DO deeply care about battery life. I wanted a black-and-white screen that would allow the battery to last for days. This does. I can charge it for the few minutes I'm in the shower each day (or every other day would work as well) and that keeps it completely topped up. LOVE it.


• I didn't know I wanted something that measures skin temperature. And it does. Win!


• Basis has been constantly working on their product. Tweaking it. Offering extra features on a testing basis. One of those was connecting to any other application on my phone. So I set it up to accept IMs from Skype. LOVE it!!! My work is constantly nagging me on Skype when I'm making lunch. And now I don't miss those messages because my phone is in my pocket!

Basis has done a recalll because of a small number of failures. They will stop their servers from working (and thus my ability to get data) in December. I have accepted their offer of sending my watch back in. Reluctantly. But now what am I going to do? This watch fit what I wanted, plus it had extra features I have come to desire!

No other fitness/smart watch has the battery life, the access to raw per minute steps, heart rate and skin temperature! Waaaah!