After a few days of anticipation, Jeff and I got our hands on Jawbone Up bracelets.  Immediate reactions

• My first interaction with the app, it crashed. Womp.  See photo below.
• Neither of our bracelets synched straight away.  Sync fail.  After quitting the program and reopening, mine worked.  Jeff’s finally worked after multiple quits and toggling the mute switch.
• We couldn’t find each other.  Despite us both registering our bracelets, the search refused to work.  We tried for two days before I finally popped up when he searched me.  I wasn’t the top match, despite the first two results being nothing close to my name.  I later tried to find another friend.  Searching his full name returned a long list he wasn’t on.  Searching his last name only returned him as the only result.  Wonky
• The app is super buggy, and lacking some key features.  While I understand that this app/device is meant to encourage better health and that a large portion of people who use this won’t NEED to have a goal that exceeds 10,000 steps a day…I live in New York City, and I would love to be able to set a custom step goal.  Other bugs include being stuck in landscape mode with no way to return to the main screen, data not appearing in landscape mode until you scroll, and the app not displaying the correct saved personal goal settings.  The recent app update has appeared to fix whatever was causing 2 out of 3 syncs to fail.

All in all, the biggest benefit I’ve noticed thus far is my attention to what I eat.  Taking photos for the “food log” (probably the weakest part of the app in many people’s opinions) has made me realize that I eat a lot of crap.  A quick and easy fix to upgrade your diet- but we’ll see how long it lasts (and how long I’ll take photos of what I eat).

I would like to track how much I walk during an average pool match, it would be nice to be able to expand the timelines so you could more accurately see your activity relative to time.  I forgot to set the band to “workout” mode prior to my match last night, so the data it collected is jammed into a section that begins at 1pm.  I pretty much just see a few bars of activity for a match that must have lasted at least an hour and change.

Also, in regards to the graphs, what is the vertical axis measuring?  It would be nice to have some sort of unit of measurement as opposed to the color coding currently used. 

It will be interesting to see how it reacts when I go back to Bikram.  Until then, just waiting for more of my friends to get on so my competitive nature keeps me striving to be most fit.