I have been using my Nike Fuel Band for almost 3 months
and have some positive and negative comments for others that are considering
buying the device.
Overall I continue to be happy with the device
itself. The battery life is excellent;
I generally only charge it for a short time, from 5 minutes to 30 minutes and
have never had it shut down. If I am at
home I generally synch via USB every day but when I am traveling I may go 3-4
days without synching. Synching does
have some other issues. I would estimate
that 10% of the time the synch gets hung up and does not work the first
time. Also, there are frequent software
updates to the device and they often require more than one attempt to update
the firmware. My other upload issue is
Bluetooth to my IPad; I have never done it successfully. To be fair, it could be my fault as I have
not spent a lot of time on it but the few times I have tried it were
unsuccessful.
Once you have successfully uploaded your data, the
website is well designed and quickly provides you the information you want to
review. Check out the screen shot from
today.
The last area of the web site that I generally look at is
“How you compare”. Frankly, I wish Nike
would do a better job with more information about peers and the Nike community
but this is a good start.
Okay, there are a few negatives or bumps in the
road. Nike started a Facebook app to
compete with other Nike Fuel Bank users.
I signed up for it and it never worked and it is now gone. Great idea!
What happened? On a similar note,
I received an email a few days ago that was a report on my June
activities. I was happy to see they were
giving comparisons similar to above for peers and the Nike community but it was
erroneous, there is no way that it was right, check it out.
They apparently compared my daily average to other’s
monthly average. This doesn’t exactly
inspire confidence; I can understand it if I were part of a Beta user group but
this is in full production.
There have been a couple of other annoyances like last
week I met my goal but the system captured a lower number. I have had to reset the device a few times,
but that is quick and relatively easy.
Overall I am quite happy with the device and the web
site. My real hope is that Nike
continues to invest and refine the system’s algorithms to better interpret the
data, i.e. cycling/elliptical versus just steps. I also am anxious to see what they are going
to do with the publishing an API for developers. Jawbone UP has an unauthorized API available,
Fitbit has a published API. I think this
data is more valuable in the context of overall health and wellness apps that
include more than just Nike Fuel/calorie expenditure.
Nike apparently has a limited API release for developers
creating music integration apps that allow for different music to play based
upon activity feeds from the Fuel band. That
is cool, but we need more data liberation for apps we would like to create.
Paul Speese
