The best-looking, least intrusive wearable device yet − but what's it for?
For
Four month battery life
Elegant design
Clasp and wristband included
Waterproof
Against
Easy to forget
Confusing watch-face
Slow sync
Poor activity logging
Activity trackers are predicted to explode in popularity, but to
become accepted by the masses, the chunky child-like designs of the
likes of the Jawbone UP and Nike FuelBand have got to go. So far really only designed for athletes, wearables need a mainstream makeover.
Now
available for £80 / US$120 / around AU$135, it's not overly expensive
either, although the accessories are a little pricey, given some cost
nearly half that of the main unit.
Misfit Wearables thinks its
Shine is just that. A coin-sized sensor designed to collect data on your
activity, while also offering basic watch functions, the Shine looks
less like an athlete's accessory, though it retains most of the
functions.
Design
The
grey, silver or black aluminium Shine is a mere 9g in weight and no
bigger in diameter than an average coin. Looking more like (unisex)
jewellery than gadgetry, out of the box it can be worn in either a
flat-profile silicone wristband (that adds a whopping 7g to the
package), or in a tiny clasp. When
attached to the wrist it's comfy and doesn't slide off. Easily slid
under a sleeve, but looking like anything but a watch, there's no doubt
that the waterproof (to 50m) Shine is eminently wearable.
The
clasp offers another way of wearing Shine − just slot it into the
silicon surround and the magnetic fold-over clasp means it can be hooked
to anything, most likely a belt loop or laces on a shoe. I did both and
found the magnetic fixing very strong. In
practice, however, the Shine's design is a double-edged sword. I love
that it's waterproof, so fine for wearing in the shower, but at some
stage you're going to want to remove it and put it in the clasp. That
might seem like a great idea, but in practice it's a really bad
decision.
You see, being small and hardly noticeable has its
downsides, and I found that during the two-week test when the clasp was
on my jeans, I forgot all about Shine for at least half the time.
Consequently,
it didn't get the chance to record my sleep as much as I'd planned it
to, and four times it was left at home while attached to the wrong
trousers.
Naturally, on two of those days I went for long walks,
not a single step of which was recorded on the app. This is what happens
when you live with wearables.
Where I will heap praise on the
Shine is its battery. It uses a CR2032 battery that will last for around
four months – that's far more handy than most activity trackers, which
need to be attached to a USB port every few days to refuel. However,
communicating with a smartphone via Bluetooth puts Shine ahead of some
activity trackers.
Features
It
might not look like other activity trackers, but the Shine isn't much
different to the sports-centric wristbands available for lower prices –
it's just less serious, and in lots of ways.
Shine records your
physical activity and sleep. It claims to be able to recognise the
difference between various different sports, including cycling,
swimming, tennis, basketball and, er, soccer. Aside from the fact that
calling football "soccer" is wrong and bad in some countries, it's a
very US-centric look at sports. Anyway,
two glaring problems exist here. The first is that any work done in a
gym can't be counted or added to Shine's statistics, making the entire
device rather pointless for gym-goers. It's not alone in this problem,
but that's no excuse.
Worse, Shine doesn't actually recognise any
of those sports at all − it merely has algorithms inside to help it
average-out movement. We know this because it's necessary to physically
choose the sport you're about to indulge in from a list in the app's
Misfit Labs area's (i.e. beta-features) Activity Tagging page. Three
taps of the Shine and whatever activity was selected last is supposed
to be recorded, though in my tests I had to almost hit the Shine to get
it to register anything.
However, the main problem with this
approach is that one of the activities in the list is Sleep, which means
that you'll have to delve into the app at least once a day, before bed,
to re-set that activity to Sleep, then back again in the morning if
you're out cycling, say.
Bluetooth or not, that's a big yawn, though it does appear to self-select walking if you do nothing.
I
had the same problem with swimming, which I had hoped would be the
Shine's ace-card. Despite triple-taps while in the deep end – on three
separate occasions – the Shine failed to keep any record of my swimming.
Motivation on the Shine is lax; you'll get no 'well done!'
messages or warnings about inactivity, though a double-tap and some of
its 12-strong ring of LEDs light-up according to your progress. Once
it's shown you that, Shine shows you the time using those 12 LEDs to
represent hours, then minutes.
I was baffled by this, and
wondered if it was some kind of binary language. C-3PO could probably
understand, but I doubt that even he has 20 seconds to spare to stare at
some lights whenever he wants to know the time. It took me two weeks to
figure out that it was an hour fast, and the irregularity of the
tapping meant that the Shine can't be classed as a watch substitute.
App
The
free Shine app for iOS and Android phones (selected models that run
Android 4.3 and over, and have Bluetooth 4.0) was recently updated to
include a Facebook dimension that can compare your stats with friends
and the world at large.
I couldn't care a jot what the rest of
the world is doing, but the optional push notifications notifying you
what your pals/bitter rivals are doing might help some.
Syncing
Shine with the app is easy, though can be slow. You're supposed to tap
Shine onto the phone itself, though that's not really practical –
instead I managed to sync it over Bluetooth from close-by, though it can
take a while, and often timed-out during testing.
We can't deny
that placing the device on the phone screen and seeing it begin a
connection is cool, and uses some proprietary technology - but it's a
novelty that wears off in place of speed and ease of use.
The
front page of the always portrait-orientated App is so basic. A Today
read-out includes a 'last synced' time above a dial that's exactly the
same size as Shine.
Around the edge is an orange line that
represents how far you've walked as a percentage of your daily goal,
which – rather confusingly – is measured in points. So, about halfway
through a normal day I synced the app to the device to discover that I'd
earned 415 of 1,000 points so far. Huh?
I'm not really sure what
to do with this information, though it does say underneath that I've
got 'about 1 hour of walking left'. That's genuinely useful, and did –
on one occasion during a particularly lazy Sunday – cause me to go out
for a walk. Shine did its job there.
Tap
the dial once the day is over and you'll see stats for points earned as
well as steps taken, calories burned, and miles walked. Below this dial
is an at-a-glance graph of your daily activity, which also doesn't give
us much insight – it's all very basic.
Drag a finger up and some
icons are revealed that represent either Activity (orange), Sleep
(purple) or Milestone (green) for reaching goals.
In my test, a
single day had six boxes in varying intensities of orange that
represented about 15−20 minutes each tagged with statements like 'kinda
active' and 'pretty active' to 'very active', with each carrying a
points award.
By the end of the day I'd reached my 1,000 points
goal and was awarded a 'milestone' cup that stated "You hit your goal.
Sweetness!"
On one particularly active day I got to double my
goal and achieved a 'personal best' award. Now what? With no sign of any
recommendations, or advice that we should change our goal, I'm not sure
what else to do with this data.
Sleep-monitoring
Walking
appears to be the default interpretation of any physical activity, with
sleep not recorded unless the bedtime triple-tap is recognised, though,
as with swimming (or cycling or soccer) you won't find out until
morning whether it did understand your instructions.
When it
does, all you get is a purple icon with basic figures for total time
spent asleep and how long deep sleep lasted. Enter that icon and you'll
see only a simple graph that's of little use.
If you want to gain insight into your sleep patterns, go for a smartphone app like SleepBot or SnoreLab − the Shine offers virtually nothing.
0 comentarii:
Post a Comment