[danielovich]

Useless device. Wrong heartrate which pretty much says it all. Try running in a red zone with this band and let me know how big the fluctuations are.

Having a powermeter on my bike but no Ant+ in the watch. Forget it. And you cant stuff all needed information into such a small screen.

No pace settng, no average, no stopwatchh...i could continue.

A fun gadget for a teenager, but I never consider using this as a workout device. Not even close.

[lhl]

The Band isn't "useless", but it's more of an activity/lifestyle level fitness tracker. I don't know why anything would have convinced you otherwise.

Of the continuous HR tracking general-purpose devices, Band v1 was better than the competition at the time [1], but things have progressed significantly in the past year (everyone's building their own PPG stacks w/ multi-wavelength LEDs now).

If you need ANT+ and more advanced tracking of course you'll need a more specialized device. You won't get powermeter support on a Garmin watch until you get into their triathalon range, like the $450 Forerunner 920XT. The tradeoff there is that there's no optical HR/continuous HR support. For Garmin, optical HR is only on the newest FR235, which doesn't have powermeter support either - that doesn't make it "a fun gadget for a teenager" - power meters are specialized, expensive (is there any <$800?) devices for a single activity. If you know that you need support for it, you should know what you need to look for, but don't expect the majority of people to care about it, especially since it's obviously not the Band's target market.

I will say the thing that's a real shame is that there's no of the "pro" fitness device manufacturers (Polar, Garmin, Suunto, TomTom) that has 1) built anywhere near a decent API/platform for consolidating fitness data (something that MS, Fitbit, Jawbone, etc have done a much better job at) or 2) at the very least, allow multiple of their own devices to work together - ie, Garmin now has a decent activity tracker w/ the Vivosmart HR (no GPS) coming out, and a whole range of more serious/specialized fitness trackers, but you can't seamlessly use and sync both into Garmin Connect. That's just embarassing (also, Garmin charges a $5K fee for API access. wut?)

BTW, for those seriously interested in their fitness gadgets, I recommend visiting, which has great reviews and an interested community, although sadly, not a forums: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/12/7193493/7-minutes-in-hell...

[tallanvor]

I have the first version of the band, and the heart rate monitor seems to be quite accurate - I used it any my old Polar watch (where you wear a band around your chest to monitor your heart rate) and found that they typically only varied by a couple of beats per second, and the only time the band shows major fluctuations is if you don't have it snug enough so it can properly monitor the rate.

It works just fine for me both for strength training and running, and I'd certainly recommend it to others.

[cakes]

I had some issues with the heart rate monitor on the first band. I accept that it was likely user error (my fault) but a few times during a normal exercise routine it reported heart rate values well outside the where my heart rate was (or should be)

[chokolad]

> no stopwatchh...i could continue.

Huh? It had stopwatch since Band 1.