Gadgetory

Microsoft's fitness band is in its second year and has a new design and while too ambitious it's still not enough of what I need especially for its 250 dollar price what do you need to get healthy I need a live I need motivation i need coaching anything to bug me all the time help me microsoft the new band is a lot like microsoft's old band which you can still get for as low as hundred twenty-five dollars it has the same two day battery life tracks heart rate steps sleep and can show phone notifications like a SmartWatch on its color screen the new band is a bit comfier and it has a curved larger OLED display that's easier to touch it also has a barometer for step counting and better heart rate sensors but you still need to press side buttons to look at your stats unless you're working out in the time to exercise and it's still big it's bigger than the Fitbit charge HR or the draw bone up 3 it's not far off the size of an apple watch it lasts 48 hours on a charge but if you use GPS tracking you're going to need to charge a lot sooner than that steps calorie burn heart rate distance sleep stair climbing the Microsoft band tracks just about everything you need and it syncs it with Microsoft's cloud based health app which has a decent phone app and a far better web dashboard you can set goals and sync with a small collection of third-party apps like MyFitnessPal runkeeper and strava and you can also track a run bike rider a day on the links with a golf tracker you can also load in workouts they give you buzzes and record your stats for each session but they don't do what I would like them to do which is to tell you how to do these workouts or encourage you to create a workout plan based on your needs it doesn't do it well enough you can check messages see incoming phone calls look at the weather or your calendar use a special app to pay at starbucks using a bar code it's basically a Microsoft SmartWatch microsoft stores a lot of your data in the cloud which is great and it draws some interesting observations on your behavior over time by comparing your statistics to the norm in your age group much like jawbone does but it buries this data instead of giving you insight on your phone or your band I want motivation encouragement I've warned the band for weeks and it never asked me if I wanted to try gym workouts or show me how to set that microsoft has all the pieces in place to do some great things of health but so far they're not all showing up in the Microsoft band if you're interested in everything that I just said you could try it out you can also get last year's band in a steep discount and pretty much get all those features to the Microsoft band in its price just a little bit too much to ask and doesn't give enough for me in return i'm scott stein at Cena