A Fitbit Ultra Story & Reveiw

This isn’t my first Fitbit. The first one I had was the original, and I bought it around the time it started showing up on the shelves of Best Buy. Overall I wasn’t thoroughly impressed.

The small networked pedometer uploads your steps to a web interface and calculates a handful of statistics based on those steps and the information you give it, such as height and weight. The little black and blue widget never felt well made and eventually started showing the wear and tear of a device that is worn all day, every day.

It wasn’t long until I fell out of the habit of wearing it and the Fitbit found it’s way into a drawer never to be heard from again…

Hardly. Around October of this year I came across it and decided to give it another go. This time I was more diligent about wearing it, even using it to track my sleep at night. Some of my coworkers took noticed and purchased their own. By now the company had introduced an updated, follow-up to the original called the Fitbit Ultra, adding a sensor that gave it the ability to count stairs.

Your web profile has a short stack of social features that make using the little guy with a few friends rewarding, adding a competitive game component to the mundane task of walking. The incentive to one up a coworker was enough to get the device to stick, and it ended up back on my hip. My outdated device was missing the features of it’s sibling and I found myself with pedometer envy. Of course, counting the number of flights of stairs is not enough of an incentive to drop another $100 on a new one, so I made do with 1.0.

My Broken FitbitBeing on my hip again, old trusty found itself under some stress and eventually gave out over Thanksgiving. This was just what I needed to justify the Ultra, but I thought an email to the Fitbit support folks explaining my loyalty and the unfortunate situation I was in would be worth a go.

To my surprise, the support team offered to replace my device, free of charge. I own a ton of techno-gadgets and I’ve never been offered a free replacement for wearing a device out. Anyway, I was told to expect the replacement in the next few weeks, and the Fitbit team took the ranks among Apple and a few others as a company that truly cares about it’s customers.

When the new one came I was in for another pleasant surprise; they had upgraded me to the Ultra.

So how does the upgraded Fitbit stack up against the original? As it turns out there aren’t a whole lot of changes to be seen. While the fitness gadget now comes in two colors and offers said stair counting abilities, it looks identical. The software hasn’t changed either, which is ok in my book. The build quality seems to have improved as well. I’ve had this one on my hip for over a month and it looks like it just came out of the box.

They’ve also put some effort into improving their iPhone app, which was nonexistent when I picked up the first one. It offers an overview of your days stats, but oddly historical data seems to be missing. It also offers a convenient way to enter the meals you eat each day. Unfortunately, the meal tracking features of the website, and subsequently the mobile app, leave a bit to be desired.

One of the more interesting things that the company offers, and I am anxious to try out, is a premium service. Among a laundry list of boring-but-useful features, a few stand out. A “personal trainer” lets you set a weight goal with associated daily calorie burning goals, and veiw them as a weekly overview. The most interesting of the features allows you to visualize how you stack up in steps, stairs and sleep quality amongst your peers. While these features do sound appealing, the $50 a year price tag does not.

In early January Fitbit announced that it would be expanding it’s product line to include an internet connected scale named the Aria that uploads all the data it can grab about your weight, bmi and fat to the online service. It’s competing head to head with the Withings body scale that offers a similar service, minus the whole digital pedometer. While the Fitbit tracks your activity throughout the day, the Aria monitors changes in your physical self. It seems the two will compliment one another quiet well, offering users of both a complete snapshot of their body at a given time. This kind of data could probably give someone like myself the tools and motivation needed to make positive lifestyle changes.

If you’re a fitnessy person, or someone who likes to see random metrics about your day to day life plotted out online (me), I’d recommend dropping the $99 on the little guy and seeing where it takes you. If you are fortunate enough to know someone that already has one, you’re ahead of the curve. I can’t say that wearing a Fitbit has made me a healthier person, but it’s definitely given me some motivation to continue working out, and hopefully surpassing some people in the process.

On Camera Phones

While the industry as a whole seems to think that you can merge a cell phone with a point-and-shoot camera and come up with an every day solution to photography, I think they are overlooking one key issue. No matter how good cell phone cameras become, the person taking the photo will always look at it as just that, a cell phone camera. 

The act of taking a photo is more meaningful than a phone call or text message. In many ways it is planned out and it is very much on purpose. 

When you take the camera with you, you plan on that event being special enough to want to take pictures. You plan on grouping those pictures together later and printing them out or posting them to some social site. With a cell phone, they sit in limbo on your phones camera roll for ages. You never take the time to organize them outside of your phone, because they are just pictures that you took on your phone. They hold far less value than those you took purposefully, with your camera, that you then placed on your computer.

I think the difference between the cell phone camera and the dedicated camera goes beyond simply the quality of the pictures. It’s about events, moments and situations that you knew a camera was needed for. It’s about keeping those events grouped together and going back and remembering them, on purpose. It’s not about randomly flipping through your phone pictures and seeing what bubbles up.

While the expression “the best camera is the one you have on you” has never rang more true, I believe it’s primary use case is one that is spontaneous. For the birthdays and holidays, nothing beats a real, legitimate camera.

Arkansas

I’ve always said, given the opportunity I’d travel anywhere. 

Arkansas is a beautiful place to visit, with rolling hills of forests separating farms, towns and roads. If I had to compare it to an area where I grew up, it would probably be most similar to Pennsylvania. 

Without being too harsh, the stereotypes of Arkansas are anything but flattering. I think part of growing up is having the opportunity to break down stereotypes and form your own opinions, and Arkansas’ landscape made this an easy task to accomplish.

We made the trip to Fayetteville last weekend to visit the University of Arkansas and some family members. Flying into Tulsua, OK around nine at night on Friday, most of the city was already asleep. Finding a gas station that was still opened on our way to UA was a fruitless task, leaving us out of cash in what is perhaps the one part of the country that you should never be without.

My first real glimpse of Fayetteville and Arkansas came early Saturday morning. The air was crisp, which was a nice break from the humid air of Houston. Most of the trip was spent catching up with friends and family, making it as much a relaxing break as a sight seeing vacation. 

While visiting we headed up to Bentonville (yes, home of Walmart) to take a look at Crystal Bridges, an art museum being built by one of the Walton kids on a creek in the hills. The trail to get to the opening where the building is being constructed was perfect for a fall walk. Since we don’t get seasons here in Texas, it was nice to enjoy the changing of the leaves and cool temperatures.

The future site of the museum is quiet impressive, with massive copper plated roofs and concrete construction. A creek/river/lake will run through the middle of the building’s footprint on it’s opening day, 11-11-11, lending to the natural theme of it’s location. I’m anxious to see what the building will eventually house. It’s already been added to the to-do list for the next trip.

No trip log, such as this, would be complete without mentioning the food. While we only visited a handful of restaurants during our stay, they were all quiet good. I had a sushi roll at Shogun that was like nothing I’ve had before. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it, but trust me, the presentation (it was on fire) was as impressive as it’s smoky flavor.

We were also treated to some home cooked goodness compliments of the family. Hana’s parents stopped on their way to Fayetteville and picked up smoked bacon and farm raised eggs, along with some homemade bread. This made for, hands down, the best omelet I’ve ever had. 

It wouldn’t have been a college visit if we didn’t swing by UA for a tour and some drinks. The college itself is nice and hilly. I’m glad I didn’t have to trek across those hills when I was in school. I was way too lazy for that action. The university inscribes all graduates names into the sidewalks of the college, going back to it’s first class in the 1870’s. The oldest names are weathered and the class is only a few people. It really emphases the university’s history in the area.

Most of the college bars are located off of a main campus road called Dickson street. The close proximity and variation was great for bar hopping, and we did just that. Even though it rained most of the night, all of the bars we stopped at were busy as can be, with live bands and plenty to drink. I’m a fan of Jazz and Blues music, so it’s no surprise that my favorite stop of the night, a newer bar called Legacy Blues, had live music and classic drinks.

I can almost guarantee this wont be my last trip to the Ozarks for more reasons than one. It just goes to show you, you can’t judge a place until you’ve been there.

You can find all of the pictures I took on their Photography page.

First iCloud Impressions

You may have heard a little buzz around some new fangled thing Apple has called iCloud. While most iPhone owners are excited about the upcoming announcement of the next iteration of the device, the silent star is Apple’s foray into the information game.

Apple has long succeeded at locking it’s customers into their ecosystem with plenty of media (music, movies and books) and apps. While these have been enough to keep me hooked for the past three years, Cook and co. haven’t stopped looking for that next eco-trap. Well, it looks like they have a winner with iCloud.

To try and summarize this robust product in as few paragraphs as possible, iCloud is Cupertino’s answer to Google’s suite of information management offerings. From email, to document syncing and storage, iCloud competes with the big G on all of the productivity fronts and then some. It’s customized for the user with multiple iOS devices (think iPad and iPhone) and add’s some really exciting features that are sure to impress even the most un-techsavvy of crowds.

Some of you may have heard of MobileMe, the marginally successful first attempt by Apple to enter the cloud game. The core features have been transitioned into iCloud; email (@me.com), calendar, find my iPhone and contacts will all be available for free soon. They all sync seamlessly with your iPhone and Mac, and all reside in the cloud for redundancy. When first starting up an iOS 5 device, it’s pretty obvious that Apple wants this to be a crutch for those users who no longer sync their devices with a computer, prompting first time users to turn on the feature within the first few screens.

These services come with a beautiful HTML 5 web interface that really lends to the overall experience. The design queues clearly come from their Mac and iPad counterparts making for a seamless experience on the web. They’ve also added a section to upload and download doc’s. While you can’t edit them, they will show up on Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for any iOS device you’ve linked with you’re account along with your Mac.

Document syncing doesn’t end with the boring Office competitors; apps can now take advantage of iCloud by storing data on it that can be accessed by any Apple device from an iPad to an iMac. I’ve been able to play with all of the features aside from this one, and I have to say it’s probably the one I’m most excited about. Gone are the days of replaying the same level of Angry Birds you just destroyed on your iPad again on your iPhone. I know, first world problems.

Another great feature included in this huge Cumulonimbus cloud is backup. From a friends and family perspective, this one is pretty damn important. Most of the people I talk to on a daily basis own iPhones. I’m not sure when this phenomenon happened but I’m going to say it has something to do with growing up (older people have more money to spend on phones… it’s a shot in the dark). Anyway, of this large number of people, I’m the only one that syncs my phone on a regular basis. I’m not sure why, but most of these people have no desire to plug their phone into their computer. With iOS 5 they will officially have no need to do this ever again, and I won’t be able to make fun of them when their phones crash and they loose all of their contacts.

iCloud’s backup capability is truly it’s best feature. It’s quick, convenient and seamless. Once enabled your phone will send a backup of itself to Apple’s shiny new servers whenever it’s charging and on WiFi, assuming it hasn’t done so already in the past 24 hours. This has worked incredibly well for me over the last three months. Within a month of turning it on I was forced to restore my phone from a backup due to a issue with iOS 5 beta 2. With my backup in iCloud it took less than an hour to restore and I was back up and running. If I hadn’t had my computer with me, it would still be no problem. Imagine, you’re out of town when you drop your iPhone and it shatters into a million pieces. You go to the local Apple Store, buy a new phone, enter your iCloud info and boom, all your data automagically starts downloading to the new iPhone. No computer necessary.

Since all of this new data can take up some serious space in the cyberwebs, a tiered data approach has been taken. All iCloud users get 5 GB free. This can be used for all of the above features; Mail, Document Syncing, and Backups. For some this may not be enough. I’ve only used half of it to date, and that includes two iOS devices backing up. Of course there aren’t any apps taking advantage of the Document Syncing, so this could potentially use quite a bit of data down the line. Apple is also letting users purchase more space for an annual fee. Twenty dollars get’s you an additional 20 GB. Fifty another 50 GB and $100 get’s a whopping 100 GB. This pricing is inline with the competition such as Dropbox and Amazons cloud storage offering.

I’m incredibly excited about iCloud. It’s a robust solution to an equally robust problem. I love that it’s cross platforms, and I’ve been looking for a reason to leave Google’s grasp for a while now, but I’ll save that for a different post. While most of the buzz around Apple’s next iDevices revolves around their design, iCloud is what will really set the stage for future devices.

iTunes Match: One Week Later

From Apple.com

One week. That’s how long it took me to come to the conclusion that iTunes Match is not at all what I was hoping. It’s great for those with extra large music collections and extra small portable storage, but for the majority of people I can’t imagine there being much need.

Issue number one for me, no Genius Playlists. For the uninformed a Genius Playlist is basically a radio station iTunes creates dynamically for you based on a genre of music. All of the music is from your library. If you’re anything like me and download the entire albums of the artists you enjoy, this is a great way to unearth some long lost treasures. Anyway, now they’re gone. 

Number two, lag when changing tracks. I know it’s still in it’s beta form but come on Apple, if Rdio and Spotify can change tracks with little to no lag, why can’t you?

Last but not least, no streaming. For some reason I was under the assumption that there was going to be live streaming of your music. No need to download the tracks and waste valuable space on your mobiles storage. Clearly this is not the case. While it can stream the initial download, a nice feature indeed, you need to manually remove the track from your storage when done. This would be great if they offered a “local cache quota” or a way to control the amount of space allowed for downloaded music. Once your quota is reached it would automatically remove the least played tracks one by one. Just an idea.

Some notes on the setup, it took a long time. If I had to guess it was over five hours, but I let it run while I was asleep so I can’t be certain. While I do understand it’s still early, the fact remains that is didn’t match over 1,500 of my songs. That means all of those had to be uploaded to Apple’s servers. Meanwhile most of these tracks had album art provided by Apple. It clearly has the capability to identify them just not using Match. Kind of odd.

Apple will be resetting the Match cloud on Monday, September 26. While I can’t be certain why, I would guess they improved their matching algorithm, producing better matched and saving Apple valuable space. They have asked we turn off all Match on all iOS devices and iTunes library. Also curiously all iCloud backups were reset yesterday morning. iOS 5 must be close.

If you were thinking about the service, I would definitely wait until it goes live officially (October 7th anyone?). In it’s current form it’s functionality is brutally limited and frustrating at times. 

Update on Friday, September 30, 2011 at 8:38AM by Michael Lapidakis

The developer forums have been abuzz with 4100 errors upon re-enabling iTunes Match after Monday’s wipe of the data. No can seem to fix the issue and it is assumed another iTunes beta (9) will be released shortly. I don’t think Match will be ready for release with iOS 5 and iCloud. It is far too buggy for consumers and they have yet to include it on the Windows flavor of iTunes.

Update on Friday, September 30, 2011 at 2:12PM by Michael Lapidakis

And just like that they’ve released iTunes 10.5 Beta 9. So far it looks like it fixed the 4100 issue that was occurring earlier. Unfortunatly is was still unable to match 1,200 out of 2,800 songs. Not very good.