Jawbone UP 2.0: Ambitious, Beautiful, And Still Fatally Flawed

Jawbone’s rereleased UP is an incredible device, but it’s lacking the very element that Nike’s Fuelband nails. The Jawbone UP fitness band was released in late 2011. It was a 24/7 fitness device to track activity, sleep and even your diet. It could have been gadget of the year. Instead, it was pulled from the market within a month due to its fragility. Now re-engineered with 3 million hours of field testing under its belt, the Jawbone UP returns to the market. But the world had changed in its absence. The Nike+ Fuelband happened. For the last two weeks, I’ve been wearing the UP everywhere I go: A wedding. A funeral. A road trip. A Thanksgiving feast. A few visits to the gym and more than one couch-laden gaming marathon. And what I’ve found is that the UP is a far more ambitious device than the Fuelband, but it gets one crucial design detail--the most i...