Review: Fitbit Fitness and Sleep Tracker

Having the number of steps you took all day staring you in the face as you slump in front of a PC is a really good incentive to get off your ass and start working out. And the sleek, sexy new Fitbit is a great motivator for walkers, avid runners, data geeks, dieters, pedometer virgins and experienced pedometer sluts alike.

The much-anticipated Fitbit has a triaxial accelerometer that doesn't just track your steps; it calculates the intensity level of your movement, the distance you traveled and the calories you burned. All you have to do is surrender details on your weight, height, age, sex and meals to the Fitbit website, plug the gadget in, and start walking.

For what may seem like a steep $100 price tag, you get a lifetime account on the website, which interacts with your Fitbit to download data wirelessly any time you are within reach of the base-station.

The pedometer itself is a 3-inch doohickey that resembles a pudgy black tie clip. It's got an OLED display that cycles through steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned and a flower (pretty!) that seems to grow in response to your activity. The Fitbit folks did not divulge how the flower actually worked, only that it used a "secret formula" and the best way to make it blossom is "to keep moving."

Because of the Fitbit's clip-like nature, you can attach it to your belt, pants, tie or whatever. We found that it does almost as well riding along in your pocket, and doesn't need to be at any particular angle. Though it may be slightly less accurate, the pocket might also be the safest place for the Fitbit, which is one of the easiest-to-lose gizmos we've ever let slip from our palms. In fact, one of our test units disappeared almost immediately into a field of grass, never to be seen again.

Those of us who managed to hang on to our Fitbits quickly became enamored with the data they collect. Like pie? No, the other kind! The Fitbit divides your day up into a pie chart of time spent being very active, fairly active or lightly active. Time spent being sedentary, appropriately, is gray. But a pie chart isn't enough for data-craving geeks like us, and Fitbit also satisfies with a chronological bar chart of when you were on and off your ass.

Perhaps the most motivating graph for some people is the monthly plot of calories burned alongside calories eaten. This one requires a fair amount of work to record what you eat every day, though that exercise in itself is enlightening.

There are 50,000 types of food and meals available to choose from, or you can manually enter the calories for food not already on the list. It adds up sodium and cholesterol as well. In the future, a wiki-style community will let users add food into the database. The option to mark foods as favorites can speed up the process, too, so you don't have to hunt down how many calories are in your favorite beer every time you have one.

The Fitbit also accounts for the calories you burn while sitting at your desk all, lolling on the couch, and doing chores that don't require a lot of steps like washing dishes or unloading groceries. You can also manually enter information from other workouts like cycling or swimming (Fitbit is not pool-proof, though we hear it is toilet-resistant), and that data will be aggregated with the rest.

One place where Fitbit may fall a little short, literally, is running. We tested it against the iPhone tracker on a 4-mile run, and the Fitbit shorted us about .6 miles. Not cool!

Fitbit even follows you to bed, tucked into a little pocket on a wristband that comes with it. It tracks how long and how well you slept, which is quite interesting, but a little depressing if you were only in bed for 5 hours and 45 minutes and just four of those hours were spent on solid sleep.

But in order to learn how to tell your Fitbit you are going to sleep, you have to hunt around on the website because there is no manual. The only instructions that come with the packaging are: To start using your Fitbit, go to fitbit.com/start. We assumed the dearth of information meant that Fitbit was so easy and self-explanatory, a manual wouldn't be needed. This is almost true, which is impressive and frustrating at the same time. We hear a manual is in the works, however.

And it is true, you can literally plug the base station into your computer, PC or Mac, sign up on the website and go. Connecting with a PC was seamless, but pairing it with a Mac and a Luddite led to a few hiccups. However, that same Luddite had been drooling over the Fitbit since it was first promised last year, because the pedometer options were very limited when she switched from PC to Mac and was forced to abandon her Sportbrain pedometer.

But overall, we loved the Fitbit, and once the kinks are ironed out and the manual exists, it will be worth the investment.