Sony’s Smartband aims to make its mark on wearable tech

At CES back in January, Sony revealed it was planning on joining the race to the fitness tech market, with the Smartband. Designed to log your entire life, it was shown as part fitness tracker, part social tracker, and the tech firm was certain it was something we'd all want. Fast forward a few months and the band is now available on the market. But does it live up to Sony's promise?

At its heart is what Sony calls the Core: a water-resistant, dust-resistant sensor with a trio of LED lights to give you some limited information.

What exactly makes the Smartband stand out from its peers? Sony is betting on the Lifelog app, which will log absolutely everything you do on your smartphone throughout the day, and take in data from the band too. That means it tracks your browsing time, music and the photographs you’ve taken. As usual it also tracks how many steps you’ve taken, your sleep, and the calories burned. You can also add “bookmarks” to mark important events or places you might want to come back to at a later date.

You can disable all this data logging of course, but then if you do so there is little else to make the band stand out from the rest of the fitness bands already on the market. Also, it can add in location information into bookmarks, so if someone did find your phone they could have access to a mine of information on you. Just be aware. Log your life with this or look elsewhere if you wish to log off.

The good . . .

One of the best things about the Smartband is that it’s flexible. The brains of the device – the Core – can be removed and transferred from band to band, like the fitbit flex. That means that in future there could be nicer bands etc, different devices, and as long as you have the sensor, you can simply swap it into whatever you like.

Pairing the phone with your device – Android 4.4 only – is easy if you have NFC enabled on your handset: simply tap and things happen automatically.

It charges off micro USB too, which is a nice touch, and the face of it is touch-sensitive, which record taps for different modes and activities. That controls everything from your media to what mode it’s in – sleep or activity. And it’s lightweight, which means that you’ll forget it’s there half the time.

The bad . . .

Like many of these devices, it requires a bit of intervention and some fine tuning. You can set it to switch to sleep mode at a certain time every day, but unless you have a rigid schedule, you won’t want to do this.

It also requires two apps to work effectively – the Sony Lifelog app and the SmartConnect app – which seems like overkill when you’re setting things up.

The touch interface, while it worked a lot of the time, sometimes didn’t recognise taps, which caused the band to record activity as sleep on a couple of occasions. The LED indicators tell you what mode it’s in, but unless you’re paying careful attention it’s easy for that to slip by unnoticed.

And the Lifelog app also seems a little intrusive at times, although as mentioned, that can be disabled. Knowing how much time you spent on Facebook may not necessarily be a good thing; ditto for twitter and web browsing. It collects a significant amount of data, which many people may like but it seems to be a bit of a stalker’s dream.

. . . & the rest

The Sony Smartband can be a bit confusing at time. There is no screen, which means you have to take a guess at why your arm is vibrating. it could be for anything from a Twitter alert to a missed call, or even that you’ve left your phone behind – the band vibrates when out of range – so you have to be choosy about what you allow your phone to send to the band.

Over the course of a week, I compared the Smartband to the activity trackers: the Fitbit Flex, the Gear Fit and the Jawbone Up. The step counter was reasonably similar across all the devices, although the Sony Smartband tended to count more activity than the rest, but the sleep tracker threw up some different results more often than not. So, like many of these devices, don’t take the results as 100 per cent accurate.

The Bluetooth connection dropped occasionally, and battery indicators are limited to the app, so you have to keep a close eye on things to make sure the band doesn’t stop working suddenly.

The verdict

Sony is coming a little late to the fitness tracker game, but if you have a burning need to detail every moment of your daily life then the Smartband and the Lifelog app is the answer.