Also included is access to Jawbone’s “Up” app, which is still one of the best in the business, offering a delightfully friendly take on what the fitness app should be, and allowing you to build a team of likeminded individuals to see how they’re going with regards to their activities.
The app is simple, colourful, and with the exception of not being able to remove some of your sleep cycles you might have accidentally thrown in while you were trying to edit one of the manually entered ones, quite easy to use, with a way of seeing how you’re doing by looking at the phone.
You can even duel against others in your team — friends and family with an Up of their own — and challenge them to a battle of steps, making the whole thing even more competitive, which is handy, too.
Battery life is also very decent, and it’s almost a biblical thing, as the Up 2 manages to hit a solid seven days of life before you’re allowed to rest and put the phone on a charge for a couple of hours.
Technically, the app often suggests as many as eight days could be supported, but seven is what we found to be comfortable, putting the Up 2 on the charge on a Sunday when we were sitting at home and cooking dinner, because that made sense at the time.
A life of a solid week isn’t bad from a device tracking your movements while you’re both awake and sleeping, but we do need to note that very little appears to have changed from what the Up is doing, even if the form-factor has.
Unfortunately, this different form-factor does bring in a few problems of its own.
Take the clip, which isn’t always the easiest to slip on. Before, there was no clip, just a rubberised band with a small skeleton structure that could quickly be wrapped around your wrist. Granted, it wasn’t exactly thin, more resembling a thick prism of a bracelet, but it was easy to get on and off.
The clip here is reasonably easy to work out if you’re using your dominant hand, but it doesn’t always work, at least not for us, and while it can be tightened to match wrists of pretty much any size, we found it wouldn’t always hold where we wanted it.
It also clips your hair quite freely, pulling on the follicles sprouting up from your wrist and tearing at them every so often, which is a touch annoying.
Water-resistance is another curious issue, because this was one of the very things holding Jawbone back with the release of the Up 3 last year, seeing that hit a release of 2015 instead of 2014. Earlier on, Jawbone told GadgetGuy that it has revisited and fixed its water-resistance issues, advising that it would be okay to shower with the Up band, but not to swim with it, but we’re still a little scared over what the water protection is like on the Up 2.
Essentially, when it gets hit with water, the Up 2 appears to temporarily shut down, something we noticed because if it gets wet and you try to tap the Up 2 band to wake it up, it doesn’t vibrate at all, refusing to light up or vibrate in any way until a minute or so later.
We’re not sure how this constitutes water-resistance, especially if the band is merely resetting itself when water comes into contact with it. We guess it’s resistant enough to know when not to talk when water is touching the capacitive touch display, but again, this doesn’t feel quite like water-resistance to us, more a preventive measure to stop the band from breaking.
Our final concern comes back to that one we’ve raised a few times in this review: there’s just so little reason for this product to exist, except to update the previous Up 24 to something to match the upcoming Up 3.
Really, that’s all this model does, with a change to the form factor, but no real improvement.
If you have an Up 24 already, this is a thinner version, and if you have an Up Move, this is a more expensive and less circular model that won’t tell the time or tell you how you’re going through the course of the day, and both of those are problems for us.
With over $50 separating the Up 2 and the Up Move, and yet more functionality being afforded to the Move, we know which model we’d pick, especially since the latter of the two is not only less expensive, but also offers longer battery life on top of the visual indicator of your daily goal progress.
For the price difference, we’re surprised not to see any phone smarts integrated here.
We’ve heard the information time and time again from Jawbone’s people that its activity trackers are about activity plain and simple, and that’s totally fine, with the band designed to tell you how you’re going and track what you’re doing, but for $149, it’s doing the exact same thing as its $89 tracker, and we don’t think the design warrants that much of a price difference.
It doesn’t help that there’s a light on the Up 2 that is barely used, with the message light — a white speech bubble — only lighting up if the Up app has something to say or you’ve reached your goal, which is kind of the same thing.
Jawbone could have allowed you to configure this if you received an SMS to alert you, vibrating and lighting up to tell you that someone else wants to message you. It could have switched it on as a phone call alert, or an email alert, or an alert of something more important than just the Up app wanting to tell you something, but it didn’t.
Instead, it is under-used, and you’re being asked to fork out $149 for a fitness band that more or less does the exact same thing as the $89 model, arriving only in a thin design that can’t tell the time or tell you if you’re almost done walking your 5000 or 10000 steps.
Conclusion
Jawbone’s latest take on the activity band is a solid update to the Up 24, producing much of the same in a lighter package, but it lacks some of the functionality of its less expensive option, the Up Move, which makes that a more compelling choice.
Make no mistake, outside of the circular design, the two products are very similar, and really the only reason to choose one over the other is that you prefer the slim style Jawbone’s Yves Behar has designed into it, but the functionality is spot on identical.
That combined with the lack of an indication as to how you’re doing and no smarts communicated from your phone beyond “Jawbone has a message for you” makes this Up 2 a hard ask, unless you really do prefer the form factor change. If that’s where you are, no worries, and we see you, but we do think Jawbone could have put a little more into this one.
