Styr Labs Activity Tracker.
The Styr Labs Activity Tracker ($68) is a fitness band that counts active minutes, calories, steps, and distance. You can wear it on your wrist or in a belt clip, and pair it with an app that recommends customized multivitamins you can order to complement your daily fitness regimen. The tracker itself is comfortable, has long battery life, and its results are accurate, but the display is dim, there's no heart rate monitoring or GPS, and the recommended multivitamins are rather pricey. While an interesting fitness tracker offering, beginners may want to check out the less expensive Misfit Flash Link or the more fashionable Misfit Ray instead.
Availability, Design, and Features
The tracker comes in a bundle called the Multivitamin Starter Kit, which costs $68 and includes 15 single-serve liquid vitamin packs. An optional companion scale comes in the Protein Starter Kit for $78 and includes two sample pouches of protein powder. The scale measures your weight, body fat, BMI, and bone mass data, and pushes that info to the app. Together, that's significantly less expensive than the Under Armour Healthbox, which similarly includes a fitness tracker and a smart scale, as well as a heart rate strap.The tracker is a wristband that monitors your activity, calories, distance, sleep, and steps. It measures 0.5 by 0.8 by 9.3 inches (HWD). You can pop the tracker/display module out of its orange-and-white silicone band and slip it into a white silicone belt clip, which measures 0.3 by 0.8 by 2.3 inches (HWD). It's pretty comfortable on the wrist, though, which is how I wore it for testing. That said, the band uses prong closures instead of a more secure watch-style buckle like you'll find on the Fitbit Blaze or the Garmin Vivosmart HR.
The display is a 0.91-inch, 128-by-32 monochrome touch screen. Letters and numbers look pixelated, but they're visible indoors. You're unlikely to see the screen in direct sunlight, however, as it's too faint and reflective. The Withings Go uses a sharper E ink display that's easy to view in bright outdoor light, but not in the dark.
There are no buttons on the tracker. To control it, you need to tap the Styr logo at the edge of the display. You tap it once to wake it up; unlike the sometimes-stubborn Fitbit Alta, the Styr responded to each wake-up tap in testing. Once awake, you can tap the logo again to cycle through its screens, including your active minutes, distance, calories, progress, steps, and time of day.
Battery life is a high point. The tracker uses a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that Styr says will last for four weeks. That seems accurate after a week of testing, as the battery indicator barely decreased. To recharge the tracker you need to remove the module from the band (or belt clip), place it inside an included plastic USB cradle, then plug it into a laptop USB port or power adapter.
The tracker is rated IP66, so it can withstand dust and splashes from the sink or shower, but you can't swim with it. For that, you'll want a waterproof fitness tracker like the Polar A360.
Pairing, App, and Performance
The app is good-looking and well-designed. The main screen is the dashboard. Unlike the usual bar graphs you've seen in apps from Fitbit and Withings, the Styr app uses a Kubrickian hexagonal model (pictured) in the center to show off your activity minutes, calories burned, and steps counted, all indicated by different colors. Tabs above give you more detailed breakdowns of each stat. For example, tapping the blue tab gives you a daily or monthly view of your step progress. Above the tabs, you'll see buttons for Today (which is basically the dashboard), Vitamins, and Proteins. Tapping either of the latter two options brings you to a questionnaire and the option to buy supplemental nutrients (more on that in a bit).
Rounding out the app, there's a slide-out menu where you can return to the dashboard, add or remove devices, view and buy supplements, share fitness data through email, social media, or SMS, and a settings page where you can edit your account and profile data. You can also link the app with other fitness trackers from Fitbit, Jawbone, and Withings, as well as fitness apps like MapMyRun, RunKeeper, and Strava, in order to share data.
As mentioned, the tracker monitors active minutes, calories burned, distance traveled, and your daily progress. There's nothing in the way of more advanced features like heart rate monitoring or GPS, which you can find in the Fitbit Surge or the TomTom Spark Cardio + Music. There are no push notifications or sleep tracking either, like in the Misfit Ray. However, you can manually log activities like cycling, running, and many more, including some I've never seen before, like firewood chopping/carrying.
The tracker proved accurate in testing. I compared its results with the very reliable Fitbit Blaze and found both delivered similar measurements.
Nutrition Supplements
The distinguishing feature here is the option to order recommended multivitamins and protein blends from Styr Labs through the app. Recommendations are based on the data collected from the tracker (and/or the wireless scale), as well as a survey in the app. The supplement blends can be tailored to gluten-free eaters, vegans, and vegetarians. A monthly supply of the customized multivitamins (30 single-serve packs) costs $68, which is just as much as the tracker itself; the customized protein mix (available in a 1-pound bag or 15 single servings) is $28. Flavors include Chocolate Banana, Lemon Pound Cake, Strawberry Shortcake, and Toasted Coconut. Plain Vanilla and Chocolate will be available eventually.
I tried a vegan-friendly, gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, and GMO-free sample pack of the multivitamins included with the Styr tracker. To mix it, you just break the pouch open at the top and squeeze the brown liquid into a container, mix well, and drink. I took a few swigs of the mixture, which were fine, but I wouldn't want to drink it every day. The brown color is off-putting, and it has a strong, vitamin-rich smell. If you've ever mixed a powdered Vitamin C packet into a glass of water, you know what I'm talking about.
Conclusions
The Styr Labs Activity Tracker is a decent entry-level fitness tracker, but the display needs work and the price of ordering additional vitamins costs just as much as the tracker itself. But if you're sold on the supplement angle, or if you simply want an accurate tracker with a nice app to count your steps, the Styr band isn't a bad choice. If you want to try something less expensive, the Editors' Choice Misfit Flash Link is just $20, and tracks everything the Styr tracker does, along with the ability to control certain functions on your phone and PC.
Source: www.bing.com
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