Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Tyla and I both weigh ourselves every morning and write down our weight. While the day to day change isn’t always something to get worked up about, it’s important to understand your trend as it stretches out to weeks and months.

We decided to step the geek up a notch and buy the Fitbit Aria scale. It connects via Wi-Fi to your home network and automatically uploads your weight to your Fitbit account. You can then view the charts and history online or in a phone app. This is definitely a luxury purchase, but it’s a nice convenience.

Once you get it up and running, it works like almost any other scale. But getting it up and running was the big issue for us. I spent a very long time wrestling with it, talking to tech support (no help) and surfing the web. I tried it with my phone and two different laptops. I tried setting up a Wi-Fi network just for the scale that had no security on it. Nothing worked. Finally, I pulled out an old Android phone that KenC gave me and it worked the first time.

Fitbit ships an application that runs on Windows and is supposed to do the setup, so surely this can’t be everyone’s experience. But this still seems like a pretty big hole in their testing. I’m using a very common router (WNDR3700) and fully patched phone and laptop OS’s. This should be a mainstream case.

Oh well, we are up and running now so there’s no need to do any more setup. And if I do change the network or something, I’ll know to grab an Android device!

P.S. I feel obligated to mention that the money for this purchase came through my health plan at work which can only be used for a specific set of items. If we were using our general funds for this, I think we’d still be doing manual logging.

Verizon still hasn’t released an update for the HTC 8x to push it to Windows Phone 8.1 that came out earlier this summer. The latest promise was October but that obviously still hasn’t happened. The Microsoft Band only works with 8.1 and above (and Android and iOS too) so I decided to take the plunge and manually update my phone. It’s not supported, voids your warranty, etc so do this at your own risk. I chose to update my phone but didn’t touch Tyla’s. Thankfully it has worked ok. This was my first real experience with with 8.1 so here are my thoughts after a couple weeks:

• Cortana is great! You can ask her anything and she’ll either search for the results or perform the action. One of my favorite capabilities is saying something like “Next time I’m at Safeway, remind me to buy bread.” It sets a reminder coupled with my GPS location. Super helpful!
• There’s now a notification center similar to what Android and iOS have. This feels like a “me too” feature that isn’t needed. The brilliance of Windows Phone is that you have live tiles giving you all the information you need at a glance. Now I have that but I also have this notification center giving me the same information in a less convenient fashion. It probably feels more comfortable for people switching to the platform, but I wish I could just turn it off. I should probably look into that more.
• In addition to the normal keyboard, you can also now use the “Word Flow” keyboard. This is like Swift Key for Android. You just drag your finger across the keyboard and it figures out what you’re trying to type. Pretty cool and really useful when your hands are busy or you aren’t looking at your screen the whole time.
• One big downgrade in my book is the loss of the “hubs.” They are technically still there but all the awesomeness about them is gone. For instance, I used to click on the “Me” tile and be able to make an update that went out to both Twitter and Facebook. Now I need an app for that. I used to be able to click on a tile for another contact and see their Facebook and Twitter updates without opening anything else. Now I need apps for that. Boo. This was one of the things that made Windows Phone more awesome than Android and iOS. Now we’ve lost that differentiator.

There are lots of other tweaks and changes and overall I’d call it a big win. It feels a tad sluggish on my phone but my hardware is over two years old now so that’s not terrible. We should be up for some new phones soon. More on that later but I’m thinking I might drop Verizon after being a customer for 14 years and switch to AT&T who appears to have much more love for the Windows Phone platform. Plus, AT&T doesn’t track you anymore.

I ordered a Microsoft Band the morning that they were announced. It’s an intriguing little device and I was already in the market for a watch device that would log GPS points for me.

First of all, the device works with Windows Phone, Android or iOS so pretty much no matter what you use, you’re included. There are a ton of sensors packed into this thing: mic, heart rate monitor, GPS, accelerometer, ambient light, galvanic skin response, and even a UV sensor. Those sensors let it act like a standard fitness device tracking your steps, your heart rate, etc and if you’re on a run you’ll get your GPS track too. It connects to your phone via a Bluetooth connection so you can get notifications about new text messages, emails, phone calls, Facebook messages, etc. It pretty much does everything that a fitness tracker or a smart watch do but it does it all in one device.

The LCD screen is a touchscreen so you can navigate through the various options and scroll through your notifications. The screen is really nice, but to read it easily, you pretty much need to wear it with the screen on the bottom of your wrist. That’s fine but you’ll want to make sure you use the included screen protector since it’s always banging on your desk. The other downside of wearing it upside down is that the heart rate monitor has a harder time locking onto your heartbeat. When I look at the chart of my heartbeat, it’s very spotty.

The app is a key part of this device. It let’s you adjust what notifications get sent to your band and it also displays more of the detailed information that it collects like your heart rate graph and a map of your run.

They say the battery lasts 48 hours if you’re not using GPS and that seems pretty accurate. I’ve been skipping the sleep tracking portion so I just turn it off at night and I can easily get 3 full days out of a charge.

There’s a ton of tech packed into this thing, but that brings up the biggest downside for me: it’s huge. All smart bands/watches are bulky to some extent, but this one feels pretty uncomfortable. Now you should know that I haven’t worn a watch in well over a decade so anything on my wrist feels weird, but this bugs me more than a watch. There are sensors and batteries around almost every part of the band. If it was more of a cloth/leather band, it would be a lot more comfortable but they obviously couldn’t fit everything into that form factor. It’s so big that I have a hard time getting my sleeve cuffs over it. If I tighten it down so that it fits under my sleeves better, then it’s really uncomfortable.

Is this cool? Yes. Am I going to keep wearing it? Nope. I forced myself to wear it for a week to give it a chance, but it’s just too annoying. I loved having notifications available with a quick glance at my wrist but that doesn’t outweigh the awkwardness of wearing it. If you want to buy one, go try one on at a Microsoft Store first.

Wearables probably are the future of tech, but we haven’t broken through to something really useful yet. (And no, the iWatch Apple Watch isn’t the answer either.) We’re going to look back at this whole generation of gadgets like we look at Palm Pilots and the Newton. We’re headed in the right direction but we still need to crack the code.

So is the Band a huge failure for Microsoft? Partially, but not really. This article talks about how the Band is a demo device for Microsoft to promote the bigger success in this picture which is their backend service/app called Health platform. They are trying to combine all these crazy independent silos of fitness and wearable data sources. It’s a great idea and hopefully it will take off even if this iteration of the Band doesn’t.

In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.

I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.

How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.

If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.