health Tracker evaluation

The Wellograph is a water-resistant fitness watch that tracks your steps, energy burned and distance traveled, in addition to the period and satisfactory of your sleep. It functions a built-in heart charge sensor, so this watch also can music your pulse, and its stopwatch features are excellent for runners who need to time their walking durations or monitor their pace.

however the Wellograph is going for $299, making it an awful lot extra pricey than the average fitness tracker. it is even greater steeply-priced than the Fitbit Surge, which at $250 also has a built-in coronary heart fee sensor, and has GPS capabilities to boot.

i lately wore the Wellograph for about  weeks to test out its activity-tracking functions, in addition to its potential to music runs. I even wore it inside the pool to peer if it lived as much as its water-resistance score. here's what i discovered:

unlike the many clunky, cumbersome health trackers available, the Wellograph is an attractive watch that would suit in only as well at a commercial enterprise meeting as at the health club. Its associate app is also glossy, with smooth-to-study graphics that put your daily interest (like steps taken and coronary heart rate) into context.

however, I had a few trouble shifting facts from the watch to my telephone. And the Wellograph lacks some key features that other similarly high priced health trackers have, like smart telephone notifications, GPS and compatibility with famous 0.33-birthday celebration apps, including MyFitnessPal. these lacking capabilities make it hard to justify the watch's $299 fee tag.

The Wellograph is without problems one of the most appealing fitness-tracking devices i've examined. It has a square face with out a bezel, or metallic frame, giving the watch a decidedly modern look and placing it other than the extra sporty searching Fitbit Surge, which capabilities a smaller display display constructed right into a rubbery plastic band. The Wellograph comes in three shades (silver, black and white) and has a sapphire crystal display screen it's very durable. even though the Wellograph comes with a leather band, you can purchase a extra sweat-pleasant nylon band for it ($44 on Amazon) that can also be worn in the pool.

The Wellograph's  buttons are easy to press, however it took me a while to figure out the way to use the buttons to navigate thru the watch's menus. After a chunk of exercise, I figured out the way to scroll through the Wellograph to look specified information about my daily steps, heart price and former night's sleep. The Run menu features a stopwatch that can be used to time runs (or different types of pastime). this is a convenient feature, especially because the stopwatch also suggests distance traveled and presentations the time of day.

but, i found that the watch face was difficult to study outside in direct daylight. I had to prompt the backlight with the intention to see the stopwatch while i was walking. I also needed to use the backlight once I checked out the watch underwater via tinted goggles.

average, this watch is genuinely bulkier than the Fitbit fee HR or the Microsoft Band, two different health trackers that characteristic integrated coronary heart price sensors. but not like those different trackers, the Wellograph is attractive sufficient to wear just about anywhere. And in spite of its especially big length — it measures 1.65 x 1.30 x 0.5 inches (forty two x 33 x 12.5 millimeters) — it turned into more at ease to wear than the Fitbit Surge, which I constantly wanted to take off for the duration of the week I tested it.

To get started with this health watch, you'll first need to download the Wellograph cellular app for iOS, Android or windows cellphone, after which set up an account thru the app. subsequent, you will want to pair the watch together with your cellphone or pill thru Bluetooth.

despite the fact that pairing the watch with my iPhone turned into simple the first time round, my next tries to sync the watch with my smartphone were something of a nightmare. To get the watch to switch statistics, first you need to cross into the Settings menu at the watch and enable Bluetooth syncing. Then, you also should make sure the watch is connected in your cellphone thru Bluetooth (this does not usually show up mechanically, even if the 2 gadgets are proper subsequent to each different), earlier than you hit the Sync button inside the app. For the sake of comparison, to sync the Fitbit Surge with its app, all you need to do is deliver the watch near your phone or tablet. You do not even must press any buttons.

On several occasions, I had to tell my phone to "overlook" the Wellograph, after which repeat the procedure to pair the watch with my phone. I also had problem syncing statistics to my cellphone while the Wellograph's battery dipped under 35 percent.

Now permit's communicate approximately the battery: charging the Wellograph is a prime pain. The watch comes with a magnetic charging cradle that stands upright, so you can see the time of day and the battery percent at the same time as the watch is charging. but, I could not get the watch to charge in this function; it constantly slipped off the charger. To fee the watch — which I handiest had to do 3 instances over  weeks — I needed to lay it down flat on its face with the cradle on top of it.

all of the records that the Wellograph tracks can be viewed right at the watch itself, which without a doubt gives this device an advantage over health trackers that don't have a display, in addition to people who require you to look at your smartphone to look anything past your basic stats. however if you want to view your stats in a extra vivid and smooth-to-study layout, you may accomplish that inside the app.

The Wellograph does a higher activity than many health trackers at setting your information into context, assisting you recognize how close or far you're from your dreams. for example, the app's flow page features a red triangle that gets shaded in as you technique a purpose of 10,000 steps an afternoon. At the lowest of the flow web page, you could see how many of your day you spent being lively and what percentage you spent being idle. i discovered that those pics, which are comparable inside the coronary heart and Sleep pages, made it very simple for me to see how close i used to be to achieving my each day dreams.

The Wellograph's heart fee screen tracks the float of blood thru your wrist to calculate how many times your coronary heart beats in keeping with minute. The device additionally makes use of a metric called heart charge variability, or changes inside the time among heartbeats, to determine how ready you are to workout. unfortunately, the Wellograph internet site does not give an explanation for how heart rate variability and exercising readiness are associated. however the web site does do a fairly exact activity of explaining your health age, some other metric that the watch tracks. fitness age, which you may view alongside your heart statistics on the watch or within the app, is a measure of how properly your body provides oxygen to cells, in step with the business enterprise. The watch determines health age thru a calculation that consists of your age, sex, resting coronary heart rate, how often you exercising and your body mass index (BMI).

, so that you do not have to inform the watch when you're tucking in for the night time. i found that the tool was superb at knowing while i used to be asleep. you can additionally see the "high-quality" of your sleep expressed as a percent at the watch and inside the app. however, the organization would not provide records for how it determines sleep pleasant, and i'm no longer sure how correct this metric truely is.

I introduced the Wellograph for a swim on numerous activities to look if it turned into genuinely water-resistant (it exceeded the test), and the intense backlight made it easy to read the watch while i used to be swimming. I should use the stopwatch feature to song my time inside the pool, but the watch doesn't tune any swimming metrics, inclusive of laps finished or strokes per lap. The disadvantage turned into that although the watch changed into pretty correct at tracking the space of my runs on land, it wasn't accurate at tracking the total distance I swam in the pool.

in spite of its flaws, I virtually loved the usage of the Wellograph. I preferred the way the watch seemed on my wrist, which stimulated me to preserve it on all day. i found that the snap shots in the app — in particular the little coronary heart that gets shaded in whilst you've exercised for half-hour — had been fantastically motivating. i discovered myself striving to attain the desires the app set for me just for the pride of seeing the ones little photographs trade colour.

earlier this 12 months, Wellograph debuted a new characteristic referred to as live, which lets you proportion your day by day step count with pals in actual time. The app shows anyone's steps in a leaderboard layout — something people with a competitive streak would possibly find to be motivating. regrettably, most effective Wellograph customers have get admission to to this option, so if you don't have any friends who also have this watch, you would possibly ought to compete towards strangers.

The Wellograph has 3 major dings. It simplest currently integrates with one 1/3-celebration app, RunKeeper, so it misses out on some popular ones, consisting of MyFitnessPal and Lose It! There additionally does no longer seem to be a way to be able to proportion statistics from the app with pals on social media. And in the end, the watch does no longer acquire notifications about texts or incoming calls from your telephone, whereas there are less high priced trackers, like the Fitbit Surge and Garmin vívosmart, that do that quite nicely.