Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a Polar fan who trains and uses Polar heart rate monitors for my running, cycling, swimming, hockey and other exercises. I was looking for something that would track my everyday activities outside of exercises. The premise is simple, it calculates your basal metabolic rate based on gender,weight, height and age and estimates your movements based on accelerometers. The primary measurements it will provide on the unit are: - number of steps - a required level of low/moderate/high intensity activities to meet the daily recommended activity goal - number of calories burned as the day progresses - time of day This does not sound much more than your average pedometer but things get more fun an interesting when you upload your data to Polar Flow and you start using a Bluetooth Smart HR transmitter when exercising. Once the data is uploaded it will show your daily activity level in 5 zones (laying down, sitting, standing, walking, jogging) which the top 3 are what count as "active time". It not only gives you a total time spent in each zone but a down to the minute breakdown of how it was achieved. It's nice for me to notice just how long the stretches are in front of the monitor at work and how little I get up to do something. It also gives you an "Inactivity Alert" when it notices stretches of 1 hour or longer of low activity during the day. You better get up and move your butt around to avoid the orange triangles! The unit also measures how long you were asleep which is an easy no-brainer method to track sleep, way easier than trying to track it on my own. The best part is when you put a HR strap on for a workout as you can see how hard and how long you actually worked out. It shows your normal 5 HR zones and gives you a percentage breakdown as to where you were during the workout. It also gives you an entire HR chart for the length of the workout. Ultimately workouts come down to intensity times duration and it is irrelevant how slow or fast you were going. It is also a great way to track activities that don't lend themselves to the traditional measurement of distance over time like running or cycling. I use it to track my public skating sessions and a friend of mine uses it to track indoor soccer games, a place where you are not allowed to wear a watch but a small bracelet like the Polar Loop is acceptable. When you have the unit linked to a HR strap it will also show your current HR on the Loop as an additional display mode. So I think the ideal market for the loop is a) People who are just starting to get more active and would like an initial peek into their lifestyle and how little they actually move during the day. b) Active athletes who're looking for a super simple way to get their sleep times logged c) People who are active in sports that can vary in duration and effort and are hard to gauge in your standard metrics of speed and time (baseball, soccer, hockey, skating, volleyball etc.) For me it was a real eye opener that outside of my active exercising of 8-10+ hours a week I barely move and I hardly get over 5,000 steps in a day. The Flow web site is still in constant development as is the Flow App for the iPhone and hopefully it will get better with time. As of today, with the latest 1.0.2 version of the FlowSync app it finally sync correctly to the website, before it had issues with resetting the Loop after each upload but that finally has been fixed. Once the initial kinks get fixed and worked out I'll be sure to update my review and rating.