Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like many others I purchased the Fitbit Ultra thinking it would be an excellent way to record my activity levels, and their website which functions similarly to other sites like Livestrong.com is very nicely organized and provided a nice amount of visual aids and tracking fields to allow you to stay on top of things. After a few weeks of use, the website is decidely the best part of this product, and can be used without purchasing a Fitbit. PROS -Nice website. -Seems to track steps accurately (when you're walking anyway, see cons) -Wireless syncing is automated, pain-free, and reliable. -'Stairs Climbed' tracking is nice. CONS -Poor engineering. At first the product feels slick and has a nice, rubberized feel. Within a few days though I started noticing that each time I took the clip off of my waist that the pieces of plastic had coming apart at the seams and I would have to 'snap' the thing back together in 3-5 individual locations. Seriously?! At this price I would expect this thing to be sealed shut with lasers. No excuse for this. -Inaccurate mileage. I read a number of complaints about the unit inaccurately tracking mileage, which was often refuted as the unit not being calibrated to stride length. I spent a ridiculous amount of time attempting to calibrate my sride length; cross referencing specific routes with a number of dynamic maps such as Google and Bing, and it made no difference. My regular 4 mile route was typically over-estimated by about 1.5 miles. Even distances as short as 1/4 mile were recorded up to twice the actual distance. -Sleep tracker is useless. Based on the readings, you'd think I was a chronic sleepwalker. I even recorded myself sleeping on my webcam one night to make sure this wasn't the case, and after correlating the times Fitbit showed a spike of activity ('awake') with the video showing absolutely no motion beyond a slight arm twitch or roll-over, it was obvious that this feature is entirely useless. -Tracks steps while travelling in vehicles. As others have noted, the unit often will track steps while driving, and mine arrived with some 32,000 steps already recorded on it, which I assume is from the shipping. Since there is no way to turn the unit off or edit the data from the website to correct for this error later, it makes it impossible to know for sure that you have an accurate reading. As I said, it's a good idea and I look forward to this technology developing a little bit more; but for now this product is entirely too expensive to be so flawed. I will continue to use their website to monitor my weight-loss, but I will be returning the Fitbit Ultra to Amazon on Monday.