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NOTE: Since my initial review, I have more comments. So please read those too, found at the very end. Update, Nov. 15, 2013. I recently upgraded to the new FirmWare. Once I have had a chance to use the new features for a few weeks, I will update this review. I expect to update my review around Dec 1 2013. Update, Dec. 15, 2013. On reviewing the new firmware: for the past month or so, my watch has not been functioning properly, so I have not been able to complete the review of BodyIQ. Once I return back to the USA, I will try to have it replaced. Update, Dec 31, 2013. Contacted Basis about repair / replacement. Auto-reply said something to the effect of holidays, and office being closed. Update, Jan 3, 2014. Message update from Basis Support, "Because The Basis Support department was closed for the holidays from 12/31 through 1/1, and because of heavy holiday traffic, please be aware that response times may be delayed." Update, Jan 11, 2014. Still have not heard from Basis. According to their website, they are all at the CES in Chicago. Why bother servicing existing customers when you can spend valuable time marketing your product to better and newer audiences. ** ORIGINAL REVIEW, written around Sep 2013 ** After glowing reviews from some friends who meticulously researched several competing products (Nike Fuel, Fitbit Flex, Jawbone), and several months of waiting, the friends and my spouse all got a Basis B1 watch. They used the Basis B1 watch for several weeks; encouraged, I also applied for an invitation, and received one several weeks later. I have spent the past 2 weeks very actively using the Basis B1 Watch: (a) the Watch, (b) website for activity tracking, goal setting, etc, (c) iPhone App for VERY limited functionality and Bluetooth syncing with device, (d) Android App for less limited functionality and Bluetooth syncing with device. THE WATCH The Watch itself is a rather clunky, poorly designed eletronic appliance with the following features: - multiple sensors, including: (a) humidity / moisture, (b) skin-based heart rate monitoring, (c) skin temperature, and (d) various accelerometers / gyrometers, - green / grey LED interface, - four small metal buttons, and one large plastic button on the side, - 3 main screens: (a) date or time, (b) readings: heartrate, steps taken, calories burned, (c) sync / setup, - there is a button to turn screen brighter so that you can see better in the dark. THE WEB APP This is basically a multi-faceted application where you can set goals, collect and view data, etc. - habits. These are various habits / goals that you can set. These fall into several categories: wearing the watch, remaining active, burning calories, sleeping. For example, you agree to wear the watch at least X hours per day for at least 2 days a week. Here, X is 12, 16, etc. Every day that you accomplish that goal, you get 25 points. When you meet the 2x a week goal, you get extra 100 points. Remaining active ones basically require you to be active during work hours. Sleeping ones have to do with regulating the time when you go to bed, the time when you wake up, and the length and regularity of sleep. There are some habits for burning X calories per day, taking 15 minutes of walk in the morning, afternoon, and the evening. As you conform to the habits, the point value of habits increase. Also, the requirements for the habits get harder. E.g., you need to carry out a given habit 3x a week, 4x a week, as you advance. But you also get rewarded with a larger number of points, both for satisfying the habit each day, and for meeting weekly aggregate goals. - insights. These are basically summaries of various things you did. E.g., sleep duration and quality is tracked, activities are tracked in duration, calories burned, etc. - data. Here you can access minute-by-minute data on: HEART RATE, STEPS, CALORIES, PERSPIRATION, TEMPERATURE, as a two-axis chart. You can zoom in and zoom out. As you zoom in, data gets of better resolution, but no better than 1 minute. What you will notice in this view is that heart rate monitoring is very sporadic. - patterns. This is basically your data, but presented in a visual, heat-map like grid setting. Both - mambo jumbo. This is a lot of inspiration stuff how the Surgeon General recommends taking at least 10,000 steps a day. I have no idea how they came up with this 10,000 steps, but it must be great marketing gimmick, because EVERYONE, and I mean, literally, EVERYONE thinks that walking 10,000 steps a day will deliver you to heaven come judgement day. THE ANDROID APP This is basically your standard, run-of-the mill android app that has about 30% of the functionality of the website. The most important function is this. Let's say you have been wearing the watch for 30 minutes or whatever. You then initiate a bluetooth sync from your watch, and the data gets to the phone. Then you can immediately view your data. You can only see HABITS and INSIGHTS on your Android App, but not the rest of the stuff. The Android App has a lot of problems. E.g., you can change your Habit settings for next week (say, you want to be more ambitious, and you want to burn 2,500 calories next week, instead of 2,250; well, you set that for next week, but when you return to try setting it again, it does not remember; if you check on the web, you can see the correct setting for next week; similarly, sometimes data is not updated on the Android app, even though you synced). One VERY useful difference between the Android and iPhone apps is this. From the Android app, you can set and control periodic sync-ing: every 15 mins, 30 mins, 60 mins, or 3 hours. However, from the iPhone app, you can no do the same thing. You have to use the sync button on the watch to sync with the iPhone app. This is a big problem, because: (1) when you don't sync regularly, the sync-ing process gets very long, and (2) if your synch button breaks, you have no way of synching with the app. THE iPhone APP Well, this one is even worse than the Android App. Actually, considering how much functionality the Android App has, basically, the iPhone App is pretty much useless. Thank god you can sync using bluetooth. From the Watch itself, you can initiate a blootooth synch with the watch by pressing a button. However, as far as I can tell, the iPhone app does not have auto-synch functionality. CUSTOMER SERVICE Well, my only experience on customer service was reading the many forum posts by customers. While some of the forums are very, very active by many customers, Basis staff rarely post there. In fact, in some forums Customers made multiple request for Basis to come in and clarify, answer questions. Alas, Basis was very passive. This was not a good sign. DOES IT WORK Now, let's get to the most important point of this review: does it work or not. Pedometer: I think it works, but with caveats. I have been using it to make steps, and you can clearly see it count the steps at the same pace as you walk. However, literally, it can only count steps. Try to do some push ups -> no activity, try to do some squats: no activity. I have not even tried biking. Heart Rate Monitor: Now, the company is very secretive, and does not tell you much about how their heart-rate monitor works. However, they repeatedly tell you that this is not a high impact activity heart rate measure. There is a very, very long thread in the Basis Forums where moderately active people are complaining, no let me rephrase, COMPLAINING that the heart rate monitor does not work. Basically, there are large numbers of issues with the heart rate monitor: - you can not force it to take measurements, - during periods of high activity, it FAILS to take measurements, - when your heart rate is very HIGH, the algorithm that Basis uses either reduces the heart rate reading, or eliminates the samples because it believes these are erroneous. Some user did a side-by-side study using a much more accurate, chest strapped heart rate monitor, and discovered that the Basis heart rate monitor, is well, junk, Skin Temperature sensor: this one appears to work, but it is unclear how you can use this. I think instead of wasting money and engineering effort by fitting the watch with an unnecessary function, Basis could have done the right thing, and make a watch with a WORKING heart rate monitor. But instead, they went after enriching the feature count, possibly in order to get VC funding. So make no mistake about it, Basis team is going after a clear strategy of getting a golden parachute exit, either from an IPO or from being acquired. I don't think they care even a little about their customer satisfaction. Calorie counting: well, there is no sensor for calorie counting. However, the million dollar question (or in this case, the $199 plus 6 months of wait) is, does the calorie counting work. Well, the more accurate calorie counting algorithm require heart rate monitoring. Since heart rate monitoring is broken, then calorie counting during activities of high impact will not work. However, calorie counting is possibly accurate-ish for walking and running. That's it. They make the assumption that sleeping calorie burn is 1.1 Calorie per minute, and non-sleep, non-active calorie burn is 1.5-1.6 per minute. These assumptions are specific to me. During activities, the calorie count is tied to your walking speed. However, I can tell you that these assumptions may not be correct. Here is why. Your resting caloric burn rate is a function of many things, such as: (a) gender, (b) height, (c) weight, (d) age (Basis has all of these assuming you don't lie on your input form). But what also matters, and matters a lot is your body composition: if you are 180 lbs with fat around your stomach, vs a lean dude with huge biceps and quads, then your caloric burn is going to be VERY, VERY different. Furthermore, if you just did 1 hour of cross-fit in the last 36 hours or so, your caloric burn is ELEVATED. So in theory, Basis could use this latter info. However, I claim it CAN'T. The reason is the shortcoming of the heart rate monitor mentioned above. If it can not reliably detect heart rate during med-high impact activities when your heart rate is ELEVATED, then it can not make any observations and conclusions about high impact activities. And high impact activities are what make a difference in fitness. Sleep measurement: this kind of works too. For about two weeks, it has accurately tracked my sleep time to within a few minutes (10 or so) on each side. However, on at least two occasions, I did not sleep well, and once, I even got up for a minute or two. In both cases, it recorded ZERO interruptions. One of those days, I was tossing and turning for an hour, and it thought I was asleep. SUMMARY It is my humble belief, but Basis watch is a very clunky, pedestrian, early stage prototype that can be especially effective on people who are easily impressed by marketing gimmicks and inspirational talk (such as those found on their habits and other places on the website). You might still find that the whole gimmick works for you, or you might be rich, and don't mind spending $199 on this tool, which measures your steps, and a few other semi-usefull things. After all, if by following the habits, you enhance your life, or your daily step count, you might one day end up living 1 year longer. And don't forget that in a lot of double-blind studies, for some people, even the sugar pill (technical term: placebo) works. So humbly give Basis watch 1 star. Just like their level tracker that makes you jump through hoops to get to the next level, I think the Basis team fully deserves a 1 Amazon Star only. Once Basis makes some improvements that actually address customer feedback, as opposed to putting new features solely for gimmickry and company exit strategy, I am willing to revisit this issue. In the meantime, please work on more improvements, so that in the future I may upgrade you to two stars. Sincerely, An Early Customer *** UPDATE ... UPDATE ... UPDATE, Oct 10 2013 *** Note: this update was posted before the firmware upgrade was available. The firmware upgrade addressed 1 or 2 issues that I specifically brought up. In particular, the calorie tracker now gives you credit even if you are not wearing the watch. Although simple, I think this is a massive improvement. Since writing the original review in the beginning of September, I have been using this watch like crazy every day, and have discovered a ton of annoyances: 1. My watch has decided that its four silver buttons do not have to work always. So from time to time, when I press ANY of the top 4 silver buttons, they do not work; furthermore, the side Sync Button does not work either. This is very inconvenient, for the following reasons: (a) I can not turn the brighter back light on, (b) I can not see step count, calories, or heart-rate, (c) I can not initialize Bluetooth sync. I have an Android App, so thankfully, I can control the sync frequency from the phone. However, HAD I owned only an iPhone App, I would be screwed, because for iPhone users, the ONLY way to initiate a sync is by pushing the button on the phone. This problem started happening after two VERY humid days. This makes me think that: (A) the electronic / mechanical components of the Basis watch are CRAP, and (B) that the watch has poor water resisting features. I understand you can not take this Watch to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, but apparently, you can not wear this watch when humidity is 90% or more for two days! 2. The sync functionality is very pedestrian, as follows. If the paired phone does not have a data connection (e.g., you are in a dead-spot, or in an airplane, or in a tunnel, or you have just turned the data off), then the sync does not succeed. I have one question: WHY? Let me ask that 5 more times: WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY? Are your programmers so lazy that they can not implement a sync to the phone, and they have to sync all the way to the website via the phone? Furthermore, AFTER you sync, you need to hit refresh several times so that the data gets fetched from the website back to the phone. Often times, after a synch, the information is inconsistent. The SAME information can be in multiple pages, if you will. E.g., you hit your 2500 steps for the morning. You should: (a) get points for that, if you have that habit, (b) your habit should show that you have satisfied it for the day, (c) your step count in the insight should be updated, and (d) your daily summary under insights should be up-todate. This applies to steps, calories, etc. However, after a sync, I have to hit refresh from several places in the App in order to get all of this to show up. Bad, bad programming. 3. The watch has a very nasty habit. When the battery dies, you are basically screwed for several reasons: (i) if it is towards the end of the day, when you are about to hit a ton of your habits, you will likely hit none, e.g.: (a) wear it, (b) calories, (c) step count, possibly multiple habits, (d) don't be a sitter. I had the misfortune of the battery dying on me while I was on business trip. Came back in two days, and plugged into power for a couple of hours, and then went to sleep. Here is another big surprise. After the battery died, and I re-charged it, I had to have the phone and the watch hand-shake again, and I did not get credits for sleep and calories for an entire night. Only in the morning did I realize that a handshake is necessary, because the watch said, "Not Recording Data". I have a question for you: why do you handle the dead battery like that, so ungracefully. Imagine that EVERY time your smart phone runs out of batter, when you re-charge and re-start, you have to activate with Sprint PCT (and pay $36). How would you like your phone? That's exactly what Basis watch is doing. Very, very unfriendly. 4. If so many of your habits are designed for very stringent goals, how can you not manage the battery downtime. I want to get credit for Wear-it habit. The highest is 20 hours. I take the Watch off about 20-25 minutes twice a day to shower, plus washing dishes, plus other activities (since your Watch is SO fragile, and can not even take some humidity, I figured it is better that I don't wear it for any extreme water sports like dishwashing). If the Watch battery is almost empty, I might need to have the phone off for 4 hours and more to handle just those times, I won't get credit for that habit. What gives? 5. Why do you not give credit for calories while the Watch is off my wrist. Just because the Watch is off my wrist does not mean that I am not burning calories. At least give credit for calories for either the sleeping rate, or the sedentary rate. If I take my phone off for 2 hours a day just to handle re-charging, and water activities, then basically I am missing 200-250 calories a day. I understand that everything is relative, and I can always add 200 calories on the daily burn, but what if I take the Watch off 4 hours one day, but 2 hours another day. I think a tracking / sensory device like Watch is far better equipped to account for that than myself. In summary: more extended and heavier usage of Basis Watch has unearthed a TON of more problems, solidifying my belief that this Basis B1 Watch is an early research prototype. Further, it has unearthed a ton of reliability issues, such as failures of the watch's water proof compartment, and other software bugs.