Microsoft Band

It’s like Microsoft has made a physical metaphor for itself. The Microsoft Band is a well-built wearable. It does useful stuff. It does useful stuff well. But only the Microsoft Band’s mum could love it.

The Band is Microsoft’s activity tracker with smartwatch capabilities. Rather than a direct rival to the likes of the Apple Watch and the best Android Wear devices, the Microsoft Band is like a Fitbit with benefits. As well as being a full-featured pedometer, health monitor and activity tracker, it works with just about any smartphone and allows you to preview texts and emails. And it is a digital watch.

As such the Microsoft Band may be a true rival to the Apple Watch and its rivals. After all, it is unclear whether people want to have a smartphone on their wrist. It is impressive that you can take photos and make calls from a watch, but it is not necessarily desirable, so it is at least possible that the Microsoft Band offers the perfect blend of convenience and portability on a device that can be worn with your existing watch.

Of course, that requires for the Microsoft Band to be good and good value. And while the Band has great functionality, it is also ugly and clunky – if not without charm.

Say what you like about Apple (and personally I feel the Apple Watch is something of a joke that has gone too far), but the company would never release a product like the Band.

For a start, it is big. Big and chunky. The band is 19mm wide and 9mm thick, and weighs 60g. That is a lot of device to wrap around your wrist. The strap of my actual wristwatch is only around half as thick at its chunkiest part.

What’s more the Band is basically rigid while the back of the display is 5cm of straight-edged, rock-hard computer. Microsoft has created the Band in three different wrist sizes. I expect everyone will find one that fits. But even when it fits it doesn’t fit, if you see what I mean. The straight edge rubbed against the bony bit of the top of my wrist, and moved around whenever I exercised, even with the strap pulled tight.

And the way the display fits is odd. It is a thin letterbox of a screen, with information displayed in landscape. So you have to bend your arm (and neck) one way or the other to see it. After experimenting with the Band on the top of my wrist and then underneath, and in both orientations, I ended up with the buttons pointing back toward me. But it is a far from perfect experience.

So much for the user experience, it is also fair to say that the Microsoft Band does not scream ‘desirable gadget’. It’s entirely unscientific, but not one person who saw my Band had positive things to say about it on style grounds alone. It looks like what it is: a big, chunky activity tracker. The display is a tiny sliver surrounded by big thick bezels, set into shiny black plastic that is all function and no style.

On the plus side, it is well constructed and robust. Made of thermal plastic elastomer, it is both waterproof and sweat-resistant, and designed for extreme temperatures. I put it through multiple workouts in a variety of environments, and it never blinked.

The Band has an 11mm by 33mm touch-enabled TFT fullcolour display. Once you’ve worked out how to access it, the screen displays bright and clear, and the touchscreen is responsive.

Microsoft has made the interface super-simple, so that tiny display is perfectly adequate, even when you’re on the move and with sweat running into your fat piggy eyes (your experience may be different to mine). The viewing angle is good. You can adjust the brightness to conserve battery life, and the Low setting worked perfectly well.

The display resolution is 320x106. The pixel density is high enough to not discern pixels – not least because there are no photos or video to view on it.

A haptic vibration motor tells you when you have done a mile or received an email. And there is a microphone in case you are the kind of maniac who likes to talk to your wrist.

The Microsoft Band is built around an ARM Cortex M4 MCU processor. There is 64MB of internal storage, although you won’t be saving photos or media files to it. It charges and connects via a USBenabled cradle.

There’s an optical heart-rate sensor, three-axis accelerometer and gyrometer. You can use GPS to track your runs, walks and cycles, and an ambient light sensor, skin temperature sensor, UV sensor and capacitive sensor combine to measure performance in all kinds of activities. The heart-rate sensor is continuous, so it’s better than some.

The GPS was very accurate with running and cycling, and the pedometer more accurate than most at calculating distance.

It connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0, and is compatible with Windows Phone, iPhone and Android (from 4.3 upward). I tried it with all three and it paired fine.

General performance was zippy with no discernible lag. And the sensors worked well, in general.

But here’s the rub. For the record, you get two 100mAh rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. And Microsoft says they should give 48 hours of battery life. That wasn’t my experience. Yes, I was using it a lot, connected via Bluetooth, measuring a lot of activity. But I have never managed to get it through two days, even when the display is set to low. And when it goes, it goes.

On the positive side, the Band charges really quickly via the supplied charging cradle cable, although you have to supply your own USB plug. If you want to use the sleep functionality too, you may be in for a struggle.

In principle there’s a compelling feature set: daily physical activity and sleep tracking, and 24-hour heart-rate tracking and health monitoring. You also have built-in GPS and guided workouts.

You can preview incoming calls, texts, social media updates, emails and calendar entries. And, if you are the sort to use Microsoft’s Cortana, you can take notes and set reminders with it.

I expect the main reason for using the Microsoft Band will be an activity tracker with benefits. And for this purpose I am more than happy with the gadget. By default it measures your steps each day, so you can set your target and walk off those pounds (or kilos – the Band can measure in both). It was as accurate as the Fitbits and Jawbones I’ve used. One potentially unique issue is that when I was out pushing a pram, steps simply didn’t register. At all. Presumably this is because my wrist wasn’t moving. Reader: I have a six-week-old daughter, pram pushing is a big part of my life right now.

When you fancy more frenetic activity, you can just select running, cycling or weight training, hit the Action button and head off, and your activity is captured. You get helpful distance updates as you go.

While the GPS tracked distance in the outside world pretty accurately, the pedometer was less reliable on a treadmill, measuring three miles for a run the treadmill counted as more than five. This is not unusual or surprising, but mildly disappointing.

The Band as an activity tracker can set and measure your workout, involving both cardio and weights. Given that these devices are psychological prompts to make you do more, this can only be a good thing. And by measuring your heart rate the Band is likely to have a more-accurate-than-some measure of the calories you burn.

I really like the Band as a smartwatch. I found that being able to preview emails and texts meant I looked at my phone far less often. If I could add in WhatsApp and Facebook updates I could leave my phone in my pocket indefinitely.

Being given a vibrating nudge that I have a meeting in 10 minutes helps me too. As does being able to look at my calendar without pulling out my phone.

I don’t want to be able to respond to emails and texts via a wristwatch. You can send templated texts from the Band, but for me just being able to triage and ignore until later most emails, texts and calls is a time – and relationship – saver.

The Band’s way of extending access to notifications on my phone offers useful functionality without compromising my smartphone’s excellence as an input device. And that’s more useful to me than a full-featured smartwatch.

Verdict

The Microsoft Band is the most Microsoft product imaginable. It does useful stuff and mostly does it well. But it is ugly and uncomfortable. No-one is ever going to point at a Microsoft Band and say “I want one of those”. Which is a shame, because despite issues with battery life and distance measurement, I like it. Whether it is enough to make people pay £169 when they can buy an Android Wear watch for an extra £100 is the key question. I suspect they won’t.